Fugitive

I’m referring, of course, to the controversy over CBS/Paramount’s DVDs of The Fugitive. Today’s Variety has an article about this issue. But notice that even for Variety, one of the biggest entertainment publications around, CBS/Paramount refused to comment. Maybe it’s because any further comment besides their recent unresponsive statement (see below) would force them to admit they made a mistake. Despite the unresponsiveness of the studio, the article does seem to bring us closer to understanding what happened; the studio didn’t want to be bothered to sort out the stock music cues they owned from the cues they didn’t own, so they changed everything:

CBS/Paramount home video finally put out an official response on the whole The Fugitive re-scoring fiasco, but it’s really no response at all:

Many of us have pondered long and hard over what is the worst musical outrage perpetrated against a TV show on DVD. And then Paramount comes along and spoils our hard work by providing an obvious answer. It turns out that Paramount’s release of the first half of season 2 of The Fugitive replaces the entire musical score. We’re not even talking about replacement cues, or one episode whose music has been rescored (this happened with an episode of Moonlighting where the DVD accidentally used a rejected score for one episode instead of the final, better score that Alf Clausen composed); all the music scores have been replaced with new electronically-generated music composed by one Mark Heyes, a composer and music editor for various CBS projects. This great and exhaustive post at the Classic TV History Blog explains the whole thing in great detail.