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Comment by AbsurdCensor | Hacker News Reader

> Oh you watched this show with the iconic soundtrack? Too bad it's only available on the VHS release from 1995, they couldn't get the rights anymore so here is the same show but worse with different music

Even slightly more modern shows I think have had that happen as well. The Drew Carry show would have been a great example.

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Yup. Daria is one of the most tragic ones, given how it was an MTV show and thus featured music iconic to the era and familiar to the audience. Replaced with muzak in the DVD releases, and a bunch of pirates have cobbled together best-effort mash-ups based on audio from TV rips, which sometimes were of very low quality, but for some episodes, all that had survived in the piracy scene was like, a RealVideo file with a 64kbps audio stream.

I loved the show Tour of Duty on CBS from 1987-90 about the Vietnam War. It used a lot of 1960's music including the Rolling Stones Paint It Black as the opening theme.

When it was released on DVD all the music was replaced with generic stuff. Then it was released on DVD in the UK with all the original music. The music licensing laws and prices are very different. It's region 2 and PAL but plays fine on a computer.

I also really enjoyed this show and rewatched it a few years ago on DVD. But I certainly noticed the main title music was different. I don't recall noticing in-episode music though, and wouldn't have remembered it from the show.

I went looking for the PAL DVDs after seeing your comment, and found one season but not a full set. After looking a little online it seems like the PAL release might have been cropped down a bit from the NTSC release? If that's the case it seems pretty disappointing.

Can someone give me more examples? I didn't realize this was a thing and am kind of facinated.

Daria is another example - being on MTV they used a lot of popular music from the time which clearly did not cost them much extra at the time of TV broadcast but was replaced with generic music for the DVD release.

Interview With the Vampire theatrically ends with the rolling stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” playing over the final scene and end credits. When the movie was on Netflix, that was cut from the soundtrack and replaced with an acoustic cover of the song.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wonder_Years#DVD_music_rep...

WKRP in Cincinnati

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WKRP_in_Cincinnati#Music_licen...

Scrubs was another one with pretty obvious music changes, because some were part of the dialogue or a joke that just doesn't make sense after the change.

Some anime on Netflix is affected. Off the top of my head, the iconic first ending theme for Naoki Urusawa's Monster had its haunting vocals removed leaving only the backing track, and Neon Genesis Evangelion had its similarly iconic ending theme covers of Fly Me to the Moon sung by its voice actresses removed.

Malcom in the middle ran into this, it didn't have DVDs for years.

And I'm pretty sure the ones that got released were based on pirates when they were released.

The episode of The Simpsons where Lisa gets a pony. Homer falls asleep at the wheel to a different lullaby than what was originally broadcast.

The substitute is a subpar filler compared to the original.

Dawson's Creek had iconic music, but as far as I can tell, the series with the original music is unobtainium. Afaict the pirates can't even get it.

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