Two TV Shows On DVD announcements caught my eye:
Two TV Shows On DVD announcements caught my eye:
– Warner Brothers is bringing out season 1 of Family Matters, bowing to huge public demand for more Urkel. (The same demand that caused a one-shot guest character to take over the show in the first place.) I barely remember the first season; I was a regular Perfect Strangers viewer at the time, and I couldn’t understand why they’d given Harriet her own show. So I tuned out after the first couple of episodes, and thereby missed the emergence of Urkel; maybe this will remind us all of how that magic moment came to be. One thing I’m going to bet, though, is that we won’t be getting the early version of the main title where they used the very expensive original recording of “What a Wonderful World.” (Replacing it with a Full House-alike song was a good choice. It’s too gentle for a TGIF show.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_stCMaY4D-4
– The company that released Don Bellisario’s Tales of the Gold Monkey overseas has struck a deal to distribute it in North America. It sometimes seems to me that there are a lot of flop U.S. series — particularly adventure series — that become very popular overseas, like Cover Up and other short-lived shows of the ’70s and ’80s. I guess that while a show with only 22 episodes has no chance of being syndicated in North America, it can get picked up as a short-run series in other countries and gain a following. Long after the actors have all moved on to other things.