name to U.S. Borax Company following a merger. The "20-Mule Team Borax" consumer products division of U.S. Borax was eventually bought out by the Dial Corporation, which as of 2014, as a division of the German consumer products concern Henkel, still manufactures and markets them. Rio Tinto Group absorbed the U.S. Borax mining operations in 1968 and now owns the TV series. Although Rio Tinto, successor-in-interest to the series' original sponsor, U.S. Borax, still has a financial stake in this show because copyrights are still held by the United States Borax and Chemical Corporation, the major rights are now held by Element 5 Media, LLC for the broadcast rights and home video rights. Restoration Paul Korver's company Cinelicious in Hollywood was part of the restoration of the TV series Death Valley Days, restoring 458 half-hour film episodes. Cinelicious worked with U.S. Borax Film Archives and Rio Tinto Group in preserving the TV series. The 16mm, and 35 mm film of Death Valley Days was scanned at 4K resolution for film preservation on a Scanity starting in 2013. Release Broadcast Beginning in 1952, the series began by using unconventional methods. First, the show was syndicated to local markets rather than released nationally. Second, they aired new programs every other week, rather than weekly. At the time, the conventional approach was exactly the opposite - national release on a weekly schedule in order to achieve a consistent audience. However, McCann-Erickson felt that the previous popularity of the radio program would overcome those obstacles, a theory that was proven in their first season of high Nielsen ratings. McCann achieved success marketing the show directly to local stations, starting with 64 in the first season, expanding to 73 in the second, their only general difficulty being one and two-station markets. Rebroadcasts During the latter years of the series, some new episodes were still being made while older episodes were already in syndication. In some markets, new episodes could even be running in competition with older ones. To make it easier for viewers to distinguish between old and new, some blocks of syndicated Death Valley Days episodes were shown under other series names and with different hosts. This was common practice at the time among syndicated series because it was easy to reshoot the hosting portions of an episode without affecting the main content. Some of these episodes were re-run with different sponsorship under the