The "TV on DVD conference".... (1 Viewer)

[Greg_S_H]

Would Happy Days fans buy all seasons? It got really bad at the end, when Richie was gone and everything.

 

[Randy A Salas]

I just sort of assumed that because they were in the trailer that they were being planned.

One can assume, but--as you pointed out, Casey--it's always better when one can confirm.

The odd thing about the Paramount trailer was that it was arguably the biggest announcement to come out of the conference. But it had no fanfare whatsoever. It didn't even get an introduction, as every other trailer did (and usually for known releases). Couple that with the absence of any type of "coming soon" message in the trailer, and it almost seemed like a mistake.

But now we have confirmation.

 

[David Lambert]

Guys, there are enough shows that ran 11 seasons that the number doesn't even jump out at me.

Randy, thanks for the info about Rhino's season sets for HRP & LotL. I'll get news items up on those today or tomorrow, and give you credit (and a link to your online newspaper presence) to show my gratitude!

As for the lack of fanfare on the Paramount trailer, Gord explained to me that Martin had left briefly to go check on sales numbers for Indy Jones, and didn't make it back before the trailer was shown. So, according to Gord, VSM's T.K. Arnold (who many HTFers know since he drops by here from time to time) simply qued it up and ran it at the appointed time, without any trumpets or flares. Still, it apparently spoke for itself.


1 Season of Cheers is out now, with S2 coming on 1/6/04.

As far as whether or not folks would buy Happy Days - or any other show - after it has "jumped the shark"...well, there aren't TOO many series that have yet released the entire run across many years. And those that have - TOS, TNG, DS9, X-Files, Python, Avengers, Space: 1999, Are You Being Served?, etc. - all have die-hard cult followings to back up sales throughout the entire run of DVDs. Long-running shows that have more "casual" and "mass-market" fans do not have any stats behind them to show what happens with the later seasons' sales. Probably the closest thing to a test of this will be S8 & S9 of The X-Files...and we're still a week and a half away from beginning that "experiment".

Also, keep in mind that you guys are just ASSUMING these will be season sets. Mind you, they could still be best-of's. Nobody has officially said anything yet on that score.

 

[John Sullmeyer]

Any word from Paramount on Twin Peaks Season 2 ?

 

[Casey Trowbridg]

Answering a few questions:
1. As of right now, there is 1 season of Cheers out on DVD with another planned for January.
2. Yes, Married with Children ran for 11 seasons. So did M*A*S*H, so will Frasier, Friends is 10 seasons, and the Simpsons 15 as of now, with season 16 confirmed. (Important to note, that last year the Simpsons passed the previous record for longest situation comedy, which I think was Ozzy and Harriat) The longest running series of a non-news or sports nature was gunsmoke at 21 seasons.3. Agreed the quality of Happy Days dropped off drastically over the years, once Ron Howard left the show to work on other projects and only made guest shots from time to time. I plan to buy every season of the series I buy on DVD, but Happy Days will severely test that plan.

 

[MikeDeVincenzo]

David

Any hint/buzz/droplet of information from Universal about "Northern Exposure"?

I've been waiting for this since the day I got my first dvd player back in 1998.

 

[David Lambert]

Universal has just started DVD announcements again since merging with NBC. The only TV show I saw announed was "Sitting Ducks" (Cartoon Network series).

I'm sure that I won't hear any tidbits about NE until they publicly announce the DVDs to everybody.


As for Twin Peaks S2...

Sorry, couldn't help myself. Nobody's talking about what's going on with that one, so I've frankly given up on it. IF it shows up in stores, I'll buy it. Besides that, I've put it out of my mind.

 

[Scott D S]

This is one in a million but I don't suppose Police Squad was mentioned?

 

[MikeDeVincenzo]

Thanks David, and let me be what must be the one billionth person to thank you for your site.

MY DVD COLLECTION SHALL NOT BE COMPLETE UNTIL NORTHERN EXPOSURE IS A PART OF IT. AND I SWEAR BEFORE THE WHOLE DAMNED HTF THAT I WILL RUN DOWN MY STREET NAKED WITH A MISS AMERICA SASH ON THE DAY A STREET DATE IS FINALLY ANNOUNCED!!!

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Now that Gord is back, I want to raise an issue here that first came up in the Law & Order: SVU Season One review thread. Rather than paraphrase all this stuff, or rewrite it from scratch, I'll just quote part of my own post:

(This) set points up an interesting problem with TV shows on DVD, one that I hope somebody dealt with at the recent conference: What do you do with cross-overs? I ask because I noticed an episode called "Entitled: Part 1" in the list above. Doing a little checking I discovered that the second part of the story is told in an episode of the original Law & Order (from the 7th season no less) called "Entitled: Part 2". (And both involve a family that the detectives first encountered back in the first or second season of the parent series.)

Anybody watching this set is going to see the first half of a two parter, and even if they're inclined to buy a Law & Order set in order to get part two, they're going to have to wait awhile.

And this is a problem with two shows from the same "stable", Dick Wolf's production company and Universal Studios. What happens with series that cross-over as a ratings stunt because they're on the same network, but aren't otherwise related?

There were at least two stories that I remember which started out on Law & Order, but finished up on Homicide: Life on the Streets. How the heck does that get handled on DVD - or in reruns, for that matter? (I've been told studio marketing guys don't even like two-part episodes within a series, because syndicators and local stations find them annoying. What the heck do you do with a two parter that crosses series. Can a station that bought L & O, but not Homicide even show part 2 of these stories?)

This is going to get very annoying at some point.

I think this is an issue that needs to be raised with the studios sooner rather than later, because networks are very fond of this kind of ratings stunt (especially when they can draw viewers from an established series to a struggling one) and nobody seems to give any thought to the stories involved, or how fans are going to be able to follow them once that particular "sweeps period" is a distant memory.

Regards,

Joe

 

[David Lambert]

Gord is indeed back, but he hasn't swung by HTF yet to my knowledge. I first heard from him last night shortly after 10:30 Eastern time, and we AIMed for like an hour. He had a radio show to do at 2:05 Eastern time. And he was exhausted even before-hand. And he had 514 e-mails to catch up on.

So he might not check in here immediately! I did mention this thread to him, though.

It is too bad that the idea of discussing this wasn't brought up prior to the conference. It wasn't part of the official agenda, and I really have to wonder if it came up for discussion just out of the blue.

It's a valid issue, and one I've been concerned about literally for years. My thoughts always tend to go in the direction of my desire for the two Bionic series to hit DVD, and "what will be done about all those crossovers where Steve and Jamie teamed up and crossed shows?" Of course, Buffy and Angel fans already have to deal with this issue, but at least there aren't long waits for the next Angel or Buffy season sets. Hercules/Xena are in a similar situation.

Your L&O/L&O:SVU and L&O/H:LotS examples show that there are much tougher ones out there! Another one up that alley, though a lot less critical, is the one where The Critic showed up on The Simpsons...this subject just came up yesterday at the HTF as a matter of fact, where Critic fans wanted that Simpsons episode on their "Critic: The Entire Series" release. MatthewA ended the discussion by pointing out the obvious: "I also imagine 20th Century Fox would not license it (to Columbia)." I should have thought of that, really. :b


It would be great to have Gord (or Randy) chime in and say whether this indeed came up at the conf, and if so what was said. Right now the plan - for both syndication and for DVD - is just "let the watchers fend for themselves"...in other words, they just put out the part of the crossover that belongs in the series run they are publishing, and they (the studio) just don't worry about the rest of the story.

On DVD, there's another set of choices, obviously. One thought is of course to include them both on the same disc. But that's not always possible, nor do the DVD's producers seem to want to go to that trouble.

So here's my other thought: If I'm the guy producing the L&O discs, and I know that this "Part 2" crossover episode of Homicide:LotS, "For God And Country", comes out in the H:LotS Season 4 set hitting the streets in a few months (just a logical assumption, since S3 hits this coming Tuesday), then maybe it's a good idea for me (the L&O producer) to convince my studio to let me put together a single disc of L&O episode "Charm City", which is the "Part 1" of the crossover. After all, I says to my studio, this is a L&O Season 6 episode, and we're not getting THAT box set out for a long time! So maybe in the meantime we can make some extra bucks and sell some relatively cheap discs - maybe just by mail order, and maybe A&E will even advertise them in their H:LotS S4 box set - to the Homicide fans who want to see the complete story.

It makes the other studio some extra bucks, it makes the fan happy, and it makes the studio who's got the other show's box set out look great because they are taking care of the customer by helping to offer the complete crossover.

As a consumer, I wouldn't even be too upset about "double dipping" on a single episode like that, either. I would keep the L&O: Charm City disc in with my H:LotS S4 set long after I bought L&O: S6.

As an former comic book collector, I used to sometimes buy an extra copy of each crossover comic for the same purpose: If Flash and Green Lantern teamed up in a 2-parter across their two books, then I would want to have an extra copy of Flash for the Green Lantern run, and an extra copy of GL for the Flash run. That way if I went back to read a bunch of GL books later on, I wouldn't have to pause and go digging up a Flash book just to read the entire story...it was handy where I wanted it to be!


This is the collectors' mentality. DVD collectors could end up being the same way; studios should learn how to profit off of it, instead of letting the customer walk away mad.

 

[David Lambert]

MikeDeVincenzo said:

Thanks David, and let me be what must be the one billionth person to thank you for your site.

You're welcome, and thanks for the compliment. But I must point out that it is really Gord's site!

 

[todd s]

The crossover problem also happened with the shows the Pretender and Profiler. Their was about 3 episodes of the Profiler that either continued a Pretender story or had the character from the Pretender on it.

 

[Randy A Salas]

It would be great to have Gord (or Randy) chime in and say whether this indeed came up at the conf, and if so what was said.

The dilemma of how to present and market cross-over episodes did not come up during any of the panels. Someone would have had to bring it up, given the topics of the panels, and there was little time at the end of each session for Q&As. Gord might have discussed this privately with someone, but I didn't.

Again, to reinforce what has been said, this was a business-to-business conference. Consumer issues like this really didn't come up that much. There were only three main panels: (1) marketing, (2) classic TV shows and (3) children's programming. (The latter had only about half the attendance of the others, and Artisan's exec continually insisted that it's still very much a VHS market.) The classic-TV panel, which featured Gord, spent as much time discussing (arguing over) the music industry and future delivery formats (such as video on demand) as it did on the appointed topic.

 

[MikeDeVincenzo]

Sorry Gord! David's profile mislead me!

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Dave:

I think your suggestion is a good one, probably because I was noodling around with a similar idea.

But seriously, a single disc with both episodes of a two-part inter-series cross-over (okay, I've used up my hyphen budget) could serve both studios and even increase awareness and appreciation of the other series, perhaps leading to more sales. (Which is similar to what these shows were intended to do in the first place.)

I do think actual two-parters, where a single story starts on series A and ends on series B, are in a somewhat different class than mere single-episode character appearances. I may be missing something if I'm a Critic fan who doesn't get his Simpsons guest-shot, but that isn't the same as watching the first half of a mystery/police drama - effectively a 90 TV movie - and then not getting the second half with the resolution of the mystery. So I think the L & O/Homicide type of situation is one that "must" be addressed, but I wouldn't put pressure on Fox to license the X-Files episode that featured Baltimore homicide detective John Munch for a single disc to be released with the appropriate season of either of those shows.

(When Homicide was in its original network run, Richard Belzer appeared as John Munch on three different TV series on two different networks, all on alternate nights in a single week: he guest-starred on L & O, appeared as a regular in that story's conclusion on Homicide and finally guest-starred on The X-Files. )

Regards,

Joe

 

[GarySchrock]

Their was almost 3 episodes of the Profiler that either continued a Pretender story or had the character from the Pretender on it.

Hmm, as far as continuing a story from the pretender, was there really more than one? I know of one, Grand Mastery or something like that, but that was the only one that was a full blown characters crossing over into both shows as far as I know. And as far as pretender was concerned, they actually even had a different ending to finish the story off without the profiler episode. Made it a little on the confusing side when you finally catch the profiler episode and see the rest of the story.

 

[todd s]

I know Dave has hinted about something, but won't tell. :frowning:
So did the children's dvd panel make any mention of Batman or Superman animated???

 

[Sarah S]

I don't think the Artisan exec wasn't getting the full picture when he insisted that the children's market is still a VHS one. I know I buy DVDs of the Wiggles because I know that if I have to play it one zillion times, I would have to buy three VHS tapes. That ain't a happenin". My budget is far too small to buy most double dips, forget degradeable mediums.

 

[Eugene Esterly]

It's amazing how the TV on DVD Industry growed in the past 3 yrs. I've had a DVD player since July 2000 & in July 2000, there were very few TV shows on DVD. Look at it now, there are lots of TV shows on DVD nowadays.

This TV on DVD conference shows how profitable the TV shows on DVD are. A good idea would be for studios to release TV shows on DVD which only last one season such as Down The Shore, The Edge, Madman Of The People, et al.