Happy New Year, folks! This is David Lambert, your TVShowsOnDVD.com News Director and Assistant Site Adminstrator. Site owner Gord Lacey and I hope that all of our readers have had an enjoyable and safe New Year celebration last night.
This is the time of year that DVD news websites like ours tend to look back to the past twelve months and talk about which releases were the best, or had the bext extras, or best quality. Or talk about the best and worst studios, and that sort of thing. Well don't worry, we're going to do that here...we're still getting it together.
Right now, though, we're going to do something a bit different: we're going to look to the year ahead, and bring you a list of TV Shows that you can reasonably expect to see on DVD in 2005! Yes, and a glance below will show you that it's a great big list...
111 shows long!
Where did the list come from? As many of you know, we don't maintain a "talkback" or "feedback" discussion forum here at "TSoD" (short for TVShowsOnDVD.com). Instead we have agreed with the owners of the Home Theater Forum ("HTF") website - the online discussion forum where Gord and I first found each other in a pre-TSoD time - to use their website as our official discussion forum. Since then, the great folks there at the HTF have made a separate "TV Shows Software" forum, where TV-DVDs get discussed...our thanks to owners Ron Epstein and Parker Clack, and every administrator/moderator there for their co-operation and support. More importantly, our thanks to the wonderful members of the HTF who participate in discussions and aren't too bashful to ask the hard questions!
One HTF member, Michael Metro, started
a discussion in late October with the subject of "TV Shows coming to DVD in 2005??" The idea was to guess what shows would see DVD release in the new year, and Michael appealed to Gord and I to "throw (them) a bone" and talk about what we knew. I went a bit further than that...I dug through every TVShowsOnDVD news item since May 2004, and pulled out every single title from then on that we had said in a story would be a new-to-DVD series in 2005.
Let me be clear about that last part: my intent was to only inlclude TV Show titles that had never been on DVD for general retail release in Region 1 before 2005. Items sold directly in the past, like Columbia House's releases of
Hogan's Heroes and
The Cosby Show, were not used to disqualify a title from the list. Public domain releases were also discounted as disqualifiers. However, any general retail release of a TV Show from a studio that properly licensed it would indeed keep a title off the list...even if the previous release was a single episode released six or seven years ago from a no-name company that's no longer around (just a made-up example; I have no title in mind when I explain that).
So, for series that are "new to DVD" completely in 2005, I find that the below list of television show properties have been said by us in TVShowsOnDVD news items to be coming in 2005 with some degree of certainty.
Bear in mind that not everything said to be coming out a given time period ends up coming out when expected. For instance,
back in July Universal sent out a press release that had a massive list of titles, and said
Amazing Stories would be out November 2nd. It never came. They are now announcing March titles, and still no new official sign of the show.
Amazing Stories probably belongs on the below list as well...we know other Universal "for sure in '04" shows like
Miami Vice, Bionic Woman, and
Kojak got pushed back from 2004 to 2005;
Amazing Stories probably did as well. But it's not on the list because Universal hasn't stepped up and clearly told us that this is the case.
So now I've talked and talked and talked (like I always do), and you're quite bored with me talking about how the list got put together. You're ready to look it over, right? Well, without further ado, here it is:
- Adam 12
- Adventures of Superman, The
- Alfred Hitchcock Presents
- America Undercover
- America's Next Top Model
- Atomic Betty
- Baa Baa Black Sheep
- Bewitched
- Bionic Woman, The
- Brady Bunch, The
- Brak Show, The
- C.S.I.: New York
- Captain and Tennille, The
- Category 6: Day of Destruction
- Charmed
- Coach
- Cosby Show, The
- Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The
- Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines
- Deadwood
- Degrassi Jr. High
- Dharma & Greg
- Dick Cavett Show, The
- Doogie Howser, M.D.
- Dragnet (newest version)
- Dragnet (original version)
- Ed, Edd N Eddy
- Emergency!
- Family Ties
- Flying Nun, The
- Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The
- Full House
- Gidget
- God, the Devil and Bob
- Greatest American Hero, The
- Harvey Birdman, Attorney-At-Law
- Hogan's Heroes
- Huckleberry Hound Show, The
- Hunter
- I Dream of Jeannie
- Ironside
- It Takes A Thief
- Jamie Foxx Show, The
- Jim Henson Presents Mother Goose Stories
- Joan of Arcadia
- Josie and the Pussycats
- Kojak
- Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County
- Las Vegas
- Leave It To Beaver
- Lidsville
- Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman
- Lone Gunmen, The
- Lost
- MacGyver
- Mages
- Marcus Welby M.D.
- Maverick
- McCloud
- McHale's Navy
- Men Behaving Badly (UK)
- Miami Vice
- Mister Rogers' Neighborhood
- Moonlighting
- Mr. Magoo Show, The
- Murder One
- Murphy Brown
- Mysteries, Magic and Miracles
- NewsRadio
- Night Court
- One Day at a Time
- One Tree Hill
- Parkers, The
- Partridge Family, The
- Perils of Penelope Pitstop, The
- Pimp My Ride
- Power, Privilege & Justice
- Pretender, The
- Profit
- Puffy Ami Yumi
- Quincy, M.E.
- Reilly: The Ace of Spies
- Remington Steele
- Renegade
- Rockford Files, The
- Roseanne
- Saved By The Bell: The New Class
- Scrubs
- Shelly Duvall's Tall Tales and Legends
- Simon & Simon
- Sister, Sister
- Six Million Dollar Man, The
- Star Trek: Enterprise
- Star Trek: The Animated Series
- Star Wars: Clone Wars
- Stripperella
- Sweet Valley High
- Taxicab Confessions
- This Is Your Life
- 'Til Death Do Us Part: Carmen and Dave
- Tomorrow Show, The
- Tony Orlando and Dawn
- Tracey Takes On...
- Transformers: Cybertron
- Undeclared
- Venture Bros., The
- Voltron: Defender of the Universe
- Wayans Bros., The
- Wonderfalls
- Woody Woodpecker Show, The
- Yogi Bear Show, The
Wow, that's a long one, isn't it? And quite exciting! There are a lot of old favorites on that, and new shows as well. If you want more details about the news we posted about any of those, please use our
News By Show link to look up your favorite titles. In a very few cases we don't have updated news on a particular title, but expect to post some in the coming weeks.
Please don't forget that there are titles on the list that may still not happen in 2005. For instance, there is very thin info on Universal titles from the
late May 2004 news from the so-called "Uni-brochure", like
Adam 12, Coach, both
Dragnet versions,
Simon & Simon, Baa Baa Black Sheep and others.
Other titles that were "firmly" placed on a studio's schedule a few months ago and haven't been talked about since, like Paramount's
Family Ties, The Parkers, and
Sister Sister might also be up in the air these days...we don't know, because the studio hasn't given us any new hints about them. So that list above isn't a "promise", and please don't take it that way. Let's play it by ear as the year progresses.
Also, that list doesn't include many items that are sure to show up on DVD as well. We talked above about
Amazing Stories and how it never hit in 2004, and so it's "sure" to turn up in 2005, but Universal hasn't told us that outright (if it does, it might be very late in the year). There are other examples, too. Like
Lost, Desperate Housewives is fairly sure to turn up, but nobody's said as much and it's bad to just assume. As I mention in
a news post yesterday,
The New Monkees seems to be in the talks, and I'd be surprised if that didn't happen. And I personally feel that 2005 is finally the year we get both
He-Man and
She-Ra, but that's just my gut talking! I hope
Get Smart! arrives as well; it's a personal favorite of mine...but I haven't heard a solid thing so far, much to my dismay.
Many many more titles are sure to show up in 2005, that we can't know about at this time. Others that are currently on our list above will never come out, sometimes for reasons completely unknown to us (think
The Nanny). Still, such a great big long list is a great way to start the new year, full of anticipation for many of our favorites! We wish we could give good news about everyone's favorites, but unfortunately that's not within our power.
Again, our thanks to the great folks at HTF who participated in the discussion; it's still ongoing for anyone who wishes to join in! Our thanks to every one of our readers as well: in the words of an old wine cooler commercial, we thank you for your support! Stay tuned throughout 2005 for news about the above 111 titles, plus continuations of existing DVD releases (more
E.R., Roswell, C.S.I., Too Close For Comfort, Three's Company, SCTV, Golden Girls, Fat Albert, Twilight Zone, A-Team, Jeffersons and
Saturday Night Live are all in-the-works...just to name a tiny few). It's going to be a very exciting (not to mention very expensive!) year for TV Shows On DVD. Don't touch that dial!!!
