In the mid-1970s, BBC Enterprises disposed of much older material for which the rights to sell the programmes had expired, and the Engineering Department routinely wiped videotapes in an era when rescreening potential was limited.
In 1998, David Croft, one of the co-creators of Dad's Army, made an appeal on BBC Two asking people if they held copies of the missing episodes.
[1] In 2001, three years after Croft's appeal, 16 mm film recordings of "Operation Kilt" and "The Battle of Godfrey's Cottage" were returned to the BBC archive.
On October 17th, 2024, the Film Is Fabulous project returned a print of the already existing episode The Battle of Godfrey's Cottage to the BBC Archives.
"Room at the Bottom" was used as the pilot project to test this process of colour recovery, with the success of the episode's restoration leading to it being used on other 16mm recordings.
[11][12] Pre-production for "A Stripe for Frazer" began in October 2015, and a little under 12 weeks later the finished animated episode was released on BBC Store on 4 February 2016.
[13] The animation was produced and directed for BBC Worldwide by Charles Norton and a team that included comic book artist, Martin Geraghty.
[13] In October 2023, UKTV announced that it had produced animated versions of the remaining missing episodes for broadcast on its Gold channel alongside "A Stripe for Frazer".
For both "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Walker" and "Under Fire", neither James Beck nor Ian Lavender appeared in the radio adaptations, and they were therefore not part of the cast of the animated versions of the episodes.
Mercury Productions, the company responsible for Saluting Dad's Army, Gold's 50th anniversary tribute series, produced the episodes, directed by Ben Kellett.
[18] Kevin McNally and Robert Bathurst were the initial casting announcements as Captain Mainwaring and Sergeant Wilson,[19] with Bernard Cribbins portraying Private Godfrey.
[20] The full cast was announced in January 2019, with McNally, Bathurst and Cribbins joined by Kevin Eldon, Mathew Horne, David Hayman and Tom Rosenthal.