Being one of those people who enjoys rambling on about how they can remember back “before MTV started to suck,” I was a big fan of The State. I loved that show. It made its debut right around the time that my comic sensibilities gelled, so I really identified it as “my show.”
Naturally, I was stymied by the fact that it took so long to get to DVD. I was tempted to get the first season when I saw it pop up on iTunes, but after reading the reviews complaining about the music licensing issues, I decided against it.
When The State did finally make it to DVD, I snapped it up, and honestly, I was disappointed by the music changes. I’ve gotten through the whole thing yet, but based on what I’ve watched, sometimes the new music doesn’t sync up. Sometimes it doesn’t match the tone of the sketch. And sometimes you can tell what song they couldn’t use based on the replacement music. Basically, the lack of the original stuff usually took me out of sketch.
Honestly, I find the whole music licensing issue frustrating enough to want to make me want to enroll in law school, just so that I could possibly resolve licensing issues. From what I hear, WKRP in Cincinnati has been gutted because of licensing issues. I have fond memories of that show, but I’m also one of those viewers who pays too much attention to the minutia of a scene—so much so that I’m frequently taken out of scenes because of poor editing or even when an actor’s dialogue sync is off despite their back being to the camera. Yeah, watching something with me is a chore.
The Wonder Years is one of those shows that will probably never get a proper DVD release. It’s a fine show and one of those shows that appealed to parents and their kids. It’s certainly a show that I’d love to have in my DVD collection, but it used so many songs that getting the clearances would cost so much that the price of the DVDs would be outlandish.
There’s got to be some sort of compromise that can be met between the big music companies and the big television studios to get these DVDs released. Even something small like Ed, which featured modern artists, isn’t out on DVD because of music issues.
Won’t those big companies think about the little people who’d love nothing more than to plop down some serious coinage to be able to watch those shows on DVD?
