An update on the rogue soundtrack on 'The Fugitive' DVD

Back in June, I wrote about the controversy over CBS Paramount's DVD of the second season of the mid-'60s show The Fugitive. Hardcore fans of the show went absolutely batguano when they popped in their new discs and discovered that all the music except for the opening and closing themes had been replaced. We're not talking about a pop-song soundtrack here but the cues -- the little bits of music that underline a scene or a character and often last only a few seconds. Frankly, it amazed me that anyone even spotted this (and clearly, that was the feeling at CBS Paramount, too), but Fugitive fans were inconsolable, posting on message boards across the Internet that the company was looting and pillaging the entire culture of Western civilization to save a few bucks.

Well, Jon Burlingame, who's covered this controversy for Daily Variety, has continued to follow the story. (It would not surprise me if Fugitive fans are holding his wife and children hostage.) And now he's written a piece for the Film Music Society that reveals what really happened. It's a little more complicated than CBS Paramount just being a greedy mob of bloodsucking parasites out to save a couple of bucks -- in fact, quite the opposite. Stripping the music out of The Fugitive and replacing it with new stuff may have cost the company as much $100,000, he reports.

It turns out that The Fugitive's cue sheets -- the studio's records that list each piece of music, its composer, publisher and other details -- are kind of a mess, making it impossible to figure out which music went where. That's critical, because The Fugitive's musical cues were drawn from different sources and ownership is now clouded in legal disputes. CBS Paramount's lawyers concluded that using any of the music amounted to pinning a SUE ME sign on the company's back. "It wasn't CBS being cheap," one executive told Burlingame. "We were told legally that we didn't know what was what, and we had to change it."

Burlingame himself thinks the situation could have been finessed. But now that CBS Paramount has caved on one season's DVD, he figures it's a lost cause on the three seasons yet to come. "So hang onto your VHS tapes of The Fugitive," he writes. "It's the only way you'll be able to hear the series the way it was meant to be." Umm, yeah, Jon. As soon as I can find them under all the eight-track tapes.

Comments

[alan]

I really am not that bothered about the music change. If thats the way it is then so be it. I just want the episodes that I love so much. I saw the series back when it was originally aired so I am a proper fan, not somebody who became one watching the 90s re runs. You guys whinging about the music are either delaying the next release or even worse making CBS Paramount say "sod it there are other thihgs to do that make us more money" and kill the project stone dead. It was good enough for them to agree to doing it, now the so called fans are smacking them in the teeth and people like me have to suffer. The score had to be changed for legal reasons, thats it so live with it. CBS at great expense did the only thing possible for the true fans, you ungrateful Bs