Ken Plume sends a slight correction to my earlier SCTV item. Tony Rosato and Robin Duke were not officially a part of the 90-minute SCTV done for NBC late night. They appear in some of those shows because a few sketches done for the earlier, 30-minute syndicated show were rerun in the 90-minute incarnation.
My friend who was involved with the DVD release also wrote me to mention that some of those sketches (i.e., the ones repeated from the earlier incarnation) are quite edited from their original versions…but that's the way they were presented on NBC so that's the way they are on the DVD set.
A topic we should discuss here when we have more time: As long as movies and old TV shows have been coming out on home video, the folks in the home video business have wrestled with the question of whether they should offer the most complete version or the way the product was originally released or just what they should do. It often happens that a show or film exists in several versions, or that with the home video release, it's possible to restore cut material or go back to a pre-release sequencing that some preferred. Occasionally, someone doing a home video release comes upon technical errors in the original which can now be easily fixed. Should they be? These questions usually come down to individual judgment calls but you have to ask what the over-all goal should be. If forced to choose, would we rather have a set of classic TV episodes presented the way the shows were originally aired or the way their makers would have preferred?