TV shows are even worse because of the soundtrack.
Oh you watched this show with the iconic soundtrack? Too bad it's only available on the VHS release from 1995, they couldn't get the rights anymore so here is the same show but worse with different music
Even video games are not exempt from that. GTA games has tons of music removed from the radios with later digital re-releases so currently the original console disc versions are the only way to play the games as they were released back then https://www.reddit.com/r/GTATrilogy/comments/1gsqdc5/what_so...
I believe the only place you can watch them as originally produced is iPlayer, but at least the BBC has copies somewhere.
In the end the situation around sound track licensing in different media seems so counter productive to even the interests of the rights holders. Essentially shows and games that incorporate songs are free advertisements for those songs and in no way compete with direct sales / streaming of that music on its own.
Even slightly more modern shows I think have had that happen as well. The Drew Carry show would have been a great example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WKRP_in_Cincinnati#Music_licen...
And I'm pretty sure the ones that got released were based on pirates when they were released.
The substitute is a subpar filler compared to the original.
When it was released on DVD all the music was replaced with generic stuff. Then it was released on DVD in the UK with all the original music. The music licensing laws and prices are very different. It's region 2 and PAL but plays fine on a computer.
I went looking for the PAL DVDs after seeing your comment, and found one season but not a full set. After looking a little online it seems like the PAL release might have been cropped down a bit from the NTSC release? If that's the case it seems pretty disappointing.
It's very hard to justify copyright in 2026 over music used in a 1980s TV show. Shows were aired once or twice (summer reruns), with additional syndication runs for particularly popular shows, and that was it. Nobody expected to make a dime from a show 40 years later. Copyright has grown absurdly out of proportion of the economic reality for which these works were originally produced.
Probably? But to devil's advocate here, I grew up watching reruns in 1990 from the 1950s on Nick at Nite or UHF stations. You could make a case that not only the actors but bands who allowed music to be used would deserve residuals, and with reruns that worked fine. The format change from TV to DVD and then to Streaming is what blew it all up.
Home video releases of whole series weren't envisioned until basically the 2000s. Most TV shows that did have releases on video would just pick a couple good episodes at a time, and sell those. A reasonable job to track down a half-dozen rights holders, and if you couldn't find them or get the rights, I assume they'd just pick a different episode.
The way the original terms were negotiated, the rights were just licensed specifically "for television" because that seemed like all that was needed, and the amount of work to locate each rightsholder to renegotiate is just astronomical. Thankfully now every show is making sure to get rights for streaming (and physical media... Right? Right?) but it's a shame what happened to everything from the 1970s-1990s. Only piracy can save us.
[0] https://kotaku.com/forza-horizon-4-delisted-xbox-licensing-1...
But we have this - https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/
"97% of project 4K77 is from a single, original 1977 35mm Technicolor release print, scanned at full 4K, cleaned at 4K, and rendered at 4K."
Opening scene comparison - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1b47UP6ZGI
It was bound to happen with Star Wars, given how big a series it is. I wish we could have the same with more, but the amount of effort is huge in many cases, and literally impossible in others.
Star Trek: TNG was a bit of a special case though, because it had to be re-cut and new digital special effects created and edited into scenes.
I think this perspective holds more true for things that were broadcast in HD but only got commercial DVD releases. That's a disappointing lapse in high quality availability where HD content was distributed, just not in a persistent form for home use. In those cases the best quality available is an HD TV or satellite recording which might not have been preserved even in online media sharing communities.
Don’t get your hopes up. That release is very special. It happened at just the right time: discs were still selling and streaming had not yet taken over.
There is simply not sufficient market for such restorations any longer. They probably didn’t make back the cost of the remaster.
The miracle was supposedly $1.2 million per season. On a back catalog item where they apparently never made their money back (maybe we shouldn't believe them on that, dunno).
But in other cases, it's not about the money at all, but about everyone cockblocking it at every step of the way long enough that the assets themselves wither and die. Babylon 5 comes to mind.
I think it would be more accurate to say that they might not have made the money back as quickly as they had hoped. Since the blu-rays are still being sold and the remasters are also being licensed to streaming services they will make that money bad and most likely have by now.
> But in other cases, it's not about the money at all, but about everyone cockblocking it at every step of the way long enough that the assets themselves wither and die. Babylon 5 comes to mind.
Even that is ultimately only a question of money as faithful re-creations of the 3D models can be created - and have been by fans for small parts.
Bablyon 5 is a really speacial case though as the unbutchered SD versions never made it to even DVD as those already got half-assed remasters with all the CGI parts simply cropped to be widescreen and then upscaled.
Unlike movies, TV shows (and this includes TNG) have an additional problem that they were often only mastered in SD with a lot of the digital effects never rendered in higher resolution. Even for scenes show entirely on film, there was no reason to re-take shots that are out of focus but still good enough for SD. That does make TNG-like restorations not just a matter of attitudes towards preservation from the rights holders but an inherently difficult project.
I'm grateful that diminishing returns were hit earlier with audio, though, which limits the blast radius for music releases. Most classic albums have a range of different masterings available on audio CD, many of which are available cheaply secondhand, which makes getting ahold of a good/accurate release considerably less daunting.
Movies and especially TV shows on the other hand are a mess. It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.