I've watched episodes of "Married... with Children" on Joost and Hulu.com, and both, for some reason, don't use the original "Love & Marriage" theme, but a different one. What is that different theme, and is it a matter of not having the song rights?
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MvL
ANSWERS: 3
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Song rights for TV shows have been a sore spot in many cases. Although I don't know anything about this particular instance, I have heard of several cases where older shows had no clause for "other media" in their contracts and therefore when it came time to release those shows on DVD they had to re-negotiate a new contract or in some cases replace the song. When the original "Gone in 60 Seconds" was released on DVD, the ballad "Lois Lane Blues" was replaced with a standard disco riff. When "WKRP in Cincinnati" was released on DVD they replaced entire shows with new music. When "Quantum Leap" was released in North America only the first season was all original music. Europe got an all-original second season but NA didn't. One scene even had the characters singing along to the song so when they ended up replacing it they had to blank out the character's voices. AS you can see, the big studios don't like to pay more for original stuff when they can get away with something much cheaper. Hope this helps.
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I don't know what the new music is (never been a Married...With Children fan), but it's fairly common for rights to theme music to be different from the rights to the show. The TV station I work for was airing public-domain episodes The Andy Griffith Show but "The Andy Griffith Show Theme" was still under copyright. So we aired it with royalty-free music instead.
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You know... that happened to me too, sort of. I just bought a boxed set of the Star Trek movies from the Original Series... and the opening music was the Next Generation theme, not the cheesy synthesizer music from the original series! How strange it is...
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