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Best TV Show Ever Comes to DVD End of April
- Thread starter Rowdy Roddy McDowall
- Start date
Awesome! 
Now I can get a chance to see this great series in full.
Now I can get a chance to see this great series in full.
Ordered mine back before Christmas. If you order direct from Shout! Factory you can get it in mid-March.
I suspect all will be correct, they seem to be pretty good for that. "Get A Life" had all the original music, which surprised me. Also "Larry Sanders," which had a lot of musical acts.
I really hope "St. Elsewhere" is in the pipeline, it's actually been longer since I've seen that than HSB. And another MTM great, "Lou Grant," I'd order that set on day one, too.
I suspect all will be correct, they seem to be pretty good for that. "Get A Life" had all the original music, which surprised me. Also "Larry Sanders," which had a lot of musical acts.
I really hope "St. Elsewhere" is in the pipeline, it's actually been longer since I've seen that than HSB. And another MTM great, "Lou Grant," I'd order that set on day one, too.
Shout! Factory has scored the Steven Bochco hat trick — in addition to Hill Street Blues, they released the long-delayed Season 5 of NYPD Blue yesterday, and also got the rights for a DVD release of L.A. Law.
I've been rewatching it and I'm at the beginning of season 2. I've been trying to drag it out as long as possible so this is good news. The bad news is I won't be able to afford it.
I would rather hear the news that I'd just tested positive for HIV than hear that Shout Factory had the rights to my favorite TV show. This is one of the worst DVD release companies out there, an amateurish outfit that has a history of botching the release of several classic shows. Keep your fingers crossed that HSB comes out okay.
Really? What botched releases?
It is too bad because Netflix doesn't seem to bother with disc sets of old shows anymore. Hopefully before too long they will start to turn up second-hand, for more reasonable prices.
I've never heard that. I have two complete series sets from them and am quite satisfied, and on the music side their English Beat set was superb at a pretty amazing price. Aside from quality, they seem to have a better handle on making a go of old properties than anyone else out there, and negotiating original music rights to boot. So I'll gladly take Shout!Factory over the status quo of two out-of-print seasons of HSB, and hope they keep at it.
I wish I'd known that sooner. But no matter; I've just ordered my set.It's been out in Australia for a while.
It is indeed the greatest TV show ever (to date, anyway). It's about bloody time it made it to DVD.
Possibly the most egregious example is when the company got the rights to All in the Family after Sony lost interest in releasing the series after season six. Shout inexplicably transfered the series, which had been originally shot on videotape, using a frame speed intended for film. The result was a Season 7 AITF release in which the action moved at a jerkily, unnatural pace almost as if Archie and Edith and Mike and Gloria were all claymation figures.
As amateurish as the above example is, it can be attributed to human error. Some of the company's other actions have smacked of deceit towards potential customers. Consider the case of the television series Rhoda, where prior to release SF spokesman Brian Ward claimed that all the episodes in the then-forthcoming DVD release would be all uncut, and that the company had worked hard to ensure that this was so. When Rhoda hit the market, it turned out that two-thirds of the episodes were cut for syndication and badly so. "I'll never forgive him (Ward) for the Rhoda Season 1 deception" wrote one Rhoda fan on hometheatreforums.
When Shout Factory acquired the rights from Route 66 from fly-by-night Image Entertainment, whose poor-quality season one DVDs of the series had been subject to much criticism, Shout planned a full series release. To mollify fans who had already bought Infinity's first three seasons (of four), Brian Ward strongly gave the impression through specific comments that the company would be remastering the entire series and the prints used would be completely different from what Infinity had earlier released. When concerns were raised about a syndicated cut episode from Infinity's set, Ward assured posters to SF's forum that "We are doing everything we can to make sure we have the complete episodes." When the set came out, it was found that all the episodes were exactly the same as the ones Infinity had released, including the cut for syndication episode, even though Columbia House had released an uncut pristine version of the same episode on VHS just a few years before. In my amazon review of "Route 66 The Complete Series" I described Shout Factory as a "cheap, lazy, and unethical company" - harsh words, but considering the circumstances, accurate.
SF has also released sets of the series Mr. Ed with syndicated cut episodes even though cable rerun stations have rerun uncut prints for years. These are just a few examples, I am sure there must be more.
I hope for the sake of HSB fans that your series gets the release it deserves. But, like I said earlier, I'd keep my fingers crossed.
You're saying this on a Star Trek fan site...
Unless you go to websites like Home Theater Forum, you'll never hear all of the bitching that goes on at these sites about how classic TV shows have been butchered, but believe me, it's there.
These people act as if Shout Factory doesn't have to deal with music publishing companies or with the individuals that own the music used in many of the older shows, or that Shout Factory usually has to go with what they're given as far as prints are concerned-and they also don't care that Shout Factory is a small company that can't go splurging on TV shows to the exclusion of everything else.
So they sit on their bums and complain about how they've been betrayed by Shout Factory and other home video companies, when in certain cases like that of the (IMHO) non-debacle centered around the music of The Fugitive DVD sets (Season 2 & 3) being replaced by new music, they really should be going after the rights holder companies/individuals that control said music pieces and giving them a piece of their minds and also telling them to be not so greedy (the same should also go with the executives at the studios as well, and they should also go after the local TV stations and tell them to stop showing infomercials and start showing the reruns that they're supposed to be showing.)
I'd say that you should just ignore them when they say this about Shout Factory, but I don't think that it's a big deal.
Meh, Shout Factory isn't bad. For worst DVD company, my vote goes to Mill Creek. Worthless, unplayable disks that freeze up in various spots. I pissed away 70 bucks on Hunter The complete series from them a few years back and found their disks to be horrible.
And it's not just me. I've heard complaints from friends, friends of friends, family of friends, my own family, online reviews, pretty much anybody who ever paid for a Mill Creek release, no matter what it might be. And the complaints continue to this day.
How those clowns stay in business is anybody's guess.
Personally, I'm looking forward to this Hill Street Blues set, although it'll be closer to September before I'm done saving up the money to get it.
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The stories from all sides can be true. Why should we ignore such things as Shout Factory misrepresentation? If we can hold the rest of the gang responsible, we can hold Shout Factory responsible as well. Why exclude them from our expectations? We can ask that it be done right or not at all when it's not worth the great disappointment.
I love the show...time to start saving all my spare change...
A couple of years ago there was a cable channel that was showing reruns of both hill street blues and LA law
Both of them are on my list of favorite shows of all-time. I made it a point to re-watch both
That being said, while Hill Street blues still holds up LA law is incredibly dated, both in terms of the fashions and some of the topical references
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