If you’re a “Doctor Who” who was planning to trade in or scrap your old VHS copy of “The Chase” when the six-part Dalek story hits DVD worldwide later this year, you may want to hang on to it.
Episode one could feature a slight edit to it due to clearance issues.
The first episode features a short clip of the Beatles from the BBC’s Top of the Pops show. The TARDIS crew watch the Fab Four’s performance on the Time-Space Visualizer with Vicki commenting that she didn’t know the group played “classical” music.
The BBC and 2|Entertain were able to get the rights to include the clip in the UK release. However, the rights don’t extend to the worldwide release. According to the Doctor Who News Page, the clip (which is a few seconds in length) has been removed from the masters for areas outside the UK.
The clip was included as part of the VHS release of the show and has been included in the syndicated version of the six-part story for the past several years.
No word yet on when “The Chase” will come to the United States. It was just released in the UK as part of a box set with the previous story, “The Space Museum.”
With this edit there’s no reason to buy this DVD since you’re not getting the whole episode.
I was wondering what they would do about that. “Remembrance of the Daleks” had a similar issue. There was a scene where a Beatles was song playing on a jukebox. The original DVD release did not have the Beatles song (it was replaced by generic 1960s pop song). The much improved “special edition” does include the Beatles song. The special edition was not released in North America.
The Remembrance of the Daleks Special Edition was released in US/Canada earlier this month.
More “copyright” stupidity.
Aw, man. 🙁
This type of thing is ruining historical shows. WKRP in Cincinnatti (granted, nothing to do at all with good British sci-fi) had an even worse copyright-ectomy. They couldn’t use any of the music that they had rights to use for broadcast, because of the charges to leave it in.
It’s the “artists” right to say yes or no, of course… But NONE of the artists own the rights anymore. It’s corporate politics and “make a buck” attitudes that drive this sort of thing. Makes Me Sick.
Yeah, the emasculation of WKRP was a travesty. I couldn’t even watch the reruns when they hit TV Land years ago because they’d gone so far as to edit out the names of bands that were mentioned in conversations by the station personnel. How crazy is that? I mean it was a conversation that mentioned either the Stones or Led Zep, and they snipped it right out to avoid any potential ding in incurring fees. Crazy.
It makes me ever more appreciative of the fact that NBC Universal delayed the release of the Miami Vice DVDs until they’d secured clearances for all the music from all five seasons. It might have been frustrating to wait that extra 4-5 years, but the end result was worth it, to me, to the MV fans, and to NBCU’s bottom line. Everyone knew without the music, they would have squat for DVD sales, and spending those bucks on clearance rights to make even more bucks in sales was the right way to go.
I will just have to buy the British version. I suggest we all do. This is ridiculous
WKRP, Happy Days, the theme song from Married With Children, all were different once the DVD’s came out due to copyright “issues”.