Lost Media Vol. 2: Missing Holiday Media

Written By Kaelyn Moore

What happens when beloved holiday entertainment crosses the line? From Disney's The Santa Clause hiding adult Easter eggs that horrified parents, to the 1997 Macy's Day Parade disaster NBC tried to erase, to Vincent Price's final grief-stricken performance that Disney deemed "unusable". These aren't just missing tapes; they're pieces of holiday history someone decided we shouldn't remember.

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SOURCES

TRANSCRIPT

What would cause a piece of media to become lost? Throughout history, and before things could become catalogued on the internet, it wasn’t uncommon for a piece of media to just vanish, leaving behind a weird ghost in our memories. 

Some was just never aired again, some was accidentally damaged, but some of it was intentionally destroyed, because someone didn’t want the public to see it.

This is Heart Starts Pounding I’m your archivist today, Kaelyn Moore. I spend most of my time working on this show hunting down information. I have subscriptions for newspapers in languages I can’t read, I hunt down old books that were once banned, I reach out to journalists and authors for more information. I even get a lot of resources from you guys, which, Shout out to Bill, our mountaineering listener who sent me some interesting books to check out after we did our episode on Everest. My reading list right now is all books you guys have sent me, I love it

My point is,  It’s rare that I can’t find something. I think that’s why I’m obsessed with media that becomes LOST. Which is what I want to tell you about today. 

And a reminder, if you like mysteries of the internet, disappearances that make you question everything, and have an otherwise dark curiosity, you’re in the right place because you’re just like me. We put up episodes once a week, so make sure youre subscribed or following along wherever you listen so you don’t miss out. Let’s get into it 

Maybe you’re like me and you remember watching Disney’s 1994 holiday classic The Santa Clause growing up. The movie is pretty wholesome family fun. 

Tim Allen plays Scott Calvin, a divorced dad who accidentally causes Santa Claus to fall off his roof on Christmas Eve. When Scott puts on Santa’s suit, he magically becomes the new Santa. This of course, allows him to reconnect with his son and learn the true meaning of christmas. 

It’s very sweet, but what if I told you that there is a cut of the movie out there that is not so sweet. Actually, it had parents clutching their pearls in horror, to the point that Disney had to make some scenes disappear forever…

See, when The Santa Clause was re-released for its 30th anniversary on Christmas Day 2024, eagle-eyed viewers noticed something strange in the original theatrical trailer. There were scenes - quick flashes of moments that didn't exist in the movie they knew. A voice saying "Who's down there?" followed by the unmistakable sound of a shotgun being loaded. Tim Allen grinning maniacally in front of what appeared to be children behind two-way glass.

People started asking what happened to those scenes, why would they be in the trailer and not the actual movie itself. Well, let me tell you a little story. 

Back in 1994, Shirley Dearth, a grandmother in Cleveland, took her young grandchildren to see The Santa Clause in theaters. The kids loved the movie, but there was one scene that they really clung to, and couldn’t stop talking about. 

It’s a scene where Scott’s wife hands him a handwritten phone number, and Scott looks at it and recites a fake number outloud as a joke. It happens so quickly you could almost miss it. That number? 1-800-SPANK ME. 

The kids kept repeating the number out loud and laughing, and when they got home one of them thought it would be funny to pick up their landline and call it. 

Shirley walked into her kitchen to see her young granddaughter on the phone, eyes wide in horror. And through the receiver, Shirley could hear soft jazz music playing in the background and the sound of a woman moaning. 

Yea, I’m sure you could guess but 1-800-Spank Me was an active phone sex hottline, and Disney had just broadcast it to millions of children. 

So of course Shirley’s grandkids were NOT the only children to call this line after seeing the movie. Kids legitimately thought that this was an easter egg that would allow them to call Santa’s workshop. Parents everywhere were horrified to see their phone bills at the end of the month. I even read about one child in Washington who racked up $400 worth of charges from calling the line. 

Shirley was later interviewed by the Associated Press where she was quoted as saying. "I don't think children need to be exposed to that," I mean, I tend to agree with her. 

Now, we’ve talked about it before on this show, but when the mouse wants something GONE, it can legitimately be erased forever,and By 1999, Disney had seemingly scrubbed the scene from existence. Every DVD, every Blu-ray, every broadcast version, the number was gone - they changed it to "1-800-POUND." It seems like they wanted to maintain the adult joke without attaching an active phone line to it. 

And so the original scene has become somewhat lost media. But some people still have the VHS tapes from before 1994, the ones with the original number, which, might I add, is still active today, over 30 years later. So do with that information what you want. 

Now, there were also darker moments from The Santa Clause that never actually made it into the movie in the first place. According to Tim Allen, speaking on The Tonight Show in 2018, the original script was much, much darker. In the first draft, Scott Calvin didn't accidentally knock Santa off the roof - he shot him.

The DreamWorks CEO at the time, Jeffrey Katzenberg had to jump in and basically say We can't start a kids movie like that. And so the scene was changed to Santa accidentally falling off the roof and dying, which is still morbid in it’s own way, don’t get me wrong. 

Initially, they wanted Bill Murray to star, because he can carry that darker tone in a movie, but eventually it was decided that Tim Allen would be the lead, and the script would be sanitized, though some more adult humor moments like the phone number still made it into the final cut. 

The Lost Media Wiki has been tracking these deleted scenes from the trailer, the one where Scott hears the shotgun get loaded and the one where he’s grinning through a two way mirror. you can glimpse them at the 1:34 and 1:41 mark of the original theatrical trailer, but it seems like the full scenes are forever lost as well. Though, it’s maybe for less nefarious reasons, one theory is that the original cut of the movie was too long and they just needed to trim some scenes. 

Just another reminder that even in the Magic Kingdom, some things are better left buried. Though if you're curious, that phone number is still out there, waiting. Just don't let your kids dial it.

Now, as far as lost media goes The Santa Clause is mostly harmless. Was it maybe traumatizing for some children? Absolutely, but today a lot of those kids look back and laugh at the whole thing. 

But that is not the case with this next piece I have for you. This piece of lost media is borderline crime scene footage taken from a very popular Thanksgiving broadcast, the Macy’s day Parade.

Every Thanksgiving, millions of Americans tune in to watch the Macy's Day Parade - If you’re not familiar, it’s a massive parade in New York City that features floats gliding down Manhattan streets, Santa arriving in his sleigh, and giant balloons of various cartoon characters and other icons of pop culture. it’s the perfect start to the holiday season. 

But on Thanksgiving Day 1997, a horrible incident happened that NBC desperately tried to hide from viewers. Something that left one woman fighting for her life and changed the parade forever.

And here's the thing - despite cameras rolling from every angle, despite thousands of witnesses lining the streets, the footage of what really happened that day seems to have been scrubbed, edited, lost to time.

<<>>

November 27th, 1997. The morning started sunny, temperatures in the 50s. Perfect parade weather, except for one thing - the winds. Meteorologists called them "gale-force." Gusts up to 45 miles per hour.

A woman named Kathleen had brought her 8-month-old son to his first parade. She and her husband Massimo had actually met on Thanksgiving years before, so this was their anniversary too. They even brought their video camera, titling the tape "Our First Thanksgiving With the Baby."

The family hurried across Central Park that morning, the baby bundled in his brand-new red and white ski suit. They found the perfect spot near 72nd Street and Central Park West. This would give them a greatview of the whole parade, it was a highly coveted spot. Massimo and Kathleen kept switching who held the baby and who held the camera, making sure they both appeared in the footage with their son. 

But as the day progressed, the wind kept getting worse. Most of the parade was unaffected by this, but the big balloons were starting to get really tossed around. 

Then, a little after 10 AM, the Cat in the Hat balloon came into view. Now it was massive, Six stories tall, its big red and white striped hat bobbing in the wind. 

Down on the ground there was a group of people in charge of holding onto the ropes that kept the balloon from flying away, and they were really starting to struggle. The wind was really picking up now, and they were holding on with all of their might to make sure it didn’t drift off or become unruly. 

What happened next happened in an instant.

A massive gust sent the balloon careening forward. The handlers tried to pull back, but they weren’t strong enough, and the giant cat in the hat lurched towards a lamp post that was right at the corner where Kathleen and her family were. They didn’t even have time to react. 

The impact was so severe it sheared off the top section of the lamp post - and a four-foot metal pole came crashing down into the crowd below.

Massimo would later describe the incident to reporters. "One second, Kathy was there with the camera, and the next second she was down on the sidewalk, blood coming from her head, the camera smashed. It was instantaneous."

A young girl named Tracy was also interviewed on scene - the pole had barely missed her, a chunk hitting her foot as she jumped out of the way. Four people in total were injured. But Kathleen definitely got the worst of it. 

She was on the sidewalk, completely unconscious in a giant crowd of people. And to make things worse, more balloons were coming. At that point, some police officers who were standing guard by the side of the parade had actually pulled out their knives and were charging the balloons that were headed towards the crowd, just slashing at them to try and let the air out so they’d come down more gently. A Pink Panther balloon collapsed quickly onto the handlers when it’s tail was slashed, and unconfirmed reports state that a handler was knocked unconscious. 

Probably the most unruly was the Barney balloon, which at one point, crashed hard into a lamp post and was shredded. The lamppost left a huge gash in Barny’s side. It then fell onto the handlers as they used all of their strength to keep him from careening into the crowd. as one handler reported “everything went purple”. To try and mitigate the damage and get the balloon down as quickly as possible, officers swarmed Barney and started stabbing the fabric with as much force as they could muster, tearing him to bits in front of a crowd of children. Eventually, Barny fully deflated and became a puddle on the street. There was a choir of kids crying and screaming that Barney had been killed. 

Kathleen was rushed to the hospital, and The neurosurgeon on call at St. Luke's Hospital that day would later call it "one of the worst crush injuries of the skull I have ever seen." Her nose and facial bones were broken. The junctures of her skull bones, as one doctor put it, "had been sprung open." There was damage to her frontal lobe, to both temporal lobes - the areas that control memory, speech, personality.

She would remain in a coma for 24 days. Her 34th birthday came and went while she lay unconscious.

But here's what makes this even more disturbing - after the Cat in the Hat knocked down that lamp post, after multiple people were rushed to the hospital, after Kathleen was fighting for her life... they let the parade continue. The deflated Cat in the Hat, its striped hat hanging limp and torn, kept floating down the route to Times Square.

And NBC? They had a decision to make.

See, when a float doesn't make it into the parade for whatever reason, NBC has a trick - they splice in footage from previous years. The editors work frantically, cutting around disasters, replacing damaged balloons with pristine footage from years past. Most viewers at home never know the difference. Because of that, barely any of the balloon massacre made it into the real broadcast. People at home could see the Cat in the Hat balloon coming down the street with his hat deflated, but they didn’t see what caused it. So, while a full broadcast was eventually found and placed on youtube, the incident has become largely lost media

Clips from the day have surfaced on the internet over the years. There’s footage of the Barney incident that someone captured from a nearby building. And there’s some camcorder footage of the cat and the hat incident that even shows him knocking over the lampost. ((https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H00YBqQ58hE))

A Reddit user claimed to have footage from someone in a high-rise who captured "a Macy's tragedy right in front of them right around 10:15." But when you click the link now? The video's been removed from YouTube.

However, there is one piece of media from the day that will probably forever remain lost media. The police confiscated Kathleen's smashed video camera as evidence. It seems like this footage not only captured the cat and the hat balloon going down, but Kathleen’s accident as well. Her husband Massimo got it back eventually, but he's never watched the tape, saying "I am afraid to see it,". I mean, I don’t blame him

When Kathleen finally emerged from her coma on December 21st - right before Christmas, what her doctors called "something of a holiday miracle" - she remembered the Barney balloon passing by that morning. But the rest of the parade? A complete blank. Gone, along with so much of the footage from that day.

She sued Macy's and the city for $395 million, settling for an undisclosed amount in 2001. But even that wasn't the end of her story.

As I was researching Kathleen’s story, I found another really scary incident from her life that I thought you guys would find interesting. Nine years after the Macy’s day parade, Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle's private plane crashed into her building on the Upper East Side. The engine landed in Kathleen's bedroom, setting it ablaze just minutes before she arrived home with her family. Once again, she narrowly escaped death in New York City. Both times on 72nd Street. I don’t know if she has incredibly good luck or bad luck, honestly

This next piece of lost media is a little different… because it isn’t lost anymore. It was actually found this year.

If you’ve seen The Shining, you probably remember the ending image even if you’ve forgotten everything else. Jack Nicholson’s character, Jack Torrance, has just chased his family through the haunted Overlook Hotel, completely unraveled. And then, after all that chaos, the movie ends in this eerily still way:

A black-and-white photograph of a crowded party. Dozens of people, frozen mid-celebration, all dressed in 1920s evening wear. And at the very center of the crowd is Jack—smiling straight into the camera like he’s always belonged there. The caption at the bottom reads:

“Overlook Hotel – July 4th Ball, 1921.”

That final shot has driven fans a little bit insane for decades. Was Jack always part of the hotel? Is the Overlook some kind of time loop? People have picked apart every pixel of that photo. Some thought the guests looked suspiciously like members of President Woodrow Wilson’s family and cabinet—Wilson left office in 1921, so maybe that date at the bottom was a clue. Others fixated on Jack’s pose, with one arm raised and one lowered, like the classic image of the demon Baphomet. Was Kubrick hinting at something satanic?

But the real mystery wasn’t in the meaning of the photo. It was in the photo itself.

Because that party scene at the end of The Shining? That wasn’t a set. It was a real photograph.

On a 1980 commentary track, Stanley Kubrick had explained that he hadn’t staged the image with extras at all. He said, quote:

“They were in a photograph taken in 1921 which we found in a picture library. I originally planned to use extras, but it proved impossible to make them look as good as the people in the photograph.”

So if that was true, then the question changed.

If this hadn’t been created for the movie… where had this photograph come from? Who were all those people? And who was the man Jack Nicholson had replaced?

That was where the lost media obsession kicked in.

Well, hidden inside an obscure 1985 book called The Complete Airbrush and Photo Retouching Manual—basically a “how to Photoshop before Photoshop” guide, was the first clue. tucked into one of the books examples was a tiny bombshell for Shining fans: a side-by-side comparison of the Overlook party photo.

On one side was the version everyone knew, with Jack Nicholson grinning at the center. On the other side was the original image.

Same ballroom. Same crowd. But at the center stood a different man. He looked young—mid-twenties, maybe. A little short. He had dark hair and what appeared to be scars around his nose. The book calmly explained how Jack Nicholson’s face had been airbrushed over this man using modern retouching techniques. But his name wasn’t included.

And then there was one more twist: the caption in the book dated the photo to 1923, not 1921.

So now there were two mysteries.

Who was the original man in the center of the photo?
And when—and where—had this party actually been held?

Reddit, of course, took that as a challenge.

A user named AI89Nut posted the image to the Lost Media subreddit and started treating it like a crime scene photo. They zoomed in on the smallest details, and the crowd slowly began to give up a few more clues.

No one was holding a drink. Not one glass in sight. For a party that crowded, that was… odd. Maybe the photo had been taken during Prohibition, in a place where alcohol was banned in public. That would have pointed to the United States—maybe New York or Los Angeles.

Then there were the accessories. Several women seemed to be wearing heart-shaped pendants in their hair, which made a Valentine’s Day event feel likely. There was a big palm frond in the background—exactly the kind of decorative plant that had been popular in fancy hotel ballrooms in the 1920s. The angle of the shot suggested the photographer was slightly elevated, maybe up on a stage looking down on a dance floor. And there was this distinctive diamond-patterned tiling on the walls, the kind of architectural detail that could have helped nail down the building if anyone ever saw it again.

Each of these things was tiny on its own. Together, they started to form a picture: some kind of formal celebration in a grand ballroom, probably in a major city, probably around Valentine’s Day.

Still, that didn’t tell you who the man at the center was.

To solve that, another user ran his face through a facial recognition tool called PimEyes. The software spat back exactly one match—a ballroom dancer born in 1898, whose life story read like fiction itself: three different names, a military plane crash that had left distinctive scars, and a connection to London’s underground dance halls of the 1920s.

A ballroom dancer named Santos Casani.

The user who ran the search was pretty sure it was a false positive. The match wasn’t perfect. But AI89Nut couldn’t shake it. They started digging into this Santos Casani person anyway… and what they found was unsettlingly close to the man in the photo.

Casani was, in fact, a professional ballroom dancer who became quite well-known in the 1920s and ’30s. He judged competitions. He owned dance clubs around London. He had been born in South Africa. And in 1919, while serving in the military, he had survived an airplane crash that left scars on his face—especially around his nose.

Just like the man seen in the original Overlook photo.

At a certain point, it stopped feeling like coincidence. If that really was Santos Casani in the center of the frame, then the photo probably hadn’t been taken in Los Angeles or New York at all. It had been taken in London.

But identifying the man was only half the battle. Now the hunt became: could anyone actually find the original photograph?

AI89Nut teamed up with a visual investigations journalist from The New York Times named Aric Toler. Together, they began a kind of archival detective story. They combed through old newspaper clippings and photo archives looking for Casani. They hoped to build a list of clubs he had owned, hotels he had performed in, ballrooms he had frequented in the early 1920s. If they could match the interior—those diamond-patterned walls, that balcony angle, those palms—to a real place, they might be able to locate the exact night the photo had been taken.

At the same time, AI89Nut started reaching out to anyone connected with The Shining who might remember where the production had gotten the image. There was an interview with a woman named Joan Smith, the artist who had actually superimposed Jack Nicholson into the photo. She believed the image had come from a Warner Bros. photo archive.

So AI89Nut tracked down another person from the film: Murray Close, the on-set photographer who had taken the original picture of Jack that eventually got pasted into the scene. And Murray said something surprising.

There was no “Warner Bros. photo archive,” at least not in the way people were imagining. But he did remember the still being licensed from somewhere else: the BBC Hulton Picture Library, one of those massive historic photo archives that held everything from Victorian portraits to mid-century news shots.

If that was true, the photo was out there, but it was buried among millions of other images.

And not only that—when they searched the Hulton Archive for “Santos Casani,” nothing relevant came up. It was like the picture had never existed.

But there was one man who worked at the archive, Matt Butson. He was the vice president and, once he heard about this mystery, he also became totally obsessed with it and did some digging.

He confirmed that they had, at one point, licensed at least one image of Santos Casani to Stanley Kubrick’s production company back in 1979. That was a good sign—they were clearly looking in the right place. But when he pulled the record, the photo attached wasn’t the Overlook party image. It was a completely different shot.

Good news: they had proven Casani was in the archive, and that Kubrick’s team had licensed photos of him.
Bad news: the specific photo they were looking for might have been misfiled… or gone.

If it had never been returned after filming, or re-categorized under the wrong name, finding it would have meant manually searching through millions of glass plate negatives, one by one. It started to feel like the original Overlook party might be lost for good.

But Matt Butson couldn’t let it go.

In April of that year, he decided to widen the search. He started looking through another collection: the Topical Press archive, an older trove of photographs that had been partially absorbed into the Hulton Archive back in the 1950s. He ran a new query for images licensed to Stanley Kubrick’s production company around the same time.

And that was when he got a hit.

Sitting in the Topical Press files was a glass plate negative. And when he held it up so he could see what it was an image of, he saw a crowded ballroom. People in evening dress. Women with heart-shaped accessories in their hair. A palm frond in the background. That distinctive diamond pattern on the wall.

And in the very center, grinning directly into the camera, was the man from the airbrushing manual.

Not Jack Torrance. Not Santos Casani, at least not yet. The name on the accompanying notecard said “John Golman.”

As it turned out, Santos Casani had been born as Joseph Goldman. When he had moved to the UK in 1915 to serve in the infantry, he had changed his name to John Golman. Later, when he reinvented himself as a dancer, he changed it again—to Santos Casani.

So the archive card was recording him at this in-between moment in his life, when he was still half-way between identities.

The photo itself was labeled as being taken at the Royal Palace Hotel in London, during a Valentine’s Day ball on February 14th, 1921.

So the internet sleuths had gotten a lot right, just from staring at a fuzzy screenshot of the end of a horror movie. It had been a grand hotel ballroom. It had been a Valentine’s celebration.

The Royal Palace Hotel had been demolished in 1961, so you couldn’t walk into that same ballroom anymore. Santos Casani had died in relative obscurity in 1983. But his ghost was still there, in a way—hidden under Jack Nicholson’s face in one of the most famous horror endings of all time.

And even now that they had found the original photo, a few things still didn’t quite add up.

No one had ever given a satisfying explanation for why no one in that room seemed to be holding a drink, even though there had been no Prohibition in London at the time. For a Valentine’s ball in a luxury hotel, the empty hands felt… deliberate. And as for that Baphomet pose—the raised arm and lowered arm that people read as demonic—Jack was just mimicking the exact pose Casani had struck in the original photo.

Maybe it didn’t mean anything. Maybe it had just been a charismatic dancer throwing his arms up for the camera at a party in 1921.

Or maybe that was the creepiest part:

This image that had launched a thousand theories about demons and haunted hotels… had started as an ordinary photograph of people having a good time. And somehow, when it slipped into The Shining, it became something else entirely.

Our final piece oflost media comes from One of my favorite holiday movies. the 1993 film The Nightmare Before Christmas. Every year, there’s very heated online debates over whether this is a Christmas movie or a Halloween movie, I actually say it’s Halloween but I’m going to let you guys decide in the comments if I’m right or wrong. 

The movie, produced by Tim Burton and directed by Henry Selick, was not popular when it first came out, but over the last 30 odd years it’s become a cult classic.

The film started as a poem Tim Burton wrote eleven years earlier, back when he was just an apprentice animator at Disney from 1979 to 1984. The poem was dark even by Burton's standards - Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King, had grown tired of Halloween, deciding to kidnap Santa and take over Christmas. Burton had sketched it all out, these twisted characters with their hollow eyes and stitched smiles.

But there's a ghost haunting this film - not one of the singing spirits of Halloween Town, but the actual ghost of horror royalty. Vincent Price's lost performance as Santa Claus.

Vincent Price was one of the kings of horror. In House of Wax, he was the murderous wax museum owner. In The Fly, he watched his brother transform into something monstrous. He'd just played Edward Scissorhands' inventor for Tim Burton. So when Burton approached him to voice Santa Claus in the movie, Price didn't hesitate. Other actors were actually offended by the offer - they thought playing Santa in a Gothic stop-motion film was beneath them. But Price understood what Burton was creating.

So, He went into the studio and started recording Santa's voice, filtered through Vincent Price's distinctive theatrical drawl. Can you imagine it? 

But only a handful of people would ever get to hear these recordings, because soon after, tragedy struck.

Price's wife, Coral Browne - a renowned actress in her own right - passed away while he was recording. The grief broke something in him. When he returned to the recording studio to finish his work, he seemed "despondent." according to the director. His voice had become frail, weak. The man who had terrified audiences for decades could barely speak above a whisper.

Disney heard the tapes and deemed the recordings unusable.


And unfortunately, that’s now where the tragedy ends. I don’t think anyone could have guessed that that would be Vincent Price’s final performance. He died of lung cancer that same year. 

So you would think that those recordings would have become memorialized, but here's where it gets strange - they're gone. Vanished. Director Henry Selick says he doesn't know where they went. Disney claims they don't have them. 

Eventually, the role was recast and a local San Francisco actor named Ed Ivory went on to play Santa Clause. And to this day, no one knows how much ofto Vincent Price’s voice was recorded, or where those tapes are. 

That is all I have for you today in our lost media episode. Are there any that I missed? What media do you remember from the holidays that’s been lost to time, you can let me know wherever you listen. 

And I’ll be back here next week with our LAST EPISODE OF THE YEAR, how is that already happening??? We’re going on an adventure to check out some of the most haunted castles around the world and the ghost stories associated with them. You’re not going to want to miss it. 

As always, you can join me over on the high council tier on patreon to check out the holiday lost media that DIDNT make it into the episode, I want to discuss a Mariah Carey one that I think I found while doing the research for this episode. 

I will see you all next week, until then, stay curious. OOOooOOOoooO

Kaelyn Moore
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