Missing No More

A couple of years ago, I picked up on a post written by blogger-critic Marty McKee that talked about a supposedly long-missing Season Two episode of Hawaii Five-O titled “Bored, She Hung Herself.” According to McKee, this is “the rarest of the 284 episodes of Hawaii Five-O that were produced during its 12-season run on CBS. It aired only once--January 7, 1970--and has not been broadcast since.”

So why did that installment of the series pull a vanishing act? It was supposedly because of an early scene in “Bored” that showed a “hippie character ... hanging by the neck without harm for the purpose of meditation.” As legend has it, some not-so-brainy viewer tried to duplicate that exercise, only to kill him- or herself. To avoid inciting any further suicides, CBS reportedly held the episode out of circulation; it wasn’t even included on the 2007 DVD release of Hawaii Five-O: The Second Season.

But as Television Obscurities notes, “the episode is neither lost nor missing but simply unavailable ... I am all but certain that CBS and/or Paramount has a copy somewhere. According to the United States Copyright Office, copyright on the episode was renewed in January of 1997 by CBS, Inc. Furthermore, a copy of the episode has been in the hands of private collectors for some time, apparently from a rather poor quality 16mm print of the episode that includes CBS identification and network bumpers, suggesting it may have come from an affiliate.”

Like others, I don’t recall ever seeing “Bored, She Hung Herself” on the boob tube, but this morning I found on the Web what may be that “rather poor quality” print Television Obscurities mentions. It’s true, the picture isn’t the cleanest or sharpest one could hope for; but in the absence of any better version, it will have to do.