Fred Savage, who played "Kevin" on "The Wonder Years" grew up surrounded by
some of the most beautiful and, in the case of his co-star Danica McKeller,
smart, women in Hollywood. Who did he end up marrying? Someone
he met in kindergarten.
I had stopped watching "The Wonder Years" after a year or so because I
thought it was getting too precious, and I began to find the narration
annoying. I just read a TV critic who feels that the narration "made
the show". Hey, maybe I was wrong. I don't know. I won't be able
to re-examine the idea until it does finally get released on DVD. Or
not.
Here's my second brilliant idea of
the month!
As you may or may not have heard, a well-regarded TV series,
"The Wonder Years", has never been released on DVD. Why not?
Lots and lots of people want it. Well, the problem is that "The
Wonder Years" used a lot of popular music in the background of many episodes.
At the time, the cost of using pop music in a tv show or movie was
negligible.
Now it is not. Everyone got greedy. Of course, the owners of "The Wonder Years" are also
greedy-- they are dissatisfied with the amount of money they will make if they have to pay
all those royalties.
The funny thing is, you could probably acquire most of the songs used in the show for
a very reasonable cost, if you just bought them on iTunes. Maybe you already have copies of
those songs. In fact, if you are fan of the "The Wonder Years", chances are pretty good that
you already have a fully licensed, fully paid for copy of the songs used in the show.
So what we need is software.
What we need is for the owners of "The Wonder Years" to release the
series on special DVD's without the expensive already paid-for music. You put the DVD in your
computer and this special software scans your hard drive, finds the missing music, and synchronizes it. Then it
burns the entire DVD to a new blank. Problem solved.
The only problem is that this would make naked a little-understood fact about copyright: you are paying
twice, three, four times for the right to listen to the same song, whether you have the album, the CD, the
itunes version, or a movie or TV show with that song on it, your wedding
video (if your videographer paid for and charged you for the rights-- not
likely.)
And by the way, it's not the artists who are greedy, of course. It's people who usually swindled the artists
out of their rights in the first place. They'll be damned if you get to watch "The Wonder Years" or the great
documentary on the civil rights movement, "Eye on the Prize" with the music.
