Are Extra Scenes/TV Film Edits Being Preserved?

It'd be nice if these things are kept for comparison with the theatrical versions. The TV versions of both Halloween and Halloween II are part of a "definitive" collection of those movies being release on blu-ray. In those cases it's clear that they are inferior movies. In the case of Halloween the added scenes (shot during the schedule for Halloween II, three years later) are filler and are redundant. In Halloween II's case there just seems to be a reshuffle of certain scenes and snippets of dialogue to accomodate some censorship and the result makes little sense or improvement on an already less than stellar sequel.

Those two are easy to come by nowadays, likewise the "International" cut of Superman : The Movie. That version is lots of fun. You can see why it was felt the additional scenes weren't needed but in this case the extra material does provide genuine gratification for having seen them.

In the case of TV versions of movies which are not shown any more and have not been released anywhere, it always seems like these are the ones you have to have seen or you "haven't seen it at all". Like the constant claims of there being a longer version of Jaws and Jaws 2 which had a more gorier scene than the "cut" version we see today. The fact that extended versions of these movies exist but are not viewable lends them a lot of cache.

@Twitzkrieg - Glasgow's FOREMOST authority

Yeah, Halloween II from the 80's, released by Shout, is the only DVD I know of that has the TV version. I don't really think the TV edits are wanted by most, but I think most people would at least want those different scenes to be on the DVD/Blu as extras.

There are a lot of films where you will go on their IMDB message board and someone will ask what happened to scenes, and a lot of times the scenes won't even be on the special edition DVD.

I just watched Quick Change (1990) and people claim there are different scenes. Others I've heard the same:
The Jerk - I saw these myself
Ace Ventura - same
Teen Wolf
Problem Child 2

That's all I can think of at the moment.

Other than The Jerk, these all had pretty barebones home releases, so maybe the studios didn't really care to begin with.

There are a lot of films where you will go on their IMDB message board and someone will ask what happened to scenes, and a lot of times the scenes won't even be on the special edition DVD.

Preserving these edits would probably stem the flow of people claiming to have seen the "full" version or having seen it "properly" and often imagining they'd seen something because they are aware of a different TV edit. The marge in the sharks's mouth scene in Jaws 2 is a classic example. I must admit I'm sympathetic to that claim but, realistically, I know it can just be an indication of how powerful that film was to me when I saw it first time.

Some of the claims defy logic too. Why would a TV version be more graphic than a theatrical version?


@Twitzkrieg - Glasgow's FOREMOST authority

I don't think I've ever seen Jaws 2.
I think I get what you're saying - people believe that they saw something that wasn't shown. They fill in the blank mentally and then believe that to actually be part of the movie.

Usually the stuff added to TV versions is there to fill time for things that had to be cut for TV.

Sometimes these scenes will actually explain something not in the Theatrical Cut though.