Wow, we had a lot of news coming from Paramount today, and studios they distribute for such as CBS, Comedy Central, Spike TV, etc. Among the news posts in the last 24 hours were for shows like:
On top of those,
Have Gun Will Travel news was posted just 3 days ago.
But wait, there's more! Lots more. When we talked to the fine folks at Paramount, they told us it's true that
Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, and
Mork & Mindy will all be out in the Summer of 2004, as was reported in
The Digital Bits' Rumor Mill a few days ago. In fact, we can tell you that these ought to show up somewhere around the end of June or the beginning of July. They're not sure exactly when yet, though...the dates might still move. Stay tuned for updates, whenever they nail something down. Also be aware that all four seasons of
Mork & Mindy are firmly in their sites, so Robin Williams fans can start drooling immediately.
Taxi is another series with long-range plans, with the first 3 seasons (out of the five seasons aired) already on the drawing boards. We don't have a clue yet when the first season will hit though, nor about other already-known series like
7th Heaven. They should make it in 2004, though. But we're keeping an eye on these, and others such as
The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, too.
One series that we've kind of put on the back burner in our minds though is
Charmed. We get e-mails every single day asking about this one, but we'll have to remind everyone that we've already
posted news a while back that this show won't make it to DVD until 2005 at least. And overseas developments don't apply to the Region 1 situation, unfortunately. So please, spare us! We're going to keep an eye on it, of course, but we're going to concentrate more for now on many of these sort-of-announced series which we're still waiting on street dates for. Dates we expect to happen in 2004, for the most part.
Speaking of already-announced series that we're keeping an eye on, we should mention that the
The Digital Bits' Rumor Mill piece we mentioned earlier says that the original series of
Star Trek should get launched in the 3rd Quarter of this year. We still don't have any verification of that, but we've heard about that as the general plan all along: all three seasons out just in time for the holidays. We'll keep you posted.
Think we're done yet? Nope, not by a long shot! Paramount may be getting out the original season of
Survivor ready to go as a season set release, but they also have plans to put the current season,
Survivor: All-Stars, onto DVD some time soon after the current contest finishes airing.
And then from Chase McCown comes even MORE interesting news! Chase sent us this e-mail just earlier today:
Last night I attended the Tribute to Sherwood Schwartz as part of the William S. Paley Television Festival in Hollywood. I asked Mr. Schwartz (the creator of The Brady Bunch and Gilligan's Island) if TBB would be coming to DVD. He said that although he had no control over that release, he knew it was "in the works" at Paramount. I know this isn't much, but for fans such as myself, it's something!
Very nice to know! Thanks, Chase, for that report. We'll follow up on this with Paramount and see if they're far enough along in their plans to talk about it yet. We've already talked to them quite a bit lately, though, as you can tell, so we may have pumped them dry for the moment.
However, while we were talking to Paramount, we mentioned how crazy it was that they're working on all these releases at once. The response was "
and we're just getting started!" So look out TV-on-DVD fans...start saving your pennies, because Paramount wants all of them!
Stay tuned, of course, for updates on all of these stories. It's going to be a very exciting TV-on-DVD year, and Paramount looks to be a major player.
Note: Since we first posted this article we have had numerous people emailing us to ask about
MacGyver. We haven't heard anything about the show coming out, sorry.
