I swore off streaming services when they started pulling episodes of comedy shows and editing out scenes because they were worried someone might be offended
- Season 4 Episode 3: America's Next Top Paddy's Billboard Model Contest
- Season 6 Episode 9: Dee Reynolds: Shaping America's Youth
- Season 8 Episode 2: The Gang Recycles Their Trash
- Season 9 Episode 9: The Gang Makes Lethal Weapon 6
- Season 14 Episode 3: Dee Day
They're all in my home server, though :)
There's at least one ALF ('86-90)episode that you can only get the uncensored version via piracy.
(Episode in question is Try to Remember. ALF originally got an electric shock. It quickly got censored in reruns to have ALF slip and hit his head because the network worried kids would get shocked emulating ALF.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smothers_Brothers_Comedy...
Reading online, I learned that a lot of the original music had been licensed only for the original run of the show, so even when it went to DVD in the early 2000s they had to remove a whole bunch of the original music. It's terrible on two fronts: one, the show is an awesome snapshot of 90s music, with tons of great stuff featured both as background music and in extended live performances, but they cut whole scenes and entire episodes that had too much of it, and two, whoever managed the process of picking replacement music clearly did not care at all, and used awful generic music that sounds like it came from a file called "BeachRiff.aiff" on a $29.95 CD library of royalty-free 60 second stock music samples.
I admit to finding a source of video files patched together from various sources with the original soundtracks intact, and it's simply MUCH more enjoyable. It seems, though, that some episodes of live performances are lost to time—or at least lost to the corporate owners who'd rather sit on the tapes in a warehouse somewhere than make them available.
What's the point? This was much less a malicious thing than it is made out to be. Once the licensing ran out, that's it. They can't just YOLO their way through it, or they'd have been sued. It's possible they tried to negotiate new terms for the music, but terms couldn't be agreed. When it came time to release on DVD, the person involved for the music might not have been available or interested in doing it again. At that point, the music would never feel right when replaced. The last point being these producers would be doing this on the cheap, so your <$30 CD library wouldn't have been far off, except the music libraries would have been much more expensive than that. Decent royalty free music has only been a thing within the past 10-15 years.
Edit: one more thing about the music, it is a large expense for the production. the studios are usually willing to pay for it to air, because they know how much ad sales they have and build it into part of the per episode expense. negotiating for DVD release with no known amount of money to earn makes it difficult to negotiate a license for "real" music
If you want 4k, that fan restoration project is also the only way to get it
1990s Beavis and Butthead episodes seem completely bizarre/pointless without the music.
When Mike Judge started releasing new episodes back in 2012-ish, it's noticeable how he mostly avoided music clips and focused on satirizing reality shows that were on the same network (MTV.) I assume this was to avoid licensing nightmares.
Turned out the 'official' release was heavily edited, with tone, characters, and even some plot had been completely reshaped. I've found this to be increasingly prevalent, and not just in a "made for TV" or "adapted for Flying" type modifications.
They decided to remove stuff that cost them nothing to have in their library like Gone with the Wind. I'd never watch it but it was clear then they had decided they would be gatekeepers of what people can and cant watch.
I cancelled Netflix too, but it's not true that it cost them nothing to have it in their library. Everyone in the movie still needs to get paid and simply having the show in the library costs them money.
I can definitely see how streaming services would adapt to bigots.
The analogy requires you giving up what you want because they stopped carrying something others find offensive. Not that they don’t sell what you like all up. In which case it makes perfect sense not to shop there.
The analogy you gave would be better if they edited the content to be semantically equivalent but they aren’t. The content just isn’t available.
Now maybe the argument is that you’re paying for the service. In which case it would be like Costco where you have a membership and they definitely don’t carry offensive material.
