77 Sunset Strip/ Hawaiian Eye/ Surfside Six/ Bourbon Street Beat

Hawaiian Eye is still fairly scarce, unless you know the right sources.

 

I don't consider it that way. It had a good run on Channel 22 in Seattle in the late 80s. Then a ton of them hit the market on 16mm film in the early 90s when the studios cleared out their warehouses of film. Finally, Good Life ran it for quite some time in the early 2000s. I even recorded a bunch of them off Warner Archive streaming when they first started the service and hadn't put up any copyguard yet. There are far, far rarer shows to be sought, like The Alaskans for instance.

 

The Monroes.

 

I've never heard of The Alaskans, I'll have to check into it as I lived there for awhile and it might be fun. I'm still waiting for a complete set of Route 66 or did I miss it? I want to see some Hawaiian Eye too, if it was on Seattle tv I somehow missed it while seeing The Cisco Kid and The Real McCoys.

 

I agree. Unless you want to buy mediocre quality dvds, it doesn't seem to be available anywhere. I don't even think there are any entire episodes up on YouTube, though there are some clips available.

 

There is a complete set of Route 66 available on dvd.

 

That's strange, I can find the complete Route 66 box now but before I was only seeing a couple of seasons and a best of set... must have had a filter of some kind on. Thanks! Be awhile saving up for it though I can see.

 

THE MONROES- on my Wish-List for DECADES!- was VERY recently released on DVD by SHOUT FACTORY. i picked it up for about $15 at Wal-Mart just before Christmas. Have not yet had time to view or review it. but it's on the top of my stack!

 

I'm quite happy to report that all of Hawaiian Eye is on Warner Archive once more!

 

There are a lot of now-obscure B&W shows like this that you would think the studios would at least put up for streaming at a modest cost, like $9.95 per season or something. Roy Huggins has been dead for 15 years now, so you would think that WB would have made a deal with his estate by now. Screwy.

These were semi-classics for that era (50-55 years ago), but all these shows are really, really dated and hard to watch today, at least for me. There's some kinda bad motion artifacts on this clip below, but it looks to me like the master was done from the original 35mm camera negatives (or at least a fine-grain protection print):



This is very sharp and clear if you can look beyond the motion problems -- I'm guessing some idiot had issues going from 29.97 video to 24.00fps video. There's a bunch of these shows up on YouTube, and I dunno... there's a lotta stuff that was sorta/kinda cool in the 1960s that just feels lame and dated today (to me). I don't dispute it's historically important and should be preserved.

 

Yeah, you would think more studios of that time like WB would put up streaming archive sites for a membership. It really is a win win for them - they stream old shows and movies from their back catalog, and make a profit from memberships, not having to press DVDs or go to the expense that a full release would entail.

Fox especially needs to embrace this, because they have so many old TV shows laying around their archive that they haven't and won't release in any format.

 

I counted 133 episodes - IMDb says there were 134, but I haven't compared the respective episode lists to see whether there's an actual discrepancy or if it's just a mistake.

This is very welcome news, as the last time I looked they only had "best of" selections of episodes for each season.

 

You may be right about there being a missing episode, but it might have been removed from circulation because of some sort of controversy like an episode in Hawaii Five O was. Either way, it is good to have almost all episodes in good quality available.

 

Roy Huggins has nothing to do with it. There are music numbers in just about every episode of all of the Warner detective shows, making the costs of releasing the shows cost prohibitive. No way could they afford to pay all of the licensing costs and make a profit.

 

I watch "77 Sunset Strip" that is on Me-TV and I tend to agree with you. Some episodes are pretty decent. But others make me wonder what all the fuss was about. At least I remember people fussing about it when it was on
Except for....Jacqueline Beer as Suzanne. Unfortunately she tended to keep her hair in a bun most of the time (more efficient switchboard work?). But when she lets her hair down and smiles....forget Bardot, Deneuve, Moreau and Ardant..Beer is the most beautiful thing France ever produced.

 

I tend to doubt that. All the major studios (Columbia, Disney, Fox, Paramount, Universal, WB, etc.) tended to own music publishing companies throughout the 1950s and 1960s and routinely had staff composers write library music that would be reused throughout the life of a series. They had to pay a small fee to the AFM and the composers, but they owned the publishing and master recording 100%. I've seen the pile of deliverable contracts that are attached to a lot of show elements (optical tracks, mag tracks, dubs, 1/4" and 1/2" session recordings, you name it), and everything I ever saw always had the studio name on it.

I know in the case of CBS, they stockpiled a lot of library music for Twilight Zone in the 1960s, and because of budget concerns, they decided to cut back on paying the AFofM on the musician fees. Every season, Bernard Herrmann would fly to Europe and they'd re-record a lot of the music cues, so the music heard in later episodes is sometimes a re-recorded version of the original track. A much later 1980s soundtrack album was supposed to use the re-recorded versions, but through a vault error, they wound up using the original Hollywood sessions. I think something similar happened on CBS' Alfred Hitchcock Presents. A lot of these shows are wall-to-wall music, and it basically cost them little or nothing to include in syndication and all other formats, "forever and to the ends of the universe," as it says in the contract.

So I don't buy that music licensing is the culprit. Music costs are much lower than you would think for standard background music. I totally get that if there was a hit mass-market song played during the show -- which did happen in WKRP in Cincinnati, Happy Days, and several other series -- sometimes these would be yanked and replaced with soundalikes. There was also a case where ABC couldn't find the paperwork for the tracks used on The Fugitive (I think this was the show), so they went in and replaced the music tracks with synthesized soundalikes. Fans hit the roof and complained, and I think the copyright owners eventually did the legwork and figured out who actually owned the publishing and master rights, and redid the home video masters.

 

Really? Because Good Life ran it through several times and I know several people who recorded it. Not to mention all of the film prints of the show that flooded the market in the early 90s. I don't think its scarce at all.

 

I'm not talking about background music. Every episode of Hawaiian Eye has Connie Stevens belting out a number or two. Likewise Dorothy Provine in Roaring 20s and The Alaskans. All of the other detective shows are chock full of night club scenes with people singing. Even for their streaming service, Warner was only able to put up selected episodes and not complete seasons of their detective shows because of song clearances.

 

This is no longer the case. As mentioned above, Warner Archive has recently made what appears to be the complete run of Hawaiian Eye episodes available for streaming.

 

It would make sense to me that the music publishing rights costs would be pretty trivial on songs like this. It'd be different if it was a hit song, which would involve the record label and artist.

I just saw a Mannix episode in HD syndication that involved a nightclub singer, and I think she did two or three songs (sometimes somewhat in the background). It's generally a couple of grand unless it's like Irving Berlin or Rogers & Hammerstein or something at that level.

 

What was the controversy concerning an episode in Hawaii Five-O, pray tell? I love reading about controversial episodes!

 

As I remember the story, an episode in season 2 of the show, "Bored, She Hung Herself", surrounded a girlfriend who was driven to suicide by her boyfriend, and she used an innovative hanging technique in doing so. Apparently some idiot in middle America tried it, and allegedly there was a law suit, where monetary compensation and a pledge to never show the episode after it's original air date, and excluding it from any syndication packages and DVDs (which it has been).

There are some really poor quality versions of it out there on sites like Dailymotion. It's actually a pretty bad episode for that point in the series, and really isn't worth any attention it gets.

 

I tracked down the person who had that horrible transfer done. She had brought it to some hack video store and they shot if off the wall without a camera. I got her print and ran it properly with an Elmo, although the color had faded by then. Lousy episode anyway and only notable for its scarcity.