Sunday, April 15, 2007

Muzak

If you want to get a little more depressed about music changes to TV-on-DVD releases, Sitcoms Online has a list of the music changes in season 2 of Happy Days.

Not only has Paramount replaced "Rock Around the Clock," they've cut just about every real '50s song except Fats Domino's "Blueberry Hill." (If you don't license "Blueberry Hill," releasing Happy Days is pretty much impossible, given that it was sung about 9,000 trillion zillion billion times in the series.)

The one thing I'll say for Paramount is that they did license all the music for the first season of Happy Days. Then the set didn't sell much, and they lost money on it. So they can at least point to actual proof that season 2 of Happy Days wouldn't sell enough to make back the expense of paying for the music. Obviously this doesn't apply to a studio releasing the first season of a show with all the music gone (but we've been over that before).

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

One problem Paramount ran into with these HAPPY DAYS shows is that the 35mm negatives for the early seasons were cut to conform to the shortened edits made for ABC daytime use back in the '70s. The footage added back into the shows for DVD use came from 16mm negatives, which were uncut. For the first season, Paramount put a lot of effort into making the 16mm insert footage match the surrounding 35mm footage. The tight budget they had to work with on the second season set didn't allow them to do that as carefully here.

Anonymous said...

>>>Obviously this doesn't apply to a studio releasing the first season of a show with all the music gone<<<<

I don't know about that. Fox can look to the fact that Paramount spent a lot of money licensing all of the music for Happy Days season 1 and still lost money.

Fox might have thought that while WKRP is a cult hit it didn't have near the popularity of Happy Days so to hedge against taking a bath on the licensing fees if the season doesn't sell they decided to insert generic music.

JesseM said...

It's so common for studios to release multiple DVDs of the same movie, why not have pricier "deluxe editions" of TV shows which keep the original music, and less expensive sets with muzak instead?