I would like to see an official DVD release of How I Spent My Summer Vacation, a 1967 TV movie starring Robert Wagner, Jill St. John and Peter Lawford. The tagline for the movie was “Crime and conspiracy on the bikini-splashed Riviera!”
I remember that movie !!! I don’t remember what it was about, but I remember stuff like Wagner using scotch tape to get somebody’s fingerprints off a glass.
Now days you can find almost anything searching the Internet, but for the longest time the movie The Day the Fish Came Out (1967) was impossible to find anywhere.
Wiseguy was another series that got held up for years due to music rights. As far as I know, they’ve never been released with the original music. Wikipedia says most of the series has been released but isn’t clear if they have the original music.
Massacre at Central High is a hard to find film. Roger Ebert gave it a positive review. The film had a very limited release on vhs. The only copies I’ve found on eBay were worn out rentals or a bootleg DVD copy from a rental. It was never broadly released to the home market. It’s not on laser disc or DVD.
I’m not aware of any kind of official release of Fernwood 2Night or the follow up “America 2Night”. There’s a lot of Fernwood stuff on YouTube, I would pay solid cash money for that. Martin Mull, Fred Willard, Frank De Vol, Tommy Tedesco from the Wrecking Crew, recurring appearances by Jim Varney, Kenneth Mars, Dabney Coleman, and others, plus one-shot visits from Tom Waits, Charlene Tilton (!), Harry Shearer, and others.
A gritty crime show from 1967 era called “N.Y.P.D.” that starred Jack Warden. Some episodes can be found on youtube. It was only 30 minutes log so the action moved swiftly. One episode guest starred a very young Al Pacino.
Don Kirshner’s Rock concert does not seem to have any tapes or DVDs for sale. It lasted 8 years
I wonder if, like the issues with WKRP and Northern Exposure, this has to do with music rights. On the other hand, the similar The Midnight Special is, in fact, available on DVD (though it doesn’t appear to be, by any stretch, a complete collection of the series, having only about 10 hours of music).
Amazingly, they are still bothering to release old TV shows on DVD as season 1 of Head of the Class with Howard Hesseman just came out a few weeks ago.
The last couple of seasons of Gunsmoke were just released on DVD earlier this year, 45 years after it went off the air. The Beverly Hillbillies is an interesting proposition: the first couple of seasons are in the public domain (because somebody forgot to renew their copyright), so have been released by multiple companies. “Official” versions of those, plus seasons three through five, have been released by CBS. Seasons six through nine have never been released in their entirety, although a few random episodes came out on VHS many years ago.
Amerika was a huge 1987 miniseries that has never made to DVD and had only a fairly limited and expensive VHS release. Never been shown again on TV, which is fairly amazing given the hype and you’d think at least some cable network would have bought it for showing in the 1990s.
It doesn’t surprise me that old TV shows are still making it to DVD, with the fragmentation and streaming wars, owning the show on DVD is one way to make sure you’ll have it. It’ll also protect against a major actor being ‘cancelled’ and the show disappearing.
I’d like to be able to get “Midnight Caller” on DVD. Gary Cole played a radio host in the wee hours who took calls, and occasionally solved crimes based on those calls. But not always. Still, a great show, and I miss it. I’d like to see it again.
I haven’t looked lately but a while back I couldn’t find Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto on DVD for a realistic price. I don’t know if this was due to Gibson’s “cancellation” for being a racist asshole but when I last looked the DVD was only available for (IMHO) inflated prices. I don’t care for Gibson much but that was a pretty engaging movie. I had it on DVD at one point but loaned it to somebody and…well you know how that goes.