There is a thread doing the rounds again asking Disney to reopen the anthology vault, the Disneyland and Wonderful World of Disney and Wonderful World of Color material, and floating a retro line to sit where the Treasures tins and the Movie Club exclusives used to be. I would buy it tomorrow. I also do not think demand is what is stopping it.
Old network television is the hardest catalogue there is to put on disc, and almost none of the difficulty is about how the masters look. Every episode is a stack of separate clearances. Music cues, guest appearances, sponsor material, footage licensed in from somewhere else for one segment. On a feature you clear all that once. On an anthology run you clear it hundreds of times, and each one is a lawyer's afternoon set against a print run that might be a few thousand units. That arithmetic stopped working around the point the disc market contracted.
It is also why this kind of material turns up on streaming quietly trimmed or with substitute music and no announcement. Discs cannot get away with that, so the safer move for a rights department is to do nothing at all.
If it ever comes back it will be a numbered limited run at collector pricing rather than a shelf line, and I would still take it. What I want to know is whether people here would genuinely pay disc money for 4:3 archival television in 2026, fresh scan or not, or whether we are just being nostalgic in public.
Old network television is the hardest catalogue there is to put on disc, and almost none of the difficulty is about how the masters look. Every episode is a stack of separate clearances. Music cues, guest appearances, sponsor material, footage licensed in from somewhere else for one segment. On a feature you clear all that once. On an anthology run you clear it hundreds of times, and each one is a lawyer's afternoon set against a print run that might be a few thousand units. That arithmetic stopped working around the point the disc market contracted.
It is also why this kind of material turns up on streaming quietly trimmed or with substitute music and no announcement. Discs cannot get away with that, so the safer move for a rights department is to do nothing at all.
If it ever comes back it will be a numbered limited run at collector pricing rather than a shelf line, and I would still take it. What I want to know is whether people here would genuinely pay disc money for 4:3 archival television in 2026, fresh scan or not, or whether we are just being nostalgic in public.
