My chum Earl Kress has a post up responding to my gripe about TV shows being released on DVD as single volumes and then again as full sets. You can read the whole thing here but I'll post one paragraph before I respond…
But the one problem with Mark's argument is that it's a Catch-22. He says wait for the Ultimate Box Set, which has all the seasons of your favorite show. However, if the individual seasons don't sell well enough, companies are now starting to reassess midway through and cancel series. For instance, Huckleberry Hound Volume 1, pictured at left, may turn out to be the only Huckleberry volume released due to low sales. Other series which have recently been shelved after one or more seasons were released are Boy Meets World, Murphy Brown and Night Court. If the sales aren't good enough to release the entire series individually, they'll never get to that ultimate box set.
Earl's right that this is a problem…but I would hope that if people buy the way I'm going to from now on — wait for the series to finish and see if there's a complete set issued — it will lead to companies releasing these things as complete sets at the outset. Certainly, F Troop (a show Earl mentions he hopes will be go the distance) could have been put out in one volume.
The other thing they could do is make the extras available to folks who buy the set volume by volume. In the example of M*A*S*H, if you're a devout fan of the show and you bought the DVD releases season by season, you've sunk a nice piece of change into getting all the episodes but you don't get all the bonus material that comes when you buy the forthcoming complete collection. What they should do is include a coupon in every season set and if you send in all the coupons, you can purchase for a nominal cost, the bonus discs and the slipcase. But they won't do that. The goal here is to make the most fanatic M*A*S*H fans buy all the seasons a second time.
I think Warner Home Video dropped the ball on that first Huckleberry Hound set. It's great material but they brought it out at a time when the market was being flooded with complete sets of classic TV shows, especially cartoon shows, many of them Hanna-Barbera releases from Warner Home Video. Ol' Huck got lost amidst the release of the better-known Yogi Bear, Flintstones and Scooby Doo sets. I hope they'll reconsider and try the second and final collection.