Wiped history

An interesting thread has started on the GSN General board about wiped game shows. I posted that I'd love to see a full set of Who Do You Trust?, Johnny Carson's more physical knockoff of Groucho's You Bet Your Life. Another poster inquired about the term "wiped"...

Can someone please explain the history of the term "wiped". Upon reading the title of this thread, I was baffled as to the subject matter. After reading the replies in this thread, I have deduced that it means "destroyed" or "erased" in the context of a television show that has not been preserved, but I never heard this term before. Is this newly coined terminology?

Not at all newly coined. It refers to the practice of reusing video tape back in the fifties and sixties and even into the seventies, when tape was very expensive. New episodes would just be taped over older episodes on the same reel, so the older eps got "wiped."

Sometimes tapes could be lost or dumped somewhere, and sometimes there was unintentional destruction. A few What's My Line tapes were reportedly ruined in making the 25th anniversary special in 1975, for instance.

In the game show world, Goodson and Todman were relatively careful about preserving shows in the first couple decades of commercial television. But even a lot of episodes from their shows are gone. Still, classics like What's My Line and I've Got a Secret are preserved very well by the general standards of early TV game shows, though some eps are missing. Almost miraculously, you can watch the first episode of What's My Line on YouTube, from sixty years ago.

As the cost of taping shows came down, and cable TV started opening up more possibilities for reusing shows over years or even decades, producers became much more careful about preserving their product. That's why a more recent show like Scrabble, for example, is apparently pretty much intact. And producer Michael Davies would probably have cut off his arm before he wiped any Regis Millionaire.