Oh. My. God.
Oh my God, like...
Oh-my-God.
If you look at the title of this video you probably know what I'm gonna be talking about,
and I'm gonna get to that, believe me, but I just...
I'm over the moon right now. I'm just ecstatic. I can't even believe what's going on.
I feel like there's a lot of terrible things happening in the world right now, but this is the year of Allison.
I got so many great things going on.
Ok so, I find this very cool, I hope you guys find this cool, too.
I think that this is newsworthy.
So there's a little bit of a story here to get to this.
A little while ago on eBay I found a lot of Quantum Leap photo negatives.
And, you guys know, I'm a Quantum Leap superfan.
The negatives are photos that they took during the show's run, mostly from season 5,
and usually when they take photos like this while they're filming it's for promotional purposes or stuff like that.
And I guess the negatives from them end up in auctions and get sold off,
and eventually this led to the eBay listing that I found.
I find this kind of interesting, and I don't know how interesting it's to anyone else
but this was the same person that I bought photo negatives from,
from the show She-Wolf of London, and that was something that I had a big kick on for a while.
And I like buying these things because you find interesting behind-the-scenes things
that you don't necessarily see, especially with shows that don't have a lot of buying seeds material available.
And for whatever reason Quantum Leap doesn't have a lot of that.
You can find some really interesting things like, you know, clapboards between takes,
sometimes they have different names of episodes on them.
Scott Bakula directed an episode called "Promised Land",
he directed a couple episodes, but this one had photos.
And you get to see him directing and these really adorable photos of,
I guess this couple in the episode were a real-life couple.
They were married and it was 50th anniversary during the shoot, and they got them a cake.
And there's these sweet photos of them having their 50th anniversary cake on the sets.
And that's just the sweetest, kindest thing that I've never known about.
Most of this is from season 5 and some from 3 and 4, a little bit of it.
And most of the coverage is for episodes that had a lot of gimmicks
and things that they wanted to get a lot of promotion for.
Also randomly in here, there's a shot of Arsenio Hall, but I think it was just like a mix up from the photographer.
I don't know... if you're the photographer and you want it back, hit me up?
And like with the last lot of photo negatives that I got
it's just a lot of stuff that I find interesting,
I don't know how widespread this interest is.
But it's something that I like to know about and find out some sort of behind-the-scenes stuff.
Sometimes you get like cool different angles of scenes from the show,
or better details of things that maybe weren't onscreen that much, and things like that.
And sometimes, if you're really lucky, you can find shots from deleted scenes,
it was like that with the She-Wolf of London negatives.
And you get something a little extra or maybe something you didn't really think about that was in an episode,
and I like to find little things like that, and I thought
"wouldn't it be cool if I found something from Quantum Leap like that?"
And that would be like a nice bonus, but I wasn't really expecting much.
But I could not believe what I found in this.
It blew my mind. This is huge!
Before we go any further with this, I'm gonna get to the part that you actually clicked for,
there's gonna be spoilers for the ending of Quantum Leap. That should go without saying.
But if you don't want to know the ending of Quantum Leap, don't go any further.
So everyone knows that Quantum Leap has one of the most infamously bittersweet endings.
It's kind of a bummer.
But, there's a little more to it, and I've got the negatives to prove it.
So I already knew going in that the ending of Quantum Leap, that last title card, was a last-minute decision.
They didn't know if they were gonna be cancelled or if they were gonna keep going,
and so they had to come up with an ending that was both a conclusion and not.
And that's really difficult to do.
So if you remember, the ending is Sam leaping as himself to Beth, Al's first wife,
and telling her that Al is coming home.
So instead of declaring him dead because he was a POW at the time.
She waits for him and he saves his first marriage and his one true love.
And there's a pan over to a picture of Al when he's younger,
and there's a leaping effect, and that's the end of it.
And you don't really know what happened, a lot of people kind of speculated what that meant,
did it mean that Al left after him or was it just an artistic choice?
From what I've heard from Donald Bellisario, it was an artistic thing, is what he said.
And there was a leaked ending,
leaping that picture into a picture of Al and Beth, and their four daughters.
And as far as anyone knew that was the only alternate ending,
and from what I've heard there was a different ending tacked on to it,
when they were originally making it, before they put that card in, and so that's what we assumed it was.
But it turns out there was a little more to it than that.
It's a little weird, the series finale for Quantum Leap,
because I always felt like Al's story felt a little... unconcluded.
Obviously we know that him and Beth get together, but you don't really get any conclusion on-screen with them.
The last time that you see Al is just him a promising Sam he's going to get him back.
And he doesn't get him back because he doesn't return home, so it's a little bit sad.
And it feels like there should have been something to sort of round that out.
There was a leaked script for a longer ending for the last episode of Quantum Leap,
and it's on a site called Al's place, which is a really great archive of all sorts of Quantum Leap stuff.
And this was supposedly from a real script, and Don Bellisario said that this was just fiction,
it was something that was made up. It's not what happened.
But it turns out, no, it did happen, because I have the negatives right here.
And I had no idea this was actually filmed. We didn't know, like,
25, 30 years have passed since this ending, and no one knew this existed.
And now we do.
So here is the deleted ending.
In the future, which I think is 1999 at the time,
Al is with Beth and they are both older and happily married.
And Al is looking at a picture of Sam and wondering where he's gone to, because he's still leaping as himself.
And Beth says "you're gonna find him",
and he says "how do you know for sure?",
"Well, because that's what friends are for".
But then there's also an alternate version of that, in which Al is looking at the picture
debating how he's gonna find Sam, and Beth says "you gotta leap to find him,
and I know you're gonna come back because if you could come back from Vietnam,
you could come back to me from this".
And then Al concludes "yeah, I gotta go find him".
So he goes and he leaps, and he ends up at the bar from the ending of "Mirror Image",
and he talks to God in the bar who tells him things are gonna be very different as a leaper, lays all doubt for him.
And then Al leaps out and ends up in a bar in the future as a woman.
And that was their proposal lead into season 6.
And I think probably that's not what they filmed.
I think they probably just filmed the ending where he said "I'm gonna go find Sam and that's what friends are for".
I don't think they probably would have taken the time to set up all of the future stuff.
Especially because they didn't know if they were going to be cancelled or not,
and that would be sort of a bummer ending too, because he would get no conclusion to that either.
Al is very Southwestern in this timeline, I don't know how I feel about the all-jean ensemble,
but it certainly would have been different.
It's really sweet to see pictures, too, of Al and Beth together that aren't quite so sad as MIA,
pictures where she's touching him, and there's little bits of affection there,
and that's really sweet to see.
I wish that we could have gotten a season 6 and see more of this,
but I really just want to see this footage like, it's got to exist somewhere,
so I hope some day in the future we'll be able to see it.
But for now we at least know that there was a little bit more to Al's story,
we got to see a little more conclusively that this timeline didn't change the fact that he knew Sam,
it didn't cut him out of his life.
And I think that's sort of a nice thing to know.
So I'm gonna find somewhere to archive all of this stuff and when I do, I'm gonna put the links in the description
so that you guys can all check them out for yourselves, spread them around, let people know.
I just want people to know, I want Quantum Leap fans to know that this exists cause this just blows my mind.
I hope you guys found this as cool as I did. I am just flipping out. Amazing!
I hope I can spread all of these good vibes to you. I hope great things happen in your future.
I'll be seeing you around.