A few people have asked me whether the 1970′s Bionic Woman series is available on DVD. This article helps explain why getting Wagner’s Bionic Series isn’t so easily available on that format:
Like why The Six Million Dollar Man and the original Bionic Woman aren’t available on DVD yet!
Yes, tonight (even as I post this!) we’re watching the second episode of the new re-imagining of The Bionic Woman with Michelle Ryan, but what fans from back in the day want to know is, “Why isn’t the original Lindsay Wagner version on DVD?” For that matter, “Where’s Col. Austin?” comes up a lot, too. Everyone wonders, in an era of TV-DVD success, why the original Bionic shows haven’t made it out on disc yet.
The concepts of the original Six Million Dollar Manwhere based on the Martin Caidin novel Cyborg, which is where Steve Austin comes from. So Universal had to get the rights to that book in order to make the show in the first place. But licenses like that periodically come up for renewal, and one such time happened back a few years ago, when all of Uni’s lawyers were distracted with the then-impending buy-out by NBC (when Vivendi was still trying to sell them off). Uni really ought to have been paying attention to that license expiration, because then they could simply have renewed it, and that would have been that. But they overlooked it in the confusion, apparently.
Dimension Films (formerly part of Disney and now owned by The Weinstein Company) seemingly had some lawyers who took it upon themselves to be watching that license on its way to expiration. As soon as Uni’s time was up and they no longer had first dibs on renewel, it was then possible for Dimension to claim the rights via a big old wad of money…and they did so. Ergo, Cyborg and the “bionic concepts” that were behind the shows are now Dimension’s, not Uni’s.
So Uni still owns the footage with Austin and (the original) Sommers, of course, but Dimension owns the rights to the mechanical-based bionic concepts that underly those stories. That’s why these shows don’t seem to be able to come to DVD: because these two companies must now come to an agreement first. An agreement that certainly involves a nice chunk of cash.
I frankly don’t know what Dimension’s presently doing with the Cyborg property. The original idea back in Oct. 2003was that Jim Carrey would be Bionic, but play it for laughs in a big-budget parody sendup of SMDM. Many fans – myself included in that number! – booed that concept, and therefore booed Carrey in the role. So many that he withdrew from the part, and Dimension wisely chose not to pursue the property with that angle. At least that is what was said publicly in early 2004. Since then, Dimension’s been quiet on the concept.
Universal was going to reportedly team with Dimension to help them finance the Jim Carrey film, in exchange for deal-withable financial terms on releasing the DVDs. That is why Uni originally said that the DVDs would come out starting in 2004. When the Carrey film got scrapped, I suppose those plans went back to square one, since there was no longer a quid-pro-quo on the film financing.
Then again, the first two seasons of each of these shows are available on DVD in the U.K., so what’s up with that? Well, that’s why “Region 1″ and “Region 2″ and all that stuff exists: because there can be different rights to a given property in different parts of the world, and this is one of those situations where the American and European rights don’t match: Universal has all the rights needed to put DVDs out in Europe. But hey have to use region coding to keep those discs from working on players sold in the USA and Canada.
So how can NBC-Universal put out a new Bionic Woman, then? If you notice, there’s no Steve Austin or any other character name that originated in the book Cyborg, and the concepts behind the bionics are completely different than the ones that originated in the book (closer to the concepts in another MIA-on-DVD show, Jake 2.0, if you ask me). So there is no rights conflict between the new show and the original book.
So it’s to do with rights and all that legal stuff. However you can still buy some Bionic Woman DVD’s via import through Amazon or if you’re in the UK you can buy them from Amazon UK. Check out our Bionic Store in the header above, or see the following links for more information:
The Bionic Woman: The Complete Season One [Region 2 Import] from Amazon
The Bionic Woman [Region 2] from Amazon
The Bionic Woman Vol.1 – (3 Episodes) from Amazon
Or, for those in the UK:
The Bionic Woman – Series 1 from Amazon UK
Bionic Woman – Series 2 from Amazon UK
The Bionic Woman – Vol. 1 [1976] from Amazon UK
The Bionic Woman – Vol. 2 [1976] from Amazon UK
The Bionic Woman – Vol. 3 [1976] from Amazon UK
