TV Guidance

Jaime Weinman writes about all kinds of television and other kinds of popular culture. He does not write Gossip Girl episode reviews. Follow Jaime on Twitter: @weinmanj

Categories: TV Guidance

Andy Richter Controls a Much Cheaper Universe

by Jaime Weinman on Tuesday, April 7, 2009 9:17am - 3 Comments

Thanks to Zack Smith for pointing out this YouTube video, where clips from Andy Richter Controls the Universe are compared to their counterparts on the recently-released DVD. By now you know the way this goes (company changes music, I complain, nothing is accomplished), so I’ll just let the clips speak for themselves, especially the first one.

Tags: Andy Richter Controls the Universe, Music Changes

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http://www.xtra.ca/blog/national/ Scott D

Ugh. Those substitutions are really painful.

The record companies’ insistence on high royalties from TV show clips is slimy and I wish something could be done.

It’s especially bad with British shows, where the use of current pop music is a given — the DVDs of ‘Skins’ and the original ‘Queer as Folk’ are all but ruined by the awful replacement music.

We need more companies like Shout, who ponied up for ALL the music used in ‘Freaks and Geeks,’ or — better yet — companies that will tell the record industry to realize that substitutions hurt them too.

Charles

Yeah, these are some pretty egregious replacements. I don’t really care too much if networks replace background music that’s not as important if it’s the only way we’ll get some shows on DVD. But where the music is actually important to what’s going on… It’s just stupid.

http://southdakotadark.blogspot.com Todd VDW

I have less and less trouble getting worked up about this. It’s just becoming a fact of the copyright universe we live in on older shows. So long as the substitutions aren’t completely egregious, I can grin and bear it (and, in fact, I hadn’t even NOTICED there were substitutions on Andy Richter … granted, I haven’t seen it in almost a decade, but still). Obviously on a show like WKRP, the music was so integral that you kind of need to have it there, but I’m not sure a lot of current-ish shows don’t use pop music as too much of a crush and its absence reveals whether or not the gags/story beats work on their own.