you know how you can go and watch a movie you watched a bunch as a kid and the version of a song in it is different? like they actually changed it since you were a kid? that isn't normal. we didn't do that until like, the last ten years. it's fucked up.
This is a post about how the Extra-Special-Super-Limited-Collector's-Wet-Dream versions of Neon Genesis Evangelion that cost $250 on ebay don't have "Fly Me to the Moon" in the credits even on the ADV dub.
i know I'm playing this off as me being pedantic but i really shouldn't.
Up til about the last 10 years it was widely understood that if you licensed a song to be used in a film or a video game or a television show that that song would be in that film or video game or television show in perpetuity.
Then, about a decade ago, things started changing. I don't know the exact point in time it changed, but the first time i became aware of it was around 2017 or '18 when some video game, i think it was Grand Theft Auto IV, got a big patch that did exactly one thing and that was remove a bunch of songs that had been in the game because the licensing expired.
And I remember being angered by that but going "oh well, that's video games, right?"
But then a couple years later when Netflix got the rights to Neon Genesis Evangelion and not only put out a new dub but took "Fly Me to the Moon" out of the show, even on the above ultra-fancy collector's Blu-ray set, which included the old dub.
And then recently i was watching From the Earth to the Moon, a HBO miniseries about the Apollo program that I've watched many many times in my life. It was one of my favorites as a kid, and i saw that it was on HBO Max. The thing that made me wanna watch was that it was remastered in 4K. Up til a couple years ago the only version available had been on DVD and I was, you know, really excited because I'm a bit of a cinephile (as you all may have gathered from my, uh, everything) and it's something I'm very familiar with.
Now as you might expect from a docudrama about the Apollo program, there's a lot of 50s, 60s, and early 70s music in it. Episode 5, "Spider", opens with a montage of space age art set to the theme song for Fireball XL-5.
So I'm watching this episode, which mind you, is one of my absolute favorites both as a space nerd and a machine fucker. (When you are done reading this post, please take the time to watch this clip that was formative to me as a robot girl.) So I'm on my nostalgia trip and i get yanked the fuck out because the song playing is not the right one.
It's still the theme song to Fireball XL-5, but its a cover, clearly recorded much later than the original, and it's really fucking jarring. Because the original is the exact sort of kitschy, early-60s space-age stuff that is being montaged in this opening scene.
And the really nutso thing is, I can't find anything about this anywhere. It's not that I'm crazy or that it isn't happening, its that it's just...gone. They do that now.
This is not normal.
It is not normal for companies (because this is 100% corporate pissing contests) to be able to retroactively change pieces of art because they don't want to lend their "intellectual property" to it anymore.
You should be angry about this. It's disgusting. And it was not normal until the last decade.
I do hate it, but it has been normal for several decades. There was a sitcom series in the late 1970s - early 1980s called WKRP In Cincinatti. It was about a rock music FM radio station and a huge part of its success was that they involved real popular rock music from the time. It did pretty well, and continued on in syndicated reruns for several years until the original music rights expired. Suddenly the record companies that had licensed 17-second clips for $3000 wanted six figure sums to continue. Poof. Disappeared.
The rights to the show changed hands and the new owners wanted their property back out on the market, so like you describe, they did hack-job soundalikes of the originals or sometimes even just generic rock-like stock production library instrumentals, re-dubbing lines with imitation actors when there was dialogue over the music. Wikipedia says they had to re-dub the doorbell at one character's apartment because the original was a licensed tune (Fly Me To The Moon. They tried it with the first season, it bombed for good reason, they didn't continue with the later seasons.
