The Sopranos Lost Media

Written By Pure Kino

If you’re a fan of The Sopranos, then you’ve probably consumed every piece of Sopranos media that’s out there. You’ve watched the show straight through multiple times. You watch Sopranos analysis here on Youtube. You’ve probably even seen some Sopranos fanfiction.

But there’s some Sopranos stuff out there that I guarantee the majority of you don’t know about. And that is the Sopranos lost media. There exists web content and even a short film starring James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano that are possibly lost forever.

Lost media is any work of art that is no longer available to the general public. This can happen if all the known copies of a work are missing or destroyed, or if the way they were viewed is no longer accessible. For example the majority of the silent films from 1930 were destroyed, many times intentionally to make room in storage for new films, and thus are lost forever.

But of course, those movies were recorded onto physical film, which is susceptible to destruction and decay. But how can the Sopranos, a show which was created in the age of digital storage and the internet, possibly have lost media? And is there any way to get it back?

Well let’s take a look.

The first example we have is the Sopranos bonus videos. Back in 2004, HBO hosted a number of videos on its website for the Sopranos. These include the standard clips from the episode and interviews with the case that you’d expect to see as bonus material. However, beyond that they also had a number of exclusive original videos made for their website.

You can see from the image here that this includes something called Meadowcam. Now I know what some of you are thinking. But it appears to have been Meadow doing some form of vlogging, talking and complaining about her life and family. It’s a shame she was a little too early to take advantage of simps on the internet. If she’d have been born after those Twitch thots, she’d be the real E-girl.

There’s also a commercial for Vesuvio on here. Michael Imperioli talked about directing a fake commercial for Vesuvio on one of the episodes of Talking Sopranos, similar to the fake behind the scenes documentary for Cleaver. I guess in universe Christopher got to live out some of his Hollywood fantasies afterall.

There’s also an assortment of other videos on here. The Crazy Horse commercial was likely something similar to the Vesuvio one, but for Adriana’s club. We’ve also seen Dr. Fried filming a commercial for his um… enhancement clinic, on the show, so this might have been just that same scene that they filmed.

Now these top 3 videos are interesting. Montel Williams is a real person, and he is the host of the Montel Williams Show. We’ve actually seen him on the Sopranos in the episode Christopher, where he hosts a discussion between the Italian and Native American activists. Now this is most likely the same interview we saw on the show, and what they actually played on the television during that episode.

But these other two videos, Wernick newscast and Wernick protests, now that is something interesting. Jeffrey Wernick is a fictional character on the show, played by actor Timothy Nolen. We see him in the episode “The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti”. He’s a mob author and analyst, and he gives a breakdown of the upcoming indictments against the family.

Though he’s a minor character that only appears that once, they created a website for him called the jeffreywernick.com, though later the material was consolidated into the HBO website. The premise is that Wernick, as a mob author, is doing research on the Soprano family. The excerpts and documentation he provides on the site serve as behind the scenes details and supplemental material for the show.

Interestingly, in his bio it’s stated that he provided the material for David Chase, and that his work served as the foundation for the Sopranos television show. This means that the premise of the show is that the Sopranos really exist in our world, and the show is a dramatization of their lives.

However, before we get too excited, the next line says that the actors on the show look shockingly like the real people they are trying to portray. So really this is just a tongue in cheek joke for the website, and not really meant to be a recontextualization of the show.

Now all of these sites unfortunately no longer exist on the web. If you go to the Sopranos page on HBO nowadays, you won’t find any of the material I’ve shown. The way I was able to access it was through the WayBack Machine, one of the greatest things to ever be made on the internet. The WayBack Machine is part of the Internet Archive, an awesome nonprofit organization dedicated to archiving websites and making them accessible to everyone for free.

The one drawback to their archive is that they cannot save Quicktime, Real Player, and Adobe Flash files. Flash was officially discontinued on Dec 31, 2020, which in addition to killing some of this Sopranos content, killed a bunch of Flash games that I used to love as a kid. The archive for the site still links to the Quicktime and RealPlayer files, but the files themselves are no longer hosted on the site and thus can’t be downloaded.

Now if you ever watched these videos back in the day and you still have the computer you watched them on, please check your downloads. They might still be saved locally on your device. One of the reasons I decided to make this video is to draw attention to the media and hopefully bring it back if possible. It might seem unlikely that anyone would still have the files after all this time, but in fact that is exactly what happened with this next piece of media.

The Sopranos vs Napster is a flash animation series created by the now defunct company Camp Chaos. They were hired by Warner Brothers to produce the animation as a kind advertisement against Napster, which was a music swapping platform that companies were very concerned about back in the early 2000’s.

Camp Chaos then created a 9 part animation series, in which Warner Brothers hires Tony to wack Napster. The animation is well… disgusting. I think it’s supposed to be stylized, like maybe it’s a statement about the crude nature of the characters. But their other animations are the same way so maybe this is all they could do. Either way I’ve seen flash animations from kids that look better than this.

However only a few of these episodes ever aired online. Something happened where Warner Brothers pulled their support for the project. According to this article from 2002, it might have had something to do with licensing rights to the online media. Or they might have just realized that these shorts were not funny at all and decided to save themselves from the embarrassment.

Camp Chaos is now defunct, so these files would have probably been lost forever, had it not been for Reddit user u/Tfor2show. He downloaded the animations for the website years ago, and recently found them again and made them available on Archive.org and on Youtube. I’ll include links to all of this in the pinned comment if you want to check it out yourself. But it’s a perfect example of how thanks to one person, something like this isn’t lost to the abyss of the internet.

Tfor2show also happens to run a Youtube channel dedicated to the Terminator movies. If you’re interested in Terminator stuff, check out his channel!

The final piece of media I’ll be going over is the lost Tony and Carmela skit that was made for Lebron James. In the summer of 2010, Lebron’s contract with the Cleveland Cavaliers was up, and he was the most sought after player in the NBA. The New York Knicks, in an effort to recruit him, created a video pitch that starred James Gandolfini and Eddie Falco in their iconic roles.

This information was discussed in a podcast in 2021 about the Knicks. They had many famous New Yorkers involved in the video, but the Sopranos bit was the opening as the show had only ended a few years back and was still very much in the public imagination. They filmed it in James Gandolfini’s apartment, and though James had a beard at the time, he apparently had the idea to frame it as though Tony was in witness protection.

Now before we all get excited, this skit is in no way canon to the show. David Chase was not involved at all, and it wasn’t even meant to be seen by anyone besides LeBron James. Eddie Falco herself said she never even considered it connected to the show.

However even though this isn’t the Sopranos sequel we’ve always wanted, it still is a piece of media that I’m sure a lot of Sopranos fans would get a kick out of. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like the video exists on the internet anywhere. The team behind the podcast tried to reach out to the franchise to see if they could get a copy, but they were unsuccessful. It might be lost forever, or it might just be sitting on someone’s flash drive, just waiting to be discovered.

That’s the thing about lost media. There have been numerous examples of movies and other works of art that were thought lost, but then someone finds an old film reel in their basement. And thanks to people like that, these pieces won’t be lost to history.

So again, I’m asking all of you to help bring these pieces of media back from the grave. Together, we can add to the Sopranos canon, and help make this community even better. If there’s any chance that you have a copy of anything I’ve shown in this video, please check. And if you find anything, make it available to the public. You can send it to me if you want, or post it on the lost media subreddit. They were integral to me being able to make this video, along with the Internet Archive.

Turns out there is actually something useful on Reddit besides the Sopranos sub.

Thanks for reading! Below is a list of all the links to the media I went over the video/blog:

Sopranos Web Content

Sopranos vs Napster Cartoon

LeBron James Pitch Video ft. James Gandolfi and Edie Falco

Pure Kino
Previous

The Sopranos as an 80’s Dark Fantasy Film
Next

Who Gave Tony Food Poisoning?