Why hasn't JULIA (the Diahann Carroll sitcom) been released on DVD?

It was a Top 10 hit and ran for 3 seasons (86 episodes). When TV Land presented the show 20+ years ago, they only aired around 10!

Surely if THE BILL COSBY SHOW (from that same period) or HERE'S LUCY can get the DVD treatment, why not this show??

 

There's not enough interest from a distributor because they don't think it will sell well enough. It probably hasn't been in syndication for the same reason.

 

I thought you were talking about the movie...............

 

That's too bad. I ended up going on iOffer and buying copies of the episodes taped from some obscure channel. They are edited, but I guess it's better than nothing.

 

Julia the Japanese porn star?

 

Ahh, I edited my OP to clarify

 

Because it's 20th Century Fox, and it is now in the hands of The House of Mouse who won't do anything with it, all thanks to Rupert Murdoch.

 

This is a good example of a very good show for its time, one that was acclaimed and won awards (though its ratings were modest), but it's extremely dated today and tough for a modern audience to watch. But -- as always -- if it were up to me, I'd say release everything, remaster it for at least HD, make it available for streaming, and get it out there so anybody who wants to can watch it. Every commercially-available theatrical film, short, newsreel, cartoon, TV series, TV pilot, and music video ever made should be available to watch in some form.

 

I couldn't agree more with this!

 

I think there is a thread around here which asks the question: Does anyone still buy DVDs anymore? I do remember this show being praised although I didn't watch it much

That said, slice of life shows date the quickest. Fantasies/romances are evergreen.

 

I only used to watch “Julia” in a pinch. I remember it being very staid.

 

I loved it when I was a kid (for some bizarre reason, I even had a Julia lunchbox!) but I watched it a couple years back on Aspire or some other equally obscure/pointless cable channel and thought it was pretty boring.

 

When Julia was on the air I watched it simply because it was the first show with a black lead that was not a guffaw comedy. I have to wonder how southern TV stations dealt with it. 5 years earlier they refused to air Nat King Cole.

 

We watched "Julia" as a family regularly when I was a little kid.
I remember liking the young boy in the show, Cory I think his name was. Nice to see kids my age on TV!
Was he as sugary as Buffy & Jody from "Family Affair"?

 

I actually never saw this show but definitely remember it breaking ground. Can’t remember if it was more a comedy or drama?

 

I could be wrong, but wasn't "The Doris Day Show" scheduled against "Julia" on another network?

 

Comedy/drama. Single black mother raising a precocious boy, while she works as a nurse for a crusty but benign older doctor.

 

Fox didn't initially put the show into syndication, even though it ran for 3 full seasons. Which was very uncommon. The only other 3 season shows I can think of off the top of my head which weren't syndicated were The Joey Bishop Show (4 seasons), Owen Marshall and The Nurses. Eventually, it was syndicated, around 15 years after it left the air but it was only sold in a few markets. It was probably sent out on pre-cut one-inch tape. Like most Fox shows, it hasn't been remastered and the only available elements are those 30 year old tapes. Finally, its Fox, and they are by far the worst studio at releasing shows from their library.

 

I’ve had to do that with a few series myself that I figure will never see the light of day on dvd or a complete release on DVD. Julia is a good show and kind of fits in the same time frame as Room 222. That one has occasionally popped up in syndication but not very often. I also wish Warner Brothers would release the complete series of 77 Sunset Strip. That’s one of my favorites.

 

Naw, they still have the original 35mm negs. Fox has an extremely well-organized library. The biggest problem I ever had with Fox was that they owned a s****y lab: Deluxe. Deluxe often did bad work, and many of their color films of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were done at Deluxe. It started to look better in the 1980s, when they caught up to every other lab in town, but the 1950s/1960s stuff is problematic at best. The TV shows aren't bad because they weren't heavily accessed, printed, scratched, and otherwise abused; the feature films are somewhat of a mess.

I knew the guys at Fox Worldwide Distribution back in the day, but the people pulling the strings were much further up the corporate ladder. There were also little "fiefdoms" where different departments hated other departments, so the U.S. syndication people hated the international people, and they all hated the home video people. Like I say, it was complicated. I can recall a time when we did all the M*A*S*H episodes for Fox Home Video in the 1980s, but the U.S. syndication people didn't want to use those masters and instead used much older tapes done a decade earlier. It was pretty crazy. How this will change with Disney remains to be seen, but the Disney people are not stupid and are actually pretty savvy when it comes to technology.

 

I remember really liking it when it was on. I was pretty young at the time.

 

I've been collecting TV shows for 40 years and believe me, what's come out on DVD is a fraction of the shows I have in my collection. Yes, it was nice to get releases on a lot of shows I busted my ass to get recordings of over the decades but there are still tons of shows which will never come out which I'm glad I recorded off network or transferred from film prints.

 

Every studio still has their 35mm negs but they aren't going to go to the expense of going back to them to do transfers. That's why when Fox put out Lost in Space on DVD, they used old one-inch tape transfers. Also why when Shout licensed Room 222, not only did they give them decades old one-inches, but they were dirty transfers done from faded 16mm prints. They looked like the crap you would see airing in syndication in 1976. Universal has all of their negatives but they aren't going to the expense of transferring them so when they release most shows, its off whatever existing tapes they have. Likewise when they license shows out. And none of these studios will let a third party handle their 35s, so its either pay their exorbitantly over inflated transfer costs, or else accepts lesser copies. Or, if no tape transfers exist and there's no usable 16mm prints anywhere, a show won't be released. That's what sabotaged the proposed Name of the Game release.