They didn't have the license and actually got sued for the VHS release.

https://old.reddit.com/r/FrostbiteFalls/comments/1flr8ue/fra...

Thank you, at last I have an explanation!

As for the people responsible: You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!

Its almost always a rights issue with changes to movie and TV soundtracks.

And video games too. GTA 4 has had that issue, and digital copies of the game have had music (which Rockstar no longer has the rights to) patched out.

Because of expired licenses to use the original music. You can see the same thing happening with later releases of media. As an example, DVD releases of Scrubs were known to have switched out many songs in the entire show.

This happens in the streaming days too. I believe Arrested Development was one where when it came to streaming they had to change the music.

It happened with Daria as well.

If you have wide taste in film and TV, at some point you have to turn to piracy (and/or fan edits) to get the “real thing”. Impossible or impractical to get it any other way.

> at some point you have to turn to piracy

Cory Doctorow's young-adults novel "Pirate Cinema" develops around this idea.

The CD release of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio program notes that it's mostly the original recordings, except for the music. They didn't have the rights to release the music on CD, so they substituted in different music. If you want the same program that was broadcast over the radio, you need to buy it on cassette, where apparently they do have the rights to the music.

Something has obviously gone badly wrong in the world of IP licensing. Somehow I imagine that movies don't license different parts of their soundtrack differently to make sure they can never be rereleased.