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TV On DVD: No Plans For Almost Anything

TV Shows on DVD has posted highlights from the Home Theater Forum chat with Warner Home Video’s TV/animation division. Back when DVD was big and HTF was a bigger site than it is now, they used to have these chats with quite a few people; now it seemed surprising that WB even had a DVD division to participate in the chat.

As you can see, most of the answers are not encouraging: many unreleased or incomplete shows (like, sigh, the last episodes of Animaniacs and Tiny Toons) fall into the “no plans at this time” category. Of course, with DVD having problems and Blu-Ray unlikely to expand to include a lot of non-current TV shows (or classic movies), the real question is what companies are going to do to get their TV catalogue out there in other ways: online streaming, burn-on-demand, and so on are the only answers if we want to see some of these shows. But that wasn’t what the chat was about.

One piece of mildly good news from the chat is the announcement that they’re working on season 2 of Growing Pains. Yes, really, that’s good news. Creators Neal Marlens and Carol Black were forced out after the first season — they’d land on their feet with The Wonder Years — and were replaced by the team of Guntzelman/Sullivan/Marshall, famous for their weird vanity logo. The show became nastier but quite well-written and willing to experiment with format, storytelling and camerawork; one of the seminal “bad sitcoms with good writing.”

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