WORDS AND MUSIC: When the first season of WKRP In Cincinnati arrived on DVD, fans of the show were justifiably livid that almost all of the musical cues � pop songs played on-air by DJs Venus Flytrap and Johnny Fever � were missing, and that when the song was integral to something happening onscreen, the scene would be trimmed to avoid looking nonsensical in the absence of music. The practice of removing copyrighted music is common enough that companies like Viacom/Paramount routinely include a fine print warning � �some music may have been changed� � on disc sets where music has either been excised or replaced with generic substitutes.
The DVD set of season two of The Fugitive � the �60s thriller starring David Janssen � recently hit the shelves after undergoing just such treatment -- despite the fact that the first season was released with all the original musical cues. According to a story in Variety this week, the score for the second season didn�t rely on a specially-composed score or public domain music, but from a mix of music by Pete Rugolo � author of the show�s theme � and cues taken from a range of music libraries. Untangling the legal knots created by the show�s music editor, Ken Wilhoit, 40 years ago proved so daunting that Paramount simply stripped out all of the show�s background music except for Rugolo�s intro and outro credit themes, a move that many fans have called �sickening,� while stating that they would be returning their purchases.
Before the dawn of the lucrative DVD business, music contracts on TV shows made no provision for royalties or rights after original runs and syndication. Today, music is negotiated with clauses that bear impressively inclusive language reserving right of usage for �any and all media now known or hereinafter devised.� This wasn�t the case as recently as a decade ago, and the change has seen profits from DVD sets diminish by the requirement of paying between ten and forty thousand dollars US per track � the Variety story recalls that licensing Motown songs for season one of Murphy Brown cost a million dollars, while rights issues probably means that shows like The Wonder Years will either hit the market with their music stripped out or not at all. (The Murphy Brown season one box retailed on amazon.com for a sale price of just $20.99, as of yesterday.)
While CBS Paramount executives refrained from answering Variety�s queries about the Fugitive set in favour of a press statement explaining their actions, the editor of the web site TVShowsOnDVD.com told the trade paper that moves like this are pushing fans into buying pirate sets, or illegal downloads, which you�d think someone in marketing or PR at Viacom would have figured out by now.
In somewhat related news, it seems that pilot episodes of two more fall shows � Steven Bochco�s legal drama Raising The Bar and Leverage, a TNT show starring Timothy Hutton � hit the online file-sharing networks this week. You�d start to think, at this point, that Hollywood woke up one morning with a newfound deathwish and an ambition to see how quickly they can go the way of Vaudeville or the telegraph.
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