Changing Channels

The next best thing to 'The Sopranos'...

I know -- 257 channels and nothin' on ever since Tony walked into that black hole 18 months ago. But on Tuesday we finally get some relief when a 33-disc, 10-pound, $400 complete boxed set of The Sopranos goes on sale, just in time for Christmas if you have a special little psychopath you're shopping for.

Along with all 86 episodes, there are two DVDs of bonus features, including one that contains a sit-down dinner with the cast and crew. (No meatballs included, though.) There are also three soundtrack CDs including A3's version of Woke Up This Morning (the show's theme song) and Journey's Don't Stop Believin, the last song Tony played on the diner jukebox before he -- well, before he did whatever he did. There are even 16 scenes cut before broadcast and a 16-page episode guide. Basically, everything but Ralphie's head.

Casper the Friendly Senior Citizen, er, Ghost, now on DVD

Yeah, Reaper and Fringe and True Blood are all lots of good gory fun. But it wouldn't seem like Halloween without Casper, the Friendly Ghost, who's been accidentally terrifying people he's trying to embrace for almost 70 years now. Luckily the folks at Classic Media, which owns all kinds of old cartoons, have issued two new DVD collections: Trick or Treat and Casper and Wendy the Good Witch Scare Up Some Fun. I've always like Casper, whose nerdy nonconformity to his ectoplasmic community inevitably strikes a chord with kids. Wendy, his blond girlfriend who popped up in 1954, is a different matter. What a little brown-noser! There isn't a kid alive who, given the ability to turn people into writhing toads, wouldn't use it on parents, teachers, older brothers and editors. The red hoodie is cute, though.

Television with a bite: The vampires are coming!

'Tis the season to sink your fangs into somebody's neck. Halloween may still be six weeks off, but what with True Blood on HBO and Gabriel, the fanged hottie who debuts on Spanish-language SBS on Sept. 28, the tube already has more vampires than you can shake a crucifix at. I'll have a story in Sunday's Miami Herald on why it's so hard to slam the coffin lid on these guys and what they may do to Spanish-language TV. (Improve it!)

Vampires, of course, are ageless. And just to prove it, Anchor Bay -- the DVD arm of the Starz cable networks -- is releasing a whole slew of vampire titles. They include The V Word, the final episode of Showtime's 2007 anthology series Masters Of Horror, in which a couple of thrill-seeking teenagers break into a mortuary and get considerably more excitement from one of the occupants than they bargained for, and Near Dark, Kathryn Bigelow's 1987 film about a traveling band of down-at-the-heels vampires that's probably as close to an undead version of Grapes Of Wrath as we'll ever see.

The most interesting of the bunch, however, is a 2007 Starz documentary, Bloodsucking Cinema, that traces the development of vampire movies over the past century. Here's my review that appeared in the Miami Herald on Oct. 27, 2007:

"Children of the night," murmured Bela Lugosi, raising those bushy Hungarian eyebrows, "what music they make!'' Was he talking about the jingle of a cash register? More than three-quarters of a century after Dracula introduced the genre, vampire movies are as popular as ever -- America's top box-office attraction last week was Thirty Days of Night, about a pack of fanged Alaskans on an all-liquid diet. So the entertaining new Starz documentary Bloodsucking Cinema couldn't come at a better time.

Using interviews with such auteurs of the undead as John Landis and John Carpenter to augment clips from perhaps a score of films, Bloodsucking Cinema gives us a peek inside the tomb of every vampire from the bald-headed grotesquerie of F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu to Salma Hayek's snake-dancing-stripper in From Dusk Till Dawn. Vampire as superhero (Blade), vampire as rock star (Queen of the Damned), even vampire as a Capulet involved with a Montague werewolf (Underworld) -- Bloodsucking Cinema's got 'em all. In fact, more than all: Am I the only one who hasn't seen Vampire Vixens from Venus?

The documentary is actually at its most interesting when it's off on an odd tangent -- for instance, the little-known 1931 Spanish-language Dracula, startlingly erotic for its day, was shot by night with a Mexican cast on the same sets where Lugosi and crew were working by day.

"The Mexicans always thought theirs was a little sexier, which it was, " says actor Cheech Marin, a fan of Mexican vampire flicks, who played a south-of-the-border bloodsucker in From Dusk Till Dawn. "Mexican vampires are really lurid. There's a lot of violence and flesh-eating and sex. They always have female vampires and they're very low-cut . . . Catholics had to mix their eroticism with guilt at all times. So that really played into the vampire myth -- it's alluring, but it's forbidden."

Not that Mexicans have a monopoly on vampire sex. Hints of eroticism were present even in Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu, in which a maiden destroys the vampire by luring him to linger past sunrise. By the late 1950s, when Great Britain's Hammer Studios started making vampire films with Christopher Lee sinking his teeth into flesh well below throat level, the sexual subtext had become a giant flashing neon light. "Christopher Lee made a great Dracula, " notes director Carpenter approvingly. "He was almost all sexual impulse, and truly vicious."

Lee, however, was Disney material compared to Anne Parillaud in Landis' 1992 Innocent Blood, in which she starred as a kinky and murderous vampire who enticed human lovers by allowing them to handcuff her before sex. Landis says he was simply trying to answer the timeless male conundrum: "This is this breathtakingly beautiful woman, but what if she eats me?" The answer, as we all suspected, is she probably will.

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.

Who messed with the music in 'The Fugitive' DVD? Hint: It wasn't the one-armed man

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 greenest thing you can do on Earth Day...

...would be Gumby. Specifically, Gumby: The Movie, which was issued Tuesday on DVD. It's the director's cut, which means that all the existential nuances removed by the crass, Mammon-worshiping studio suits have been restored. And of course the Blockheads, the Clayboys, Lowbelly the dog and all the usual suspects are there, too.

Vincent Price, Casey Kasem and Peter Cottontail

Looking for an old-fashioned TV Easter? Well, Charlton Heston will part the Red Sea as usual in The Ten Commandments on ABC on March 22. But this year there's another option: Classic Media has just released a DVD of the 1971 TV special Here Comes Peter Cottontail, which used to be another ABC Easter perennial. Produced by the same animators who did Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, it's also got the voices of Vincent Price, Danny Kaye and Casey Kasem.

Talk about nine lives!

Felix The Cat is among our oldest cartoon characters, dating back to 1919 and the era of silent films.  And he practically invented television. In 1928, in RCA's very first experimental TV broadcast, an image of a papier-mache Felix doll spinning slowly on a phonograph was beamed out of a Brooklyn lab. (On W2XBS, in case you wanted to check your TiVo.) RCA televised Felix on a daily basis for most of the next decade.

Felix got back into TV in 1953, when some of his old films were licensed to television, among the first programming for children. By 1958, he had his own series -- and next week Classic Media is releasing the 31 episodes (in color!) on DVD for the first time. Happy birthday, pal.

I always wanted to use the words "scissor vixen" in this blog

It's always gratifying when the forces of Art triumph over the provincial and censorious. Hence I am delighted to report that Jennifer "Toastee" Toof, cruelly expelled from MTV's Flavor Of Love 2 (sort of The Bachelor as possibly imagined by a street pimp instead of the Hollywood variety) for refusing to surrender to Viacom's outmoded concepts of romance and courtship, has gotten her own DVD. Toastee Exposed is a montage of Toastee's pioneering film work under her stage name, Natalie the Scissor Vixen, in which she...well, better not say, lest I induce a wave of killer strokes throughout Miami Herald management. Guess I can't link to the video for the same reason, but Google her -- that's a computer expression, you filthy people -- and you'll get a bunch of examples. Anyway, there is a socially redeeming point to this post, and it is: The Parents Television Council is wrong, there is something they won't show on MTV. Scissor vixens. That may be pretty much the whole list, though.

'Cagney & Lacey,' back from the dead

Since Cagney & Lacey has been getting canceled every 20 minutes or so for the past 25 years, I'm sure we haven't heard the last of this. But as of 1:38 p.m. on March 27, 2007, the DVD release on Mother's Day is back on.