At the beginning of last week, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (formerly Columbia/ Tristar) announced
Married...with Children - The Complete 3rd Season on DVD, and in our
news post for that we showed off the front cover and a menu screen as well. That set is coming out on
January 25th, and includes the infamous unaired episode, "I'll See You In Court".
What isn't included, however, is the iconic theme song, Frank Sinatra's "Love And Marriage", a situation we first described about a week-and-a-half before the announce date, in
this news report. In it, we remarked that the studio "
assures us that the music substitution will be clearly marked on the packaging. "
Many of our readers have wondered exactly what form that would take: what would the wording be, and whether Sony would try to spin it as a positive thing. After all, it's not as if the studio plans to put wording on their packaging that actively discourages people from buying their products - that would be expecting a bit much! But we join our readers in feeling that sometimes the studios go a tad too far is trying to make it sound exciting that music substitutions have regretably taken place.
We now have our first look at the back of the box for
Married...with Children - The Complete 3rd Season, and you can plainly see - right above the picture of Peggy and Al - that Sony's choice of wording is a simple statement of fact and nothing more: "Includes New Opening Theme Song". Take a look:
We applaud Sony for the plain-spoken sentence, bold-faced and prominently placed so that it is pretty noticable. We regret the need for the change, but here at TVShowsOnDVD we certainly understand that the studio was being asked to pay a large increase in the music license fee (which started out pretty high already before the, ah, attempted "re-negotiation") for a single song that lasted a short time. By the way, don't bug the Sinatra family about this; from what we hear it isn't a situation they are involved in, but rather a different entity who hasn't been named for obvious reasons.
I'm very bummed about the change, but it's the episodes I want after all, and I think most of you feel the same. Sony hopes so, too, because a lack of success with this box set's sales could jeopardize future releases in the series. If they had to do this, at least they did it right: they said so up-front, let DVD news sites like TVShowsOnDVD know about it and report it, put it on the box, and made the copy on the box factual rather than a marketing point.
Looking at the box back, we also see things like the episode breakdown (7 episodes on Disc 1, seven more on Disc 2, and then 8 episodes on the 3rd Disc) and the description of how the "Easter Eggs" supplement works: "
10 Hidden Easter Eggs Featuring Interviews With The Cast ", which is exactly how it worked on the second season release.
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone that's celebrating it today, and look for news all (extended) weekend long...the studios may be taking off, but we've gathered some cool news that we haven't had the chance to catch up to yet. And we'll be posting it (between naps) every day from now until Sunday. Stay tuned!
