TV shows that STILL aren't available on DVD!?!?

Yeah it had a lot of recognizable stars like David Cassidy and Bruce Boxleiner.

 

R1 got two sets, but they each held two series worth of episodes, so four series of the eight were released here.

R2 only got the first seven (of eight) series released. As someone who is in R1 and was watching the show via the UK DVD releases, that was... disappointing.

 

Not a TV series, but I was just surprised to discover that the old 1957 flick, I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF, seems to be harder to track down than expected. It's not On Demand nor does it appear to be available on DVD via Amazon. If one searches, one can find used DVDs floating around on eBay but I'm surprised that such a well-known film isn't more readily available. Is there some sort of legal hassle involving it?

 

Speaking speaking of movies, I was reading about an old 1970s voodoo movie called Alabama's Ghost. Elvira put it out on VHS in the 1980s and there hasn't been another home video release since. It currently costs $2400 on Amazon.

20th Century Fox would often start a show on BluRay, then give up. Glee stopped around Season 3 or 4. Burn Notice only did BluRays for Season 2 and "The Fall of Sam Axe."

Agreed but MOD would still be better than nothing.

A surprising number of people don't care. I have tons of friends who watch old 4:3 shows stretched out to fill the entire 16:9 TV screen and it drives me nuts! Also, I know lots of people who have such poor eyesight that they can't tell the difference between SD and HD.

Yep. Sadly, the PBS station here in Arizona only aired 2 of the 5 seasons of that show.

 

Legend has it that if you watch Highway To Heaven during a full moon, it turns into I Was A Teenage Werewolf.

The full movie appears to be on Amazon, although the quality is awful (in more ways than one).

 

If MOD was 1/3rd the cost they currently go for and allowed us to make backups. Remember, pressed discs have a far longer lifespan(1) than the off-the-shelf purple burnable media(2)

(1) 20-100 years under ideal storage and manufacturing conditions
(2) 3~4 years, based on real life experience, though it is claimed they will last 5 to 10 years under ideal storage conditions. Either way, pressed is far more worth the cost. Never mind that burnable discs that are burnt at higher/faster speeds also tend to fail sooner, due to quality of dye used as well as quality of burn from the write laser.

Good points about the other issues; most people just don't care or are subconscious regarding widescreen/larger pixel density (or preferred 4:3 for everything and hated the new 16:9 TVs) or their eyesight doesn't benefit. 4K is selling mostly because of HDR, better MPEG compression cleanup algorithms, and other image enhancement processing advancements since there's more to image quality than raw pixel count.

 

With pressed discs, the absolute minimum order that studio’s will press is 5,000 copies, because below that the price per disc (which is anywhere between $5,000 and $20,000 USD to make the glass master; more sophisticated higher the price) would rise and the studios wouldn’t be able to offer the discs at like $19.99 and still make a profit. This is why sometimes studios will make only 5,000 copies of HD programming on Blu-Ray, but unlimited copies on DVD. But that’s also why they’ll go the MOD route. If the studios don’t think a title will sell 5,000, they can still offer it.

I also remember a few years ago when Viz Media was releasing “Sailor Moon” on DVD (the 90’s series). There was an uproar when the DVD’s of Season 1 part 1 hit stores, with people claiming that Viz had modified the picture into widescreen and had not kept it OAR. The one problem with that argument was that Viz had put the shows on the DVD’s in anamorphic pillar-box format, thus preserving the 4:3 ratio, but allowing the shows to not be stretched to 16:9. So on old 4:3 TV’s you have black bars all around the image, but on 16:9 TV’s you have pillars on the sides. The outrage was so much that Viz released the remaining episodes on DVD in regular 4:3, so they are stretched on 16:9 TV’s, but fill the old 4:3 TV’s.

 

The one series I would love to see on DVD is Century City, featuring extraordinarily handsome Ioan Gruffudd. Nine episodes were filmed, but only 4 aired on CBS before it was cancelled. (I believe all 9 aired in Canada.)

 

Total wholehearted agreement for The Green Hornet. I have three versions of the series on DVD-R, of varying quality and completeness (16mm, Starz Action and American Life broadcasts). An actual, legit set would be amazing. I like it miles better than Batman and it's the perfect Fox adventure series. And man, what great music. Bruce Lee gets the spotlight in history, but Van Williams carried the series and he threw a mean punch himself. Great show!

The Fugitive has been restored for years now. Get The Most Wanted Edition. If you can find it cheap enough. If you just get the regular box set, which is nice and cheap, it will probably have the corrected versions. If you still get a crummy batch, CBS will swap them out free of charge.

 

I've heard that shows released onto DVD from Mill Creek are crap (that is, they're badly transferred to DVD, and without any extras.)

 

Mill Creek is a budget home video outfit, for the most part. They price their releases very low so that they can be sold into retail stores (these days, meaning Target and Walmart) at a low price. As a result, that usually means no budget for bonus features, deluxe packaging, music clearances, or any restoration work.

 

Mill Creek's blu-ray releases are actually pretty good. No extras, but how often would I watch them? Their Airwolf release is great and I've heard good things about other Universal series they put out on BD. Their DVDs, though, are awful. They emblazon the flimsy boxes with "MUST SEE TELEVISION" and "READY! SET! BINGE!" Then they compress the hell out of them to fit as many episodes per disc as they can. The only reason why I have the complete I Dream of Jeannie box set is because a) it was dirt cheap and 2) they have the original Screen Gems logo at the end of each episode. That actually means a lot to me...

 

That's all fine and dandy, but Mill Creek should be using double-sided DVD discs to put their TV shows on, rather than be compressing them to fit on one disc each; that makes them not anywhere as good as Image Entertainment, Shout Factory, or Kino Lorber (the company that recently came out with the excellent DVD set of the cult classic TV show Coronet Blue.)

Again, it's all fine and dandy that their Blu-Ray's are good: however, perhaps they should convert to only putting shows out on Blu-Ray, or as I said above, using double-sided DVD discs for their TV collections, which would allow them to space out each episode of a TV series properly without compressing them. As for having the Screen Gems logo at the end of each episode of the I Dream Of Jeannie set you own without any logo plastering of the current Sony Pictures Television logo (I too am a fan of the 'vanity plates' myself), you can always go to YouTube and get a video of said logo (best way to collect one is to have a video downloader program that allows you to download videos from YouTube to keep for yourself for later watching, or to get the Torch browser, which has a 'download a video from a site' function as a part of it.)

Speaking of that logo, here it is;

There's also this one, a recreation of the original, but with the 'A Sony Company' byline at the bottom:

Personally, I'd like to see them bring back Screen Gems as a TV production/distribution company, but that's probably wishful thinking.

 

Geez Louise! Is it so hard for people to adjust the aspect ratio settings on their TV to match with whatever show they’re watching?! (Granted, some TVs make it harder than others. But my cheapie 24” LG TV has a button right at the top of the remote for changing the aspect ratio. Very handy wherever I’m watching classic episodes of Doctor Who or MST3K or old movies from the 1940s.)

 

I’ve got one TV here that won’t change to a 4:3 ratio when you are watching anything 4:3 over HDMI (and the vast majority of upscaling DVD players with HDMI output on the market don’t offer the ability to matte 4:3 Full Screen discs and send them to the TV in a pillar box 16:9 image, like a lot of Blu-Ray players do) but if you are watching stuff over the analog inputs it allows you to change it to 4:3. So for modern times having 4:3 stuff hard matted into a 16:9 image with pillars makes sense. And if you want the image stretched to fill the entire screen, you can still do that.

 

What I find really baffling is when Blu-Ray bonus features are presented in 4:3 and aren’t given the black vertical bars to make it properly fit on a 16:9 TV. It’s one thing when we’re talking DVD since some people may still be watching it on an old 4:3 TV. But I think that we can assume that anyone watching Blu-Ray also has a 16:9 TV, so all of the features on the disc should be presented accordingly. I was just watching the making-of doc on the Twilight Time Blu-ray for Rollerball and had to switch the settings on my TV for it. Seems like a weird gaffe for such a premium label.

 

Double-sided DVD’s! Just about every DVD manufacturer stopped using those and went to single sided because Double-sided discs were not dependable, as they were highly susceptible to disc rot, and people were complaining about having to repurchase sets every 18 months or so.

But just because they are using double-sided discs doesn’t mean that Mill Creek wouldn’t compress the life out of the shows. As far as they would be concerned, they could fit 12 hours onto one disc rather than 6.

 

I can’t really begrudge Mill Creek for going dirt cheap on their TV sets since they’re mostly shows that no one else will release at all. (Poor Mad About You got abandoned by both Sony and Shout! Factory before Mill Creek finally gave us a complete set.) And you really can’t complain about the price given how many seasons they cram into a single set. But I do still wish that they would take a page from VEI and give us slightly sturdier packaging.