Some shows or movies have either only had a few home or digital releases, or have never had any releases, and you can only watch episodes on YouTube or shady video sharing sites. There can be a wide variety of reasons for this, such as rights issues or there just isn’t a high demand for the show/movie to justify a home or digital release.
What are some such shows?
Well, perhaps some can also be whether they got more than a VHS release. There are a few shows and movies which didn’t get those. Also whether on which streaming services.
Dragnet LA (2003)
St Elsewhere never got a dvd release apart from Season 1.
Hawks (1988) is a movie with Timothy Dalton and Antony Edwards I had on VHS and lost and never saw a copy again, I eventually got one off a private torrent site from someone who got a copy from a dvr from a television showing.
Walt Disney’s Song of the South:
“Song of the South is a 1946 American live-action/animated musical produced by Walt Disney and released by RKO Radio Pictures. It is based on the collection of Uncle Remus stories as adapted by Joel Chandler Harris. The film takes place in the southern United States during the Reconstruction era after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. The story follows seven-year-old Johnny who is visiting his grandmother’s plantation for an extended stay.”
as the article says Song of South was released in Europe and Asia for home use.
There was a 6-hour Christopher Columbus mini-series that was made in 1985. I remember watching it as a kid and loving it.
However, the only DVD that can be found is a shortened version of the series and it only comes on a region 2 DVD that won’t play in most US DVD players.
The infamous Star Wars Holiday Special has never been released on any home media/
This might not be exactly what you’re looking for, but many episodes of MST3K have never been officially released. Only low-res TV recordings are available on YouTube, and there are a few that can’t even be found there. I think the main reason is that the rights to the movie within an episode can’t be reacquired, or it’s too expensive to do so.
I don’t know why, but these TV shows have never been on DVD. (it is possible that this has changed since the last time I checked. If so, good news!)
Lassie (elect episodes, but not a complete season, let alone the whole package)
Memphis Beat (probably a music rights issue, but that’s just a guess)
Baa Baa Black Sheep - the rest of the episodes. About two thirds were released , and then they stopped
Movie:
Friend of the Deceased - a quirky little Russian film I saw in the art house and would like to see again
Have seasons 4 & 5 of The Muppet Show ever had a home release?
Tom Chapin’s Saturday morning show “Make a Wish”, which is probably not as good as I remember…
Also, David Sanborn’s “Night Music”, the best TV music show ever.
Flying Blind. It was a single season comedy and I think it was on FOX. Tea Leoni was the star. It was in the era just before DVD hit the scene. I am pretty sure it has never been released in any format although I have seen very slick bootlegs online.
“No Soap Radio” was a strange hybrid-situation comedy interspersed with sketches.
Speaking of Chapin’s “Make A Wish”, there was another children’s show of that type, and all I can remember was that it had the words “Milo” and “Machine” in the title.
The TV series version of Honey I Shrunk The Kids with Peter Scolari. I really enjoyed that show but never saw the last couple of seasons, as that was when I moved to Australia.
A short lived (10 episodes made, seven aired) series about the Elmore Leonard character from Out of Sight, starring Carla Gugino (nearly perfect casting). As far as I can tell, it has never been released to DVD or streaming.
WKRP has never had a proper home release thanks to the licensing morass created by all the music in the show. There have been edited versions using generic music but they’re terrible.
Same with Northern Exposure. The original airings had brilliant use of music but when the DVD’s were released 99.9% of the original music had been replaced with generic elevator crap. A hugely successful, multi-Emmy award winning show that was one of the if not the biggest show on network TV for a couple of seasons and today you essentially cannot watch them as they were originally broadcast with resorting to old pirated recordings.
Edit: replying to gotpasswords, because apparently hitting the reply button doesn’t actually reply to your post like it did on the old board.
The Shout! Factory DVD releases, from 2014-2015, are said to have about 85% of the music originally featured in the show. When they took on releasing WKRP, Shout! Factory had a stated goal of getting rights to every song in the original broadcast versions, but apparently there were some rights that either couldn’t be gotten at all, or were prohibitively expensive. I fear that that’s as close as we’re ever going to get.
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A huge percentage of early television programming simply doesn’t exist anymore. For example, most of the recorded archives of the DuMont network (1948-1956) was dumped into New York Harbor as trash in the 1970s. The BBC purged massive amounts of its archive in the 1970s; about a third of the 1960s episodes of Doctor Who and most of the first season of the Avengers are gone, among other seminal shows.
I’ve got that set. It’s better than previous efforts, since pretty much all of the music that is relevant to the episode plots has been restored–so, for example, “Tiny Dancer” has been restored to the Ivan the Russian episode, and Les dons his wig to Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded” before he escorts Jennifer to an awards banquet. Elsewhere, Jennifer’s doorbell once again plays “Fly Me to the Moon,” and the fanfare from “Patton” plays in the Little Arthur episode.
I can tell that a few things are missing, but it’s hard to say exactly what. I’d suggest that if Shout! Factory couldn’t get the rights to something, it was probably pretty minor and unmemorable.