Before I went over images you’ll never see.  Now I present famous images that exist but you haven’t seen.  We’ll start with the horrible:

The Star Wars Holiday Special

In 1977 the world was changed forever by the blockbuster movie and soon to be legend of Star Wars.  As the money poured in TV Execs decided to get into the action and somehow got Lucas to clear the abomination that would become, The Star Wars Holiday Special.  I would normally say watch it to see how bad it is but this is so horrible that I would plead with you to just take my word for it.  Lucas to his credit eventually got out of the project and had his name removed. He was once quoted as saying, “if I had the time and a sledgehammer, I would track down every bootlegged copy of that program and smash it.”  One good thing that came out of this mess was the introduction of the Boba Fett character.

Pacino

The Local Stigmatic

In the late 80s while Pacino was still trying shake his godfather image. So he bankrolled a film, The Local Stigmatic.  The 56 minutes piece was shown once at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in March 1990 but then he kept in under wraps for years, only showing it to friends.

Chinese Coffee

Like Stigmatic this was a play that Pacino adapted to the big screen.  It is an intense dialog piece starring Al Pacino and Jerry Orbach talking back and forth.  It was also directed by Pacino.  Released in 2000 as part of the Tribeca Film Festival but again he refused to release it to more theaters or on to DVD.

Finally on June 19, 2007 both movies were released as part of a three-movie boxed set called Pacino: An Actor’s Vision The release wasn’t announced and the neither of the films have been reviewed much or had any media attention.

The Program

In 1993 the football movie “The Program” was released with a scene where the members of a football team, as a test of their bravery, lay down on the middle of the road while cars wiz by.  Almost immediately idiot teenagers everywhere were getting run over by speeding cars as they attempted to replicate what they saw on screen.

Alarmed by the copycat incidents and likely lawsuits, Buena Vista pulled the scene from the movie and re-released an edited version to theaters.  The old versions were destroyed and it was rumored that the scene was itself edited out of and destroyed from the master copy.  Presently VHS and DVD copies of the film don’t have it.  However unedited versions are shown outside the US in foreign TV markets.

Snuff film

In an effort to promote assisted suicide or euthanasia, Kevorkian aka Dr Death did an interview with 60 minutes.  The segment included a clip were Kevorkian flipped the switch on his death machine killing willing volunteer Thomas Youk, 52, who was in the
final stages of Lou Gehrig’s disease and couldn’t kill himself.   Broadcast on the November 22, 1998, it wasn’t the first snuff film broadcast on TV (think Budd Dwyer or Christine Chubbuck) but caused huge controversy as it was aired on the respected  60 minutes platform.

Rage

Not a movie but a book written by Stephen King under the name Richard Bachman in 1977.  The plot describes a school shooting and hostage drama.  A number of real life school shootings have been associated with the book.  As a result King pulled the book from American markets to prevent the possibility of the book inspiring anymore, “incidents”.