By the late 1940s, Buster Keaton, the man who literally reinvented what a human body could do on film, was basically a ghost. He was doing daywork, a four-week circus stint in Paris and touring in a stage production of The Gorilla. It looked like the credits had rolled on one of the greatest careers in cinema.

Then came the magic of the vacuum tube.

In 1949, Ed Wynn (the Perfect Fool and a guy who knew talent when he saw it) brought Buster onto his variety show. It was the early days of TV, broadcast live on the West Coast, recorded on kinescopes and then physically mailed to the rest of the country like a weird cinematic chain letter. The reaction was electric. People remembered why they loved Buster.

This led to The Buster Keaton Show on KHJ (KTTV) in Los Angeles. As Buster put it: “It was one of the thrills of my life… I had almost given up hope of getting another real chance as an actor.”

Watching these episodes now is like looking at a lost civilization. Because there was no such thing as canned laughter yet, and the shows were often filmed without a studio audience, Buster’s brilliant, bone-crunching physical comedy often lands in a vacuum of silence. It’s eerie, beautiful and occasionally heartbreaking.

Eventually, producer Carl Hittleman tried to film a new version of the show in 1951 to syndicate it nationally, bringing in a Who’s Who of silent-era vets like Hank Mann and Harold Goodwin. They even re-titled it Life with Buster Keaton and chopped it up into a feature film called The Misadventures of Buster Keaton for the European market. It was marketed to kids as a slapstick museum piece, but we know better. This is the work of a master finding his feet in a brand-new world.

This set is a miracle of preservation. Archivist Jeff Joseph has done the heavy lifting here, digitally upgrading these rare kinescopes to high resolution. Out of the 13 original live episodes, only 9 remain. This set includes two holy grails: a February 2, 1950, episode that hasn’t been seen since the night it aired, and a February 23, 1950, episode making its first-ever home media appearance.

Extras on the Blu-ray include Three Comedians in Close-up (CBC-TV), an episode of This Your Life, rare footage of Keaton at the circus and two shorts, Cops and The Goat.  If you have any love for the history of the medium or the man who broke his neck for a gag and kept filming, you need this from MVD.