Retro
Lost Media
Lost media wikis, obsolete format museums and archives of things that were never meant to outlive their broadcast.
12 sites
Decades of adverts preserved exactly as broadcast, including the jingles you will regret having remembered.
- 10 min
- Sound on
An audio museum of sounds made by objects that no longer exist — dial tones, shutter clicks, the whirr of a rewinding tape.
- 10 min
- Sound on
US government training films liberated from federal vaults. Sincere, badly acted, and occasionally about surviving a nuclear attack.
- 10 min
- Sound on
The looser, stranger sibling of the main lost media wiki, with more speculation and considerably more unresolved threads.
- 1 hr+
Scanned film and broadcasting trade magazines going back to 1904, searchable in full text. The industry writing about itself, live.
- 1 hr+
The Internet Archive's full film and video collection — public domain features, home movies, government reels and stranger things.
- 1 hr+
- Sound on
Every format anybody ever stored anything on, documented with photographs and the dates it lived between. Far more than you expect.
- 1 hr+
Radio drama, comedy and serials from before television took over, in quantities that would take several lifetimes to finish.
- 1 hr+
- Sound on
Thousands of American industrial, educational and advertising films, all public domain and all quietly extraordinary.
- 1 hr+
- Sound on
A catalogue of films, broadcasts and recordings that are known to have existed and cannot now be found. Some entries get solved.
- 1 hr+
Searchable captions across millions of hours of broadcast news, which makes it possible to find the exact moment something was said.
- 1 hr+
- Sound on
Well over a hundred thousand scanned advertisements sorted by decade and subject. A very direct record of what people were told to want.
- 1 hr+
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
Lost Media: questions
How many sites are in Lost Media?
12 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
12 of the 12 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
12 of 12 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 12 are safe for work and 5 work with the sound off.