They also often time have versions of old movies and shows that have been modified due to silly things like license agreements on music expiring! I have felt gaslighted when I rewatch and old movie and some scene isn’t how I remember.
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.
My sore spot is the original Rust In Peace album. It was rerecorded and the rerecording is horrible. Any copy of the original is treasure to me.
That's a fair point!
When the Bobs sold Back to the Future they put a clause in the contract that the movies could not be remade or altered in any way without their approval. They nixed the 3D versions that Universal was planned when 3D TVs were in vogue.
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
Of course these people did not want to sell a broken product; they sold a lot fewer copies because they were forced to by goofy laws and their financial circumstances.
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.