how come rawhide season 1 have so many episodes missing from the series
Quick Scoop
Rawhide Season 1 doesn’t actually have missing episodes; it originally aired
23 episodes, and nearly all of them are known, cataloged, and available on
modern releases. The feeling that “so many” are missing usually comes from how
the series is presented on streaming, TV schedules, or partial DVD sets, not
from actual lost episodes.
Why people think episodes are “missing”
1. Incomplete streaming or TV lineups
Many streaming services or cable re-runs only show a subset of Season 1 (for example, 8–12 episodes) and label it as “Season 1,” which makes it look like the rest are gone. These are selection choices by the platform, not evidence of missing material.
“Episode 1 Aired Jan 9, 1959 … Episode 22 Aired Jun 26, 1959” – that’s a full 22–23 episode run, none unaccounted for.
2. Partial home-video releases
Earlier DVD or Blu-ray releases sometimes only included certain episodes or seasons, or were region-specific (like an Australian “Complete First Season” that came out much later). If you saw an older, incomplete set, it’s easy to assume the rest don’t exist.
3. Misremembered episode counts
Rawhide went on for 8 seasons and 217 episodes total. Season 1 specifically had 23 episodes, but later seasons varied in length. People who remember “a lot of episodes” from the whole show may mistakenly think Season 1 should have 40–50, so anything less feels like “missing”.
What actually exists for Season 1
Known episode list
Season 1 (Jan 9 – Jul 10, 1959) includes:
- Incident of the Tumbleweed Wagon
- Incident at Alabaster Plain
- Incident With an Executioner
- Incident of the Widowed Dove
- Incident on the Edge of Madness
- Incident of the Power and the Plow
- Incident at Barker Springs
- Incident West of Lano
- Incident of the Town in Terror
- Incident of the Golden Calf
- Incident of the Coyote Weed
- Incident of the Chubasco
- Incident of the Curious Street
- Incident of the Dog Days
- Incident of the Calico Gun
- Incident of the Misplaced Indians
- Incident of Fear in the Streets
- Incident Below the Brazos
- Incident of the Dry Drive
- Incident of the Judas Trap
- Incident in No Man’s Land
- Incident of the Burst of Evil
(Some listings count 23, sometimes 22, depending on how the final播出 episode is categorized; the difference is tiny.) All of these are documented on Wikipedia, TVDB, and Rotten Tomatoes.
Full-season availability
- “Rawhide: The Complete First Season” was released on Blu-ray in Australia in March 2023, confirming that all Season 1 episodes are preserved and distributable.
- Fan sites and episode databases list all episodes with air dates and guest stars, further confirming nothing is truly missing.
So, are any episodes actually lost?
There’s no credible evidence that any Rawhide Season 1 episodes are lost or destroyed. The show was produced by CBS and stored in standard network archives; most episodes from that era survived, especially popular Westerns like Rawhide. Any “missing” feeling is almost certainly due to:
- Incomplete streaming catalogs
- Partial or region-specific DVD/Blu-ray sets
- Misunderstanding of how many episodes Season 1 originally had.
If you want to see the entire first season, look for:
- “Rawhide: The Complete First Season” Blu-ray (ViaVision/Australia), or
- Any listing that explicitly says “all 23 episodes” rather than just “Season 1” with a small episode count.
Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.