I can just imagine the conversation when the bosses at CBS Paramount discovered there was a conflict over ownership of some of the background music used in the second season of The Fugitive, which they were getting ready to release on DVD. "What are we going to do?" says Executive No. 1. "We're already pre-sold tens of thousands of these DVDs. If we cancel, we'd have to [visible shudder] give back the money." Executive No. 2 is sanguine: "Hey, let's just get Alvin & The Chipmunks or somebody to write and record new music. It's been 44 years since this show aired -- who's even going to notice a few seconds of different music here or there?"
You can read the answer to his hypothetical question for yourselves at Amazon.com, where Fugitive fans are in a frothing rage. "CBS/Paramount destroyed its own property -- STAY AWAY," writes one outraged customer. "All the music is changed -- this is not The Fugitive I love," mourns another. "Do not reward CBS Paramount by buying this butchered-up set!" demands a third. The complaints, threats, and prediction of end times go on for pages and pages.
These aren't the first fans to be outraged by a bait-and-switch on a video soundtrack. The earliest videotape versions of Animal House substituted music in the background of some scenes. The most notable, and irritating, was the removal of Sam Cooke's Wonderful World (Don't know much about history/Don't know much biology/Don't know much about a science book/Don't know much about the French I took...) from a scene featuring John Belushi's barbaric Bluto character. The DVD versions of music-heavy TV shows like WKRP In Cincinnati and Northern Exposure made extensive changes in the songs.
The problem is that until about 20 years, deals for music for a movie or TV-show soundtrack didn't automatically include the rights for spinoffs like videotapes or DVDs. And when studios dig up older material for DVD release, they often find the cost of obtaining the rights is astronomical. Variety recently reported that the Motown songs in just the first season of Murphy Brown cost Time Warner nearly $1 million.
At those prices, the studios are tempted to look for cheaper alternatives -- or just give up. That's why neither China Beach nor The Wonder Years, with their non-stop soundtracks of 1960s rock and roll, have ever made it to DVD. Director John Sayles once warned me that if I wanted a copy of of his 1960s high school tale Baby, It's You, I should tape it myself off HBO or Showtime because nobody would ever cough up enough money for the music to put it out on video. (He was wrong, but it took 15 years.)
The Fugitive, unlike the movies and shows I've mentioned so far, didn't use popular music for its soundtrack. What's been changed are the things known in the business as cues, the little bits of original music that introduce a character or underline a scene. The problem is that some of them were written specifically for the show (no payments necessary) and some were drawn from a commercial music library (payments very necessary), and nobody could figure out which were which. To make matters worse, the music library is now out of business, so it wasn't even clear who CBS Paramount should negotiate with. In the end, the company bagged all the music and started from scratch.
I'm sure that at the time it sounded like a great -- or at least good -- idea. But try telling that to the fan who wrote on Amazon that The Fugitive is "absolutely the DVD defamation of the year."
The title of The War of the World, a three-part PBS documentary series, is no sloppy typo but deliberate wordplay on H.G. Welles' 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, which describes a devastating attack by Martians armed with death rays and robotic fighting machines that leaves most of the world's great cities in ruins. To Scottish historian Niall Ferguson, the book was not science fiction but ''a work of astonishing prescience'' that accurately foretold the horrendous world wars of the century that would follow, with a single mistake: ''Those responsible were not Martians -- they were other human beings.'' And, Ferguson wonders, how could a century marked by so much scientific and economic progress have gone so violently wrong -- "What made men act like Martians?''
