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Where's A Different World?

Of the many hours of TV my wife and I watch, we don't watch a lot of the same shows. Two of the shows we have enjoyed immensely together are The Cosby Show and A Different World. A few weeks back, she made mention to me about how she read that, while Season 1 dropped on DVD, subsequent seasons have been held in limbo. Doing some research on Wikipedia, I found this, saying that Urban Works, the company that owned the rights to release these, was bought out by First Look Studios back in 2006. Digging deeper, I read that, while it was intially set to drop, Season 2's DVD release got cancelled with no word on if/when it would be brought back. What's good with that?

I hit up the First Look site, and tried calling the number in their Contact Us section. Error message? I noticed an e-mail address, and sent a pretty detailed message asking for info, and ended up getting it blocked by their spam filter. Now, this company has also released The Cosby Show, as well as Baywatch, in the last few years, on DVD. Why not A Different World? Is this just a mess up with the rights and licenses, or is it deeper? Do they not think a show of this caliber will make money with the demographic it reached (urban youth from the late 80s/early 90s, college students, fans of The Cosby Show, etc.)? BET has shown reruns over the last few months, as have Oxygen and other channels... how could a DVD release of the remaining seasons NOT get put out?

I am two steps from starting up a petition on this, but I want to know that fans of the series are with me on this, wondering where this show will end up in the end. Pass this on, leave a comment, let's get together on ths one!

EDIT: Right before posting this, I noticed TransGriot has the same idea, in longer detail, explaining Viacom's thoughts on putting this out (poor sales of Season 1 = not coming out). We need to get organized...
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1 comment:

Monica Roberts said...

thanks for the shout out in your post.

Let's get the ball rolling on this and express to Viacom that if y'all can put out all those humor challenged Seinfeld shows, you can release Seasons 2-6 of A Different World.

BTW, I did stumble across a petition somewhere out there on the Net requesting that Viacom release ADW.