His Honor, Homer Bell (partially found NBC sitcom; 1955)

A print ad for the series

Status: Partially found

His Honor, Homer Bell is a syndicated TV sitcom produced in 1955, starring Gene Lockhart as the titular character, an elected judge/practicing attorney and widower who looks after his orphaned niece Casey (Mary Lee Dearring). Maude (Jane Moultrie), a housekeeper, also lives with them. Episodes typically involved Homer or Casey getting into a dilemma and learning a valuable lesson as they got out of it. Many of the episodes were directed by Derwin Abbe, and Winston Sharples composed the score. The primary sponsor was Union Pacific Railroad.

A total of 39 episodes were produced; the series began airing in 1955 on KCOP Los Angeles and was running until at least 1961. Despite this, no video footage was known to exist for decades, not even through kinescopes. It also hasn't been particularly well-documented, to the point where there isn't a complete episode guide publicly available, and for the longest time very little production material even existed outside of draft scripts and some of Sharples' scores.

It wasn't until November 21, 2023 that FT Depot, which had uncovered many other pieces of lost media from film prints, managed to find and upload a copy of episode four, "Homer's Birthday", to YouTube. On January 1, 2024, they uploaded another episode: "Casey, Girl Tycoon" (the episode number is unknown). The episodes were uncovered at a manufacturing facility for film lab equipment, which had cut them up for film transport testing of the machines. FT Depot purchased the equipment at a bankruptcy auction, and ended up obtaining the prints. While they were still cut up (on top of already being degraded and scratched), the episodes were complete aside from some missing frames.