There is a thread going about Life Goes On, the 1989 to 1993 network drama, started by someone who found episodes uploaded to YouTube and realised the show has almost no home video presence. Season one came out on DVD in 2006 and then the releases simply stopped. That pattern shows up often enough that you can usually guess the reason before anyone confirms it.
When a series gets exactly one season on disc and then goes quiet, the problem is almost never demand. It is that season one cleared its music and the later seasons did not, or the clearance was bought for a fixed window and nobody wanted to pay to renew it for a modest catalogue title. Life Goes On is an especially awkward case because its theme was a Beatles cover, and Beatles publishing is about the most expensive door anyone can knock on. Something that needs a full rescore before it can ship is a project, not a reissue.
What that leaves us with is a show existing in two places. The 2006 discs, if you can still find a set at a sane price, and whatever somebody has uploaded from an old off-air recording. One is going out of print and the other is a broadcast-quality transfer at absolute best, sitting on a platform that pulls things down without notice. Neither of those counts as preservation.
I do not have a fix for it. I have a stack of shows in the same position and I have mostly accepted that some are gone in any watchable form. What is the one series you have given up on ever seeing released properly?
When a series gets exactly one season on disc and then goes quiet, the problem is almost never demand. It is that season one cleared its music and the later seasons did not, or the clearance was bought for a fixed window and nobody wanted to pay to renew it for a modest catalogue title. Life Goes On is an especially awkward case because its theme was a Beatles cover, and Beatles publishing is about the most expensive door anyone can knock on. Something that needs a full rescore before it can ship is a project, not a reissue.
What that leaves us with is a show existing in two places. The 2006 discs, if you can still find a set at a sane price, and whatever somebody has uploaded from an old off-air recording. One is going out of print and the other is a broadcast-quality transfer at absolute best, sitting on a platform that pulls things down without notice. Neither of those counts as preservation.
I do not have a fix for it. I have a stack of shows in the same position and I have mostly accepted that some are gone in any watchable form. What is the one series you have given up on ever seeing released properly?
