ScottRE
Senior HTF Member
There needs to be a thread for weird changes to shows on home video. Not changes in regards to music rights, those make some kinda sense since that's generally monetary. But the rest of it: missing scenes, sound alterations, credit changes and so on. Very few of my favorite shows released on DVD and BD are 100% accurate. A lot of alterations just got grandfathered in from the early syndication days (such as One Step Beyond), others were goofs and things that can only be seen as some technician deciding to screw with me personally (wrong music for the opening theme in odd episodes of Star Trek, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants, etc).One of the DVD forums had a discussion about some Bewitched differences regarding the Sony vs Mill Creek releases and there were screen grabs of the "orb of light", as well as mention of extra footage put back into one two-parter episode, but I can't remember what site or where to look. I could'a swore that Mill Creek had fixed some problems left in the previous sets but, of course, not the opening/closing theme issue.
Sometimes there are just careless errors in these big sets, like with the old Fawlty Towers release where the line, "Is it your legs?" got excised for no apparent reason. Or, when Gilligan's Island was prepped for VHS originally, and some footage of Gilligan zipping off on the jet pack got lost in the edit. That bit was restored for the dvd set and the hi-def downloads, but even the new 1080p transfers of Gilligan still have some problems like day shots with night filters, flipped images, and shots out of order.
Remember MASH when it first hit streaming and The Interview was released in color? I saved that episode (later corrected to b&w) as an extra feature and anomaly when I compiled my own Bluray set which also retains the original edit of Our Finest Hour from Columbia House VHS.
Worthy of note: The Doctor Who "Destruction" Team, as I call them, have been making their own personal choice changes to those programs for years and people have just accepted the "corrections" and judgement calls like no big deal. Funny thing is that the whole "restoration" project's initial goal was to restore the programs to as close to original transmission as possible-- until there was suddenly a budget! Then CGI, new credit sequences, camera blips that just had to be smoothed over, audio that was deemed to rough for release so, of course, the guy editing puts his own voice in as a Dalek and just loves it so, there! It stays!
This even extended to other shows like Monty Python's Flying Circus when it hit Bluray, where changes were made at the video producers' discretion, even when it was known that fans would expect a different result. Little jokes like the intentional jump-splicey look of the titles for How Not To Be Seen were "cleaned up" because those in charge decided it just wasn't supposed to look that way. Animations were alternately cleaned up to their advantage, and also edited to remove anything considered a mistake. A mistake in a Terry Jones cutout animation sequence shot hastily on 16mm and edited with cello-tape? Nah. Can't have that. It has to look like it was filmed professionally yesterday.
I, uh.. Need sleep, I guess? LOL
Actually a thread would keep this one from going down a rabbit hole (I'm frequently guilty of that - lol).
