baby, if you've ever wondered

Out of the dozens of DVD box sets that fill the shelves in our living room, exactly three are solely and completely mine: Pink Lady and Jeff, Bottom, and Bubblegum Crisis. The rest were purchased by (or given to) my wife, and while some of them are of shows that we both enjoy, I still think of them as "hers" since she's the person who actually watches them.

Strangely enough (and despite my strong retrological tendencies) I've chosen to keep to the sidelines during the DVD boxset revolution. While it's wonderful to see so much nostalgia fodder made available to the public, I find myself liking the idea that the entire run of B.J. and The Bear can be obtained at a reasonable price more than the notion of sitting down and actually trying to choke down an episode of the series. It's similar how I feel about the fire department -- I'm glad to know they're out there, but I hope to hell that I'll never have to require their services. Plus, I'm not that much of a TV watcher, and on those occasions when I do plunk myself down in front of the small screen, I'd rather pop in a taped copy of Bad Ronald than watch a Facts of Life marathon on TV Land.

Life is too short, and fuzzy flashbacks to childhood aside, I've come to realize that most programs are best viewed once, if at all, then relegated to memory's distorting mercies.

There are some series whose appeal to me is durable enough to justify the purchase of a box set. Apart from the three I've already mentioned owning, the first (pre-outer space) season of Josie and The Pussycats and the three seasons of The Addams Family occupy low-priority slots on my Amazon wish list...and there's the problem of WKRP in Cincinnati.

Despite a strong and acknowledged demand, the DVD release of the classic sitcom about a struggling Midwestern rock radio station was held up for years over licensing issues. It's a problem which has kept several other favorites of mine -- It Came From Hollywood, Urgh! A Music War, the Region 1 release of Spaced, and the 60's Batman TV series -- from reaching store shelves. The problem stemmed from a change in how music was licensed for television, which given the heavy use of licensed music in the series, put a prohibitive price tag on a home release. Later syndication edits of the show worked around the issue by swapping in generic library music cuts in place of the original songs, and overdubbing dialogue where context required, but the fix was extremely unpopular with the fans.

As a result, the DVD release of WKRP remained in limbo for years, with half-baked rumors of a pending announcement making the rounds of internet fandom. When the official announcement was made last year regarding the first season's upcoming release on DVD there was speculation on the subject of the licensing issues, and whether or not the original or the later syndicated versions of the episodes would be used. The news that the show's creators were going to select replacement tracks as needed was taken as a tentatively positive sign that there would be an effort made to keep as much of the content intact as possible, and perhaps preserve the most contextually important songs through some corporate legal magic.

Instead, the end results turned out to be indistinguishable from the syndication edits, with scenes and dialogue heavily edited (or cut outright) to dodge any licensing issues.

The range of responses to the final products make for some fascinating, if maddening, reading. There are hardcore fans who see it as treason most foul and snotty reviewers who claim that "it's good as we're going to get" while dismissing the fan rants by downplaying the importance of the original music. It is comforting (and by "comforting," I mean "soul-wrenchingly depressing") to know that the eternal circular battle between disproportionate fan-ger and snotty condescension passing as "reasonableness" isn't just limited to comics fandom.

I love WKRP. It was the first "adult" television program I ever followed on a regular basis (though early syndicated repeats -- with the original music -- run weekday evenings on a local UHF station). It's one of the best ensemble cast sitcoms ever made, and unlike a lot of the cynical meanness that passes for TV comedy these days, it had, for lack of a better term, "heart." The reactionary, agriculture-obsessed newsman Les Nessman and the sartorially challenged lounge lizard ad man Herb Tarlek were given a sense of humanity and depth rather than played as simple Midwestern caricatures. Similarly, the "cool" characters in the cast were frequently shown to be all too human.

So, as a strong fan of the show, do I think that having the original music is that important?

I do, but I'm not going to foam at the mouth or declare a flamewar over it. I agree that the writing and acting is able to carry the show even with the cuts and substitutions, but the absence of the licensed tracks does diminish the experience. Given that the show was about a radio station, music played an important part, woven into the overall tapestry in things as subtle as an in-joke (CCR's "It Came out of the Sky" queued up after the disastrous turkey drop) or as accompaniment to a big dramatic or comedic moment (Foreigner's "Hot Blooded" playing in the background as Les sexes himself up with a toupee). Moreover, WKRP's creators thought the use of licensed music was important enough to justify shooting the series on video, instead of on film like the other MTM productions, because it meant lower fees for the music rights.

There's also the matter of historicity in regards to the music used in the show. The period in which WKRP originally ran, 1978-1982, was an incredibly important and interesting time in the history of pop music, encompassing the "death" of disco, the rise of the "new wave," and that mythical era when non-hyphenated "rock" was a powerful ongoing concern. One of the things I love most about WKRP is how it incidentally and unselfconsciously documented these trends, and others, as they happened -- things such as the ever-changing promotional posters (featuring, at certain times, The Selecter, The Clash, and Joe Jackson) in the broadcast booth or, most importantly, the station's playlist which included everything from the Flying Lizards to the Rolling Stones to the cool jazz of Donald Byrd to Frankie Lymon. It's a fascinating, if fictionalized, glimpse into the pre-media consolidation/standardized national format era (and those emerging trends were addressed in a couple episodes of the show) of music broadcasting, and it's a shame that aspect of WKRP has been completely (apart from the posters) redacted from the home video release.

It would have been nice to replace my grainy early syndication taped copies of the show with cleaner DVD versions, but the price for doing so is just too high, in too many ways.


A while back I made a project out of assembling a complete soundtrack for WKRP based on a marathon viewing of the show and various scraps of info found on the internet. It's still a bit shy of being finished, but it does make for some great listening. Here are a few selections pulled from it:

The Sports - Who Listens to the Radio? (from Don't Throw Stones, 1979; collected on The Definitive Collection, 2004) - Australian new wave of the Costello/Parker/Edmunds/Lowe school. With all the various genres and subgenres that have been "revived" in recent years, why hasn't pub rock-inflected power pop been given a new coat of paint and set loose upon the world?

Oh, that's right, it takes actual effort to come up with clever lyrics and killer hooks.

Ted Nugent - Queen of the Forest (from Ted Nugent, 1975) - Normally I wouldn't be caught dead posting something by the Dark Prince of Reactionary Rustbelt Rock, but this track happens to be the song that Dr. Johnny Fever played to kick off WKRP's format change from easy listening to rock in the series pilot, so I'm making a one time exception to my "No Nuge" policy. I'm also dedicating it to Dave Campbell, the Rainy City Madman. He knows why.

Oops, I almost forgot: BOOOOOGER!

Detective - Betcha Won't Dance (from It Takes One to Know One, 1978) - Does this sound punk to you? No? That's because it's "Hoodlum Rock," an absurd made-for-TV offshoot of punk performed by "Scum of the Earth" in a first-season episode of WKRP. One of the members of Scum of the Earth (not to be confused with The Dregs of Humanity) was played by the prolific and multi-talented Michael Des Barres. Detective, Des Barres then-current band, provided SOTE's music. (Des Barres also went on to play a DJ on the short-lived The New WKRP direct-to-syndication sitcom, which was slightly better than The New Monkees but not as good as The New Munsters.)