Tag: wkrp in cincinnati

Movie/TV Show of the Week: WKRP in Cincinnati: The Complete Series.

Look, I know that many of you watched the show.  And I think that many of you know that when they first released WKRP In Cincinnati for DVD, they had to replace the music on the show with generic music, because – through absolutely nobody’s fault  – they didn’t get the home video rights.

Well (via @baseballcrank), they got the rights.

That reality returns in Shout Factory’s new DVD set WKRP In Cincinnati: The Complete Series, which restores the majority of the show’s original music cues. Not everything is here. Trainspotters will notice the absence of Pink Floyd’s “Dogs” from the landmark “Turkeys Away” episode, and the handful of Beatles tunes peppered throughout the series are nowhere to be found. Both groups are known to command an exorbitant fee for the filmic use of their music (as late as 2012, Matthew Weiner reserved a large portion of Mad Men‘s budget to secure the rights for “Tomorrow Never Knows”) — but it’s close enough to firmly anchor WKRP In Cincinnatiin the era of its creation.

And all is right with the world. Sorry, Eight Legged Freaks: it was a good run, but you have to go now. Continue reading Movie/TV Show of the Week: WKRP in Cincinnati: The Complete Series.

How *do* you resolve the WKRP in Cincinnati problem?

The problem being, apparently, that the DVDs suck because they had to take all the music out; there would have been no way to get all the permissions from all the bands whose music was used in the show (via RS McCain).  I have to say that I’d consider properly compensating the musicians is more important to me than presenting the show in its original form; I’d also have to say that I won’t buy the aforementioned DVDs in their present incarnation.  Not that I can particularly buy DVD sets of anything right now, but if I could, I wouldn’t.

It’s an interesting problem.

Moe Lane

PS: De rigeur: