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MY THREE SONS? Really? Truly?

It used to be that you could predict which shows were likely to be butchered on DVD. Not no more. First came The Fugitive, a show that used almost nothing but library music and still wound up getting its entire soundtrack stripped out, and now My Three Sons (with Fred MacMurray) has been released on DVD with a brand-new synthesizer score from the same guy who did the “new” Fugitive music.

The reason for this is the same as the Fugitive thing: these shows and several others from the early ’60s got most of their music cues from two different music libraries, Capitol and CBS, and since CBS/Paramount didn’t know who owned which cues, they decided to just throw everything out and have someone write a new score. This is something that could have been resolved much more easily if they’d brought in someone who was familiar with these music cues (there are people who know where each cue comes from, just by listening to them), but assuming that it’s not possible to sort out this problem, the real question is why CBS/Paramount bothers releasing them. They’re just getting well-deserved bad publicity for themselves, and the money they can make on these releases probably doesn’t even cover the cost of commissioning a whole new musical score.

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