DVD news
This was taken from sctvguide.ca
DVD Sales According to a recent article on TV series on DVD, "outside that upper echelon of current hits, studios are starting to see softness in individual titles." Shout Factory in particular is said to have seen "sales for certain later releases of sketch series SCTV sell less than half of initial titles." Seems like more than a coincidence, then, that the delay in releasing the next set has been much longer than for previous ones. So if you haven't quite gotten around to buying a copy of Volume 4 (or any of the other sets) for yourself and several of your close and not so close friends (and its never too early to start thinking about Mother's Day, and credit is so cheap these days), do your bit to help ensure we enjoy more sets in the future.
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Music Rights The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on the high cost of obtaining the music rights for DVDs of many vintage TV shows. The article notes that clearing the rights to Freaks and Geeks cost Shout! Factory (producers of the SCTV sets) a cool $1 million for 118 songs, but they made it back with sales of 112,000 units. Going by recent articles (see previous news item), the most recent SCTV sets haven't been shifting anything like these quantities... okay forget all of that,read more.
The article also provides indirect confirmation of the so far not officially announced SCTV Season 3 DVD set, referring to changes required to a sketch from that season: "Sometimes the artist behind a song simply will refuse to grant licensing rights altogether. Bob Emmer, chief operating officer of Shout! Factory, a DVD distributor, says that in preparing the DVD release of "Second City TV" he had to delete a scene from the 1970s comedy-sketch series that parodied musician Neil Young because he couldn't obtain rights from the artist. In the scene, an actor played a psychiatrist named "Dr. Neil Young" who gave answers to a patient's question only in lyrics from Mr. Young's songs. "He had a problem with it," says Mr. Emmer, declining to elaborate. A spokesman for Mr. Young had no comment." (Thanks J Robbins
That really sucks! They're taking out a sketch that was already deleted from syndication!WTF?!? They better not delete any of the other sketches from that show (i.e. The Cisco Kid)!
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