TV Shows held hostage

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by James Slattery, May 31, 2021.

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  1. t-man 54

    t-man 54 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Michigan
    One i can think of that is being held hostage is the Jack Benny show. Sure, there are the public domain episodes and Shout came out with
    the lost episodes 3 dvd set a while back, but CBS seems to be hanging on to all of the complete seasons and
    won't release them from their vault. Joan Benny, his daughter, wants them out, but apparently her hands are tied.
    Found an old article from 2010 on this.

    CBS uncovers rare Jack Benny treasures, puts them back and tosses out the key | Boing Boing
     
    Last edited: Jun 3, 2021
  2. antoniod

    antoniod Forum Resident

    I might have seen those shows then! I watched every single show on daytime TV because I was a TV addict from an early age. I called him "Daddy" Thomas.
     
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  3. antoniod

    antoniod Forum Resident

    Warner Brothers themselves weren't as concerned about potential offensiveness with the cartoons they still owned in the 60s and 70s. Porky Pig could still be seen going to Africa and meeting up with stereotypical natives in a redrawn Looney Tune, and in general I never hear about additional "censored" titles from the B/W Looney Tunes or the post '48 Tunes/Melodies. The Porky Pig(the one with Kay Kyser/Cake Iser)is on DVD(I did notice a Stepin Fetchit caricature had been left out of the redraw of PORKY'S ROAD RACE).
     
  4. antoniod

    antoniod Forum Resident

    THE MARTY FELDMAN COMEDY MACHINE(1971). There was supposed to have been a DVD set in Britain about six years ago, but it never appeared. The series got a bad rap and was brushed aside as having been vastly inferior to his BBC series("Comedy Machine" was produced by ATV for America), but somebody uploaded some to YouTube and I thought they were quite good, a meetup of Marty, Spike Milligan, and Terry Gilliam, plus material by John Cleese and Graham Chapman(also by Michael Palin)left over from AT LAST THE 1948 SHOW. Milligan added a "Goon" flavor to the series. Gilliam's "The Miracle of Flight" originated on it. Unfortunately, episodes shown in the US were half-hour re-edits using sketches from different episodes, with a regular Girl Group and taped-in-America stand-ups added to the expense of British material. A little later, MONTY PYTHON was a hit in the US(by Public TV standards, anyway)because it was presented as intended with no Lord Grade tinkering.
     
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  5. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

    TV & MUSIC always made life better...still does.
     
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  6. antoniod

    antoniod Forum Resident

    As a toddler I watched everything before I started nursery school! Ski Report, the Today Show, Queen for a Day, I Love Lucy, the Jack Benny Daytime Show, Make Room for Daddy, the Littlest Hobo, International Showtime, Sing along with Mitch..........how's that for a time capsule? At least it gave me the ambition to be a comedian myself, something I'm still working on.
     
  7. Standoffish

    Standoffish Smarter than a turkey

    Location:
    North Carolina
    Huh? The complete series has been released on DVD.
     
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  8. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    That was 40 some years ago...
     
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  9. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

    a show on my want list for sure...I love The Christmas episode with Mel Blanc!
     
    t-man 54 likes this.
  10. daglesj

    daglesj Forum Resident

    Location:
    Norfolk, UK
    Too high a level of attrition for the potential audience for these old shows nowadays.

    Boomers aint getting any younger. Probably way too late already.
     
  11. t-man 54

    t-man 54 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Michigan
    I still think there is audience for the old shows. Just look at MeTV and the get tv channels for starters. Also, you have a lot of boomers like me that would buy some of these old shows on DVD.
     
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  12. Shoes1916

    Shoes1916 Forum Resident

    Location:
    United States
    I'd love to see the originals AND the tinkered withs! :love:
     
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  13. daglesj

    daglesj Forum Resident

    Location:
    Norfolk, UK
    Boomers are in decline, have you not noticed?
     
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  14. Joel Cairo

    Joel Cairo Video Gort / Paiute Warrior Staff

    Location:
    Portland, Oregon
    Well-- not all of us... :D

    - Kevin
     
  15. rudybeet

    rudybeet Forum Resident

    Location:
    Pittsburgh, PA
    Another vote for Ed. Tried watching ultra low res YouTube VHS uploads, but it was painful.
     
  16. rudybeet

    rudybeet Forum Resident

    Location:
    Pittsburgh, PA
    Don't know if you can still get them, but the whole serious was released on DVD.
     
    Steve Litos likes this.
  17. Mirrorblade.1

    Mirrorblade.1 Forum Resident

    Crossing Jordan was just syndicated last year on start tv before little of anything after it went off the air.
    The complete dvd series is only available in the uk. Cybill , because Les Moooves is.. an was a jerk..
    It was airing on laff tv he hated linda bloodworth
     
  18. Vahan

    Vahan Forum Resident

    Location:
    Glendale, CA, USA
    I don't think Linda Bloodworth-Thomason was ever involved with Cybil. I checked IMDB and Wikipedia, and I didn't see her name.
     
  19. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

    way too late...at the moment these shows have to be considered banned...
     
  20. ZippyPippy

    ZippyPippy Forum Resident

    I thought for a second why is Mayberry RFD bring brought up, and then I figured it out
     
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  21. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    The Gilbert Gottfried podcast has gotten into some interesting <unprintable> stories about Danny Thomas, and went into great detail on one a few months ago. Let's just say it was so sordid, a joke was made about it on a recent HBO show, but right before it aired, Marlo Thomas called the producers and implored them to remove the joke. She never said the incident didn't happen, but she begged them to remove the joke anyway simply because it disrespected Thomas' St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, which raises millions of dollars a year. The producers kind of gulped and complied, but they told the whole story to Gottfried, so the legend lives on.

    My opinion: there's thousands of TV shows, episodes, specials, and series that -- sadly -- will never see the light of day. Usually the reason is one or more of three things:

    1) they can't find decent sound or picture elements

    2) getting all the rights cleared (SAG, AFTRA, DGA, WGA, PGA, AFM, etc.) would be inordinately expensive, especially the music

    3) there's no mass-market audience that will pay to see the show, not enough to cover all the expenses.

    And that's even beyond a politically-incorrect show like Amos & Andy, which will never be seen again due to content.
     
    Last edited: Jun 4, 2021
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  22. Kyle B

    Kyle B Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicago
    Sherry Jackson, who played Danny’s eldest daughter Terry on the show, gave an interview about 10 years ago and had some unpleasant things to say about Danny (and Sheldon Leonard, his coproducer). She was not a fan of either and left the series about halfway through its run.

    For kicks, I looked up the now out-of-print Moonlighting DVDs. The individual season sets are generally going for over $100.
     
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  23. JediJones

    JediJones Forum Resident

    Location:
    Pennsylvania
    Yeah, Wikipedia says they've been out-of-print since 2013. Unfortunately I never thought to purchase them. It's a show I saw very little of but always wanted to try to watch. From what I've seen, I tend to believe the reviews and the fans who say it was a very well-written show (that may have jumped the shark at some point in the later seasons of course...supposedly the first 3 are the best). And it's obvious how much chemistry Willis and Shepherd have. From the Wiki and the below Blu-Ray forum post, I learned that Lionsgate licensed the series from Disney for DVD. They got all the music rights. Other than a handful of errors and misplaced elements, the shows were put together for DVD very accurately and faithfully.

    Now that the shows are in Disney's hands again, a further physical release seems extremely unlikely. Nobody's run away faster from physical media than Disney.

    Don't kid yourself that music rights are some kind of insurmountable problem though. Quantum Leap was just released on Blu-Ray in 2020. For the earlier DVD release of Quantum Leap, they replaced all the music with cheap songs. But for the Blu-ray, all the original music rights were obtained and the correct songs were restored. And supposedly it has a lot of popular songs on it. They can get music rights when they want to, and it doesn't need to be only for some high-profile, recent show. It just depends on how cheap the producers of the set want to be.

    Moonlighting Complete Series is it possible? - Page 2 - Blu-ray Forum
     
    Last edited: Jun 5, 2021
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  24. Regarding whether or not there is a demand for old TV on DVD .....

    I may be an anomaly here, but I like physical media and I believe there is a market for it. However, it is only a small market and, as such, only demands small runs. I'm just gonna pick a show at random and say "Sherlock Holmes", the 1954 series. Now, a massive run of this show wouldn't sell, but if there was no other release, I'm pretty sure I could shift, say 2500 copies worldwide. Now while I don't think a big company like Sony or Universal or even smaller companies like SHOUT! Factory or Madman (Australia) or Network (UK) would bother with that, I would.

    If a rights holder would license me a show, I would author the DVD's myself, even if they look like a cheap home job - and, let's face it, lots of TV-shows-on-DVD of older shows often feature no-effort menus - and have a couple of thousand made then sell them via word of mouth (well, word of internet forum and Facebook and Twitter posts). And pay for it all myself, too. OK, there'd be minimal restoration, because I couldn't afford it. But, on the same token, I wouldn't release anything that looked too bad either.

    But would a rights holder even know how to negotiate a rights agreement for only 2000 copies? Most of these places negotiate for tens-of-thousands of copies, if not hundreds-of-thousands, or for a TV channel to run so many hours, so many repeats and reach a potential audience of how many millions. They would have to negotiate percentages, because the numbers would be so low as to not even register on their bottom line.

    But I'd do it if I could. Any rights holders for any TV show care to negotiate with me? I want this so badly, you'd be surprised as to what I'll agree to!
     
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  25. wondergrape

    wondergrape Forum Resident

    Location:
    Ohio
    I'd say Ed fits the premise. I don't recall it's initial run, but I became aware of it due to the rise to prominence of many in its cast. I doubt I'm alone.
     
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