Daniel Frank points out to me that the second season of The Dick Van Dyke Show on DVD is scheduled for release on the same date as the first one. Great! Here's a link to order that one from Amazon. Or order both on the same visit there and I still get a cut.
All of the listings say that this one contains a whole bunch of extras plus 31 episodes, but they do not list the 31 episodes. This raises an eyebrow or two because there were actually 33 episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show in its second season. If anyone can shed any light on this, shed it in this direction.
Also: I see that the same DVD company (Image Entertainment) has just brought out Woody Allen's What's Up, Tiger Lily? on DVD. There don't seem to be any extras on this, which is a shame. Would have been nice if they could have given us Alternate Audio with the original soundtrack.
Since I mentioned Daniel Frank: Over on his fine weblog, he points out that one thing which has delayed the SCTV episodes on home video (and even killed some of their televised reruns) has been a problem with music clearances. When you use someone else's song on a TV show, you have to clear the use of it, which can sometimes be complicated, especially if you want to use the song in an odd context or with parody lyrics. In some cases, parody lyrics are absolutely forbidden. Back when I wrote variety shows (back when there were variety shows) we often had to drop a sketch because we couldn't clear a certain song. I remember, at least back in the eighties, the Music Clearance people would laugh at you if you asked about doing anything odd with a Gershwin song or something from the Lerner and Loewe catalog. One of them said to me when I inquired, "I don't even have to make that call. The answer is always no. You use it exactly as written or you don't use it."
Or sometimes, a given song would just be too expensive. At least back then and probably still, Johnny Carson's famous theme song cost four or five times the going rate for a few bars of a comparable tune. That is why, when you see folks impersonate Carson, they so rarely use that song. (In the Saturday Night Live segments where Dana Carvey played Carson, they always skipped the monologue and started with a bit at the desk, as if returning from a commercial. That was, at least in part, because you couldn't do the show's opening without the theme and even NBC didn't want to pay the fee.)
Anyway, the relevance of all this to SCTV is that on at least a couple of episodes, I recall seeing them do something silly with a Gershwin tune, and they once did a parody of My Fair Lady. I asked one of our old Music Clearance people how they could get away with those, and the reply was, "They don't ask." Which is admirable in some ways but not others.