So you're a "realist" who is "not constrained" by "nostalgia" such as believing that "the same incidental music repeated over and over again" is "cool or okay"
I'm a realist who believes in
reality, and in the reality of a situation, or has to depending on said situation, unlike you and your fellow
Fugitive fans. The reality at the time was that Paramount Home Video and CBS couldn't use the music then, and didn't do so, so they had a substitute set of music made. You and the other fans couldn't stand that, so you made nasty insults at reviewers and and executives just for the crime of replacing incidental music in a TV show with something better. All because your sense of nostalgia couldn't stand hearing different but
similar pieces of music substituting for the same 'beloved' music you most likely heard over and over again the last few times you saw
The Fugitive on TV. Neither the plot, cinematography, lighting, sound or anything else was changed. Just the
incidental music. But lemming-like, you and the other
Fugitive fans acted as if the breasts of your mothers had been desecrated. Over pieces of music. From a stock music catalog.
Considering how certain people have exhibited older movies like
Birth Of A Nation and
Nosferatu with different soundtracks (the last one has been done this way by a entrepreneur in Toronto to the music of Radiohead's
Kid A), the mind boggles.
If it's culpably "nostalgic" to expect the original incidental music, what other programme content might it be un-"cool" or not "okay" to repeat "over and over again" (such repetition being, on your analysis, one of the most regrettable drawbacks about a storage medium such as a DVD)?
No other program but this one, at the time it was originally issued on DVD. And as I said,
this music's not that important. The greater tragedy for TV programs isn't this one (you didn't lose the main theme) but a show like
WKRP In Cincinnati in which the music (actual
songs that comment on the mood of the show put in by the writers for a specific reason,
not stock music cues from a music library) had to be left out because of the cost of getting said music from the original rights holders and also because including said music would have made the box sets of
WKRP In Cincinnati quite expensive. Of course, you could care less, I guess if something like that had to happen, so long as you get your precious music intact? But the company had to care, since said prices would have meant lesser or no sales at all with a ton of boxed sets sitting on the shelves of a store, for an old show with not a lot of buyers. That's the
[b]reality[/b of business, and of DVD sales. But what is reality, business or not, to
fanatics like you?
Perhaps the plot should be altered, the dialogue changed, old footage removed or new footage introduced. Where do you stop? Perhaps it's so hopelessly nostalgic, so terminally uncool to insist upon retaining any component of the original that we should actually change everything.
I don't, wouldn't, and didn't, start, and I only meant it for this show, not others. You on the other hand, have implied that I had for all older shows.
Such a healthy embrace of change would surely be good for "spoiled children" like me, and might, so to speak, actually constitute a salutary replacement of our "diapers"; far better, I'm sure, than soiling the same old episodes of The Fugitive, or any other classic series, by viewing them repeatedly in the absurd expectation that they ought to remain substantially what their creators intended them to be. How stupid of anyone who objects to DVD releases whose content differs drastically from what might reasonably be expected to "get pissy" by pursuing the manufacturers of the DVDs rather than doing time-consuming research and legwork in tracking down the rights holders of the incidental music, and then pursuing almost certainly complex and expensive litigation in which an asymmetrical battle between slingless Davids and corporate Goliaths with mega-tonnages of legal armor is joined. Perhaps we should follow the sterling example you set, when not public-spiritedly chastising pathetic individuals like us on a forum like this, and thereby instilling a better sense of true priorities, and expend our misdirected energies (currently spent persecuting blameless executives and cocooning ourselves in the womb-like security of old TV shows, many with an unfashionably reactionary subtext) on setting the problems of a nation and world besieged by economic, social and environmental problems to rights.
I'm responding to
fanatics who think that they are owed everything under the sun as it relates to an old TV show on DVD, and can only go after that,
but nothing else in life that's more important. With people like you, it's no wonder things are crap. But what does it
really mean to you? Not much, so long as you can get
somebody else to do the lifting for you of making things better.
Learning who the rights holder to the contested incidental music is hard? It's obviously not hard for you to pester Paramount Home Video and CBS, and treat them in the rude and uncouth manner you and most of the
Fugitive fans did about said precious incidental music, though; they're owned by Capitol Records and you could have protested them. But you chose to go after hapless executives at Paramount Home Video and CBS in the manner previously mentioned and quite well known
It seems to me that the message of the original "Fugitive" series was precisely that one should consult one's own conscience, and not blindly follow the social consensus, so I'm not quite sure why you should appeal to Professor Chomsky for corroboration of your wordy, but incoherent anathema against innocent couch-potatoes like me (the only way I can parse your strange reference to "people like yourself") who just want our old shows not to be tampered with.
My conscience is crystal clear and what I had to say is also crystal clear, but obviously not to a [
fan]atic trapped in the past and unable to live in the present or deal with the future. There's great TV shows on the air right now (I won't be wasting time telling you about them, you can find them out for yourself) and you could watch them. But what will you watch? The same ones you saw when you were younger. Proves most of what I've said before.
At any rate, your attitude and those of your fellow fans of
The Fugitive has probably doomed any other older TV property from being issued on DVD or Blu-Ray DVD save for future releases done as DVD on demand similar to the Warner Archive (and only sold through Amazon, burned onto a DVD with no bells or whistles whatsoever.) All because you couldn't hear some old incidental music from a TV show that you've seen before, and pitched a big temper tantrum.
reply
share