Super Klenk - how many episodes are there?
Now that GMA have started to upload episodes of Super Klenk -- the Ara Mina superhero vehicle that was previously considered lost media -- it is possible to speculate how many episodes will eventually be uploaded. Currently there are nine in total on the YoüLOL YouTube channel. Many web sources suggest 13 episodes were made in total before the show was cancelled. But details of lost media can be unreliable, as they are often based in people's fallible recollections. Contemporary records, like tv listings, are less prone to error. The tv listings for Super Klenk suggest that there could be as many as 18 episodes made of this series.
Who is right? To get to the bottom of the matter we need to delve into some investiagtion and speculation involving dates.
First let's document what dates are known for certain -- all of these will be useful clues when we try to work out the broadcast dates for each episode:
The first episode was broadcast on 12th December 1999, according to tv promo adverts for the series.
Valentine's Day in The Philippines in 2000 was on Monday 14th February.
The 12th March edition of the series featured a villain called Bingo Man, according to a snippet in The Philippines Inquirer.
The 16th April edition was its last, again according to a snippet in The Philippines Inquirer.
Back in 1999 and 2000, The Philippines Inquirer newspaper would published weekly tv listings in its Saturday editions, making it possible to know which weeks the show was broadcast. Super Klenk was broadcast at 8pm on a Sunday, so the previous day's newspaper will have references to its episodes. Sadly the online archives only stretch back to the the start of 2000, and not all editions are present in the archives.
The table above indicates the Sundays when the show could have been shown, starting on 12th December and ending on 16th April, with the yellow cells indicating the broadcasts where tv listings are viewable in the newspaper archives. The series ended on the 16th April, but it wasn't possible to double check from the listings whether the series was absent on 23rd April, however the listings for the 30th (in red) show that Super Klenk had indeed been replaced by another show.
On YouTube, GMA isn't putting up the original broadcast dates as part of its descriptions for each video, but the latest episode currently available (as of writing) is a Valentine's Day themed story, labelled as episode number 9. Let's assume this was likely broadcast on Sunday 13th Feb, the day before the event itself. Starting on 12th December 1999, and assuming they didn't show an episode on 26th December, then it would indeed be the case that the episode shown on the day before Valentine's Day would be the 9th episode.
Of course this makes a few assumptions (notably that the Valentine's episode was shown just before the day itself), but the assumptions are reasonable and the resulting timeline fits in well with the tv schedules.
But following this logic, the episode on 16th April would not have been the 13th episode, but the 18th episode. This assumes that no episode was repeated.
If the 13th episode uploaded to YouTube turns out to be the Bingo Man episode, then we'll know we're correctly mapping episode numbers to their broadcast dates. (Note: see updates at the foot of this post.)
To make matters even more complicated, however, episode 9 (the Valentine's episode), as it appears on the YouTube channel, ends on a cliffhanger and has no end credits. This suggests that this YouTube episode is only half an episode, and that the original tv episode has been cut into two parts. If this is indeed the case, then episode 10 on YouTube will actually be part two of the 13th February story. This would mean the actual episode count on YouTube could end up being more than 18 -- although again this is based on the assumption that episode 9 is half an episode, and that our initial assumption about 18 broadcast episodes is right.
So there could be 13 episodes, if some were repeated. There could be 18 episodes, if all the available Sundays were original episodes. And there could even be more than 18 uploaded episodes, if GMA are splitting some feature-length episodes into two parts.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see as the episodes are slowly uploaded...
EDIT: Since the above was written, YoüLOL have uploaded episodes 13 and 14; episode 13 is indeed the Bingo Man episode mentioned in the Inquirer. So, we now know that there are certainly more than 13 episodes. Also, it has become clear that episodes are not being cut into parts, but that the end of some episodes are being chopped off after the final commercial break -- notably this appears to have happened on episode 9 and 11. All of this puts the 18 episode timeline on track (assuming no repeats).
