 Because the shows were created prior to the launch of Ampex's electronic videotape recorder in late 1956, all of them were initially broadcast live in black and white, then recorded on film kinescope for reruns and for West Coast rebroadcasts.By the early 1970s, their vast library of 35mm and 16mm kinescopes eventually wound up in the hands of "a successor network," who reportedly disposed of all of them in New York City's East River to make room for more recent-vintage videotapes in a warehouse.Although recovery of films that have been submerged for decades has been done (see "The Carpet from Bagdad" as an example), to date, there have been no salvage-diving efforts to locate or recover the DuMont archive that reportedly sits in the East River, and if it survived in that environment, most of the films were likely damaged.