thick skin let it roll...I agree Rhino gave us much great music and screwed us as well...you should have gotten in touch with your credit card and made a claim.
They were a great small independent company in the early 80s up until Warner Music bought them. Don't know the date. The 80s & 90s and into the early 2000s was great though. Used to love to get their catalogs by mail with all the Monkees merchandise listed with photos. They also had a Monkees hot line. The real folks who were fans there all got let go. And here we are today ...
...sitting on thousands of incomplete Monkees TV Show BD boxes...I really disliked their Monomania period when I would by reissues that were mono thinking it was stereo...with out even a warning on the packaging...I probably own nearly all of their catalog...I was a huge fan of the label...
The Warners buyout was exactly when things started going south with Rhino and The Monkees. It's amazing that Andrew was able to see 1/4 of the Monkees items he got released to come to fruition under their fiat. Warners is where the QC issues started coming into play, too - as I mentioned in another thread, I had a very similar issue with one of their box sets YEARS before the Monkees Blu-Ray/RSD record box gaffes. It was the wrong kind of deja vu, that's for sure!
Warner may own Rhino, but Rhino still runs itself. If there are QC issues, it's on Rhino and not Warner. Warner lets the labels they own run their own shows for the most part. Rhino is a catalog label with tons of successful releases in recent times. ANything that was on Atlantic gets pushed to Rhino for reissues. Most catalogs are handled quite well. The exceptions would be The Doors (which is on the band and not the label), and The Monkees (and I don't know who to blame there).
I've read another comment on a guestbook that Rhino moved warehouse facilities during the tv series release on DVD/Blu-Ray so they apparently screwed up where the designer packaging material ended up (think Raiders Lost ark scene) where all that stuff is pre-Covid they didn't look....? find the unassembled parts....
Isn't Warner's now owned by AT&T? They may let Rhino operate independently, but mergers and buyouts often result in layoffs. They could have fewer people working on things, or let go of the people who were in charge of the project.
The biggest problem was the people they let go. These were the ones responsible for the 1982 Picture Disc "Monkee Business" and the 80s reissues. Then there's Bill Inglot and Sandoval. I can't remember the other guys names who started it all. I remember Maggie McManus, who would get all the scoop, saying that was one of the reasons she decided to end the Monkee Business Fanzine.
I just ripped the episodes to MKV files, and watch them via the SSD they are stored on. That keeps the box and discs untouched. (Although the double-sided tape Rhino used to attach the lenticular artwork to the box gave way the first time the set was opened…)
It was Harold Bronson who was the head of Rhino before the acquisition and that is not the reason why Maggie ended MBF. Her reasoning simply was she was unable to compete against the internet that was much faster and easier to obtain news on a daily basis when her magazine came out quarterly, the news would have been old news by then.
FWIW - I used to work at a software duplicating business and one of the services they offered was assembling/packaging of CD-ROMS/Compact Discs/DVDs. We'd get all the separate parts shipped to us (discs, booklets, inserts, etc.) and then put them all together into the package you'd buy at the software/big box store. Sometimes, we'd have a project we'd be sitting on, waiting on a specific part of the package that was needed to fully assemble the product, or we'd have left-over booklets/inserts and NO discs to go with them. After 90 days any product that was NOT finished/fully assembled/completed was simply tossed into the dumpster. We were NOT a storage facility. This RARELY did happen, but it DID happen - entire spindles of discs (100 count) tossed right into the trash. The thought that there is a warehouse FULL of unassembled Monkees blu-ray box sets is very likely a fantasy, and the contents of those unassembled sets are very likely residing in a landfill as we speak.
Yes I know but she had also mentioned it becoming harder to get info for her Fanzine. It was a side note.
I buy this. With the way Rhino handles business I can see them wasting a ton of money on printed Blu Ray discs only to have them turn into coasters at a dump somewhere in Los Angeles.
What should be done is Warner give Amazon Access to the BR files and Amazon can Burn BR discs on demand. I'd Pay $50 for the lot of 10 with no booklet or box. Just Blu Ray covers, all I need. That way, they recover their investment, we get the discs and that's really all I want. BeaVe
To be honest, I'm quite curious to know the financial breakdown on the set. The box was absolute trash. The set itself was NOT numbered as advertised (which to me would have meant the box, which would have also meant that for the price we paid the box was STELLAR - which it was not). The book was numbered, but so what? The book had very good information for a Blu Ray box set. The video looks VERY good. The audio sounded good. I wish we could get a sense of what the expenses were for the remastering of the video and audio and why making these available in a smaller, less fancy presentation (minus the garbage box) is out of the question. The Monkees episodes are just going to sit on a shelf yet again and for those of us that bought the set, great, but there are other people that would have wanted to see these. I loaned my set to two friends. They loved it. I'm sure they'd pony up if it was still available.
It always throws me off a little to watch Head without the Rhino promo of the dudes in the desert reciting their weird poem about being "the keepers of the cool" and "masters of the past"
Also: How do you keep a literal Beatles song in one of your episodes but not get Jerry Lee Lewis' estate to sign off on his smallish appearance in 33 1/3..?
Bingo. Yet another part of the Monkees universe that I will never understand that no one will ever talk about. I mean, Jerry is still with us. He's not deceased, but I don't know who is in charge of the publishing on that song. OR...was this just a matter of Jerry not wanting his appearance in this show seen ever again?
Yeah, so many weird things we're living through. Anything can happen. But I got the Amazon WB Porky Pig MOD and am happy with the product. WB could at least get their money back easily by letting Amazon burn them. Oh well. The Flux of life in the 21st century. And just think, a few years ago a Rolling Stones album came out on........Capitol Records! That's how strange things are. Beave
