Sesame Workshop/Shout! Factory Deal

[Oscarfan]

I wondered if maybe they had stopped doing video releases or at least put them on hold due to Covid, but we’ve now got our first announcement of a 2021 Sesame Street release - Elmo’s World: Things Elmo Loves, coming February 2 - that’s just a few weeks from now!

Could this be the fastest a release got after being announced? I mean, besides store exclusive releases, some of which we did not see the announcement for until we saw them in stores (or word got out)?

No, we've known about this since late November.

Elmo's World: Things Elmo Loves

Elmo's World: Things Elmo Loves is an "Elmo's World" home video title released by Shout! Factory on February 2, 2021. The video contains 15 editions of the segment, including: Emotions Grandparents Bus Drivers Drawing Fruits Supermarkets Hair Nursery Rhymes Dog Walkers Chickens Scientists Balls...

muppet.fandom.com

 

[minor muppetz]

Huh. It passed my radar. I was thinking I'd checked the 2021 page and didn't see it until last night but now I'm seeing it has been noted since at least December 15 (but the 2021 page hasn't been on the wiki long... I'm trying to remember if I bothered looking there before). And it wasn't on the Shout! Factory page, but it seems we haven't added any post-2019 releases to that gallery.

 

[minor muppetz]

The next Sesame Street release is Cool Counting Collection, a number-themed follow-up to Awesome Alphabet Collection (and it has better alliteration!).

It's interesting, the initial press release for Awesome Alphabet Collection mentioned a mix of classic and newer clips, while the wording for this ones press release says it's segments from the recent seasons. I wonder how far back they're considering "recent", the oldest clip mentioned in the press release is an appearance by Liam Neeson, which premiered in the late-1990s, so at least one full screen pre-HD segment (unless that's a mistake, and press releases have occasionally mentioned segments that did not appear in the final video release).

Awesome Alphabet Collection had three segments for each letter. I'm thinking for this, it would be cool if there were three segments for each segment - one with The Count, one that just shows the number, and one that counts to that number (well, with the numbers 1 and 0, it would be hard to differentiate if it's just showing or counting). The description says its the numbers 0-20, I hope the bonus features can include a few segments for higher numbers (though these days, Sesame Street DVD releases don't really include bonus clips unless it's a street story, Elmo's World, Elmo the Musical, or an episode of Sesame Studios or Furchester Hotel).

 

[CoolGuy1013]

The next Sesame Street release is Cool Counting Collection, a number-themed follow-up to Awesome Alphabet Collection (and it has better alliteration!).

It's interesting, the initial press release for Awesome Alphabet Collection mentioned a mix of classic and newer clips, while the wording for this ones press release says it's segments from the recent seasons. I wonder how far back they're considering "recent", the oldest clip mentioned in the press release is an appearance by Liam Neeson, which premiered in the late-1990s, so at least one full screen pre-HD segment (unless that's a mistake, and press releases have occasionally mentioned segments that did not appear in the final video release).

Awesome Alphabet Collection had three segments for each letter. I'm thinking for this, it would be cool if there were three segments for each segment - one with The Count, one that just shows the number, and one that counts to that number (well, with the numbers 1 and 0, it would be hard to differentiate if it's just showing or counting). The description says its the numbers 0-20, I hope the bonus features can include a few segments for higher numbers (though these days, Sesame Street DVD releases don't really include bonus clips unless it's a street story, Elmo's World, Elmo the Musical, or an episode of Sesame Studios or Furchester Hotel).

I can hardly wait for this. I loved Awesome Alphabet Collection, and I’ve always been more of a numbers guy than a Letters guy. Now I just gotta set up a Hoopla account.

 

[LittleJerry92]

My only hope is this DVD doesn’t feature segments that were just ripped from another home video *cough* Letter B from Count It Higher *cough*

 

[CoolGuy1013]

Not everything can be exclusive, Jerry. And you complain about people complaining about that.

 

[LittleJerry92]

My issue isn’t what segments are included on the DVDs, my issue is when a segment is just taken from another home video compilation when instead they could have just taken it from the raw master tape of the individual segments. The DVD can have as much previously-released material and/or newly-released material all it wants, I only ask it doesn’t come directly off another home video compilation release (especially if it was edited in some way) because it just feels like a cheap way to go looking through segments to release (and in fairness, Shout could have easily just taken Letter B from Old School Volume 3 if they didn’t feel like searching).

Besides that one issue with the Alphabet DVD, I have also had issues with Shout’s DVD releases in the past with how they treat their merchandise, particularly the Nickelodeon season set releases which felt rushed when they were all released on home media back in 2011/12 (until we at least started to get some bonus features on the complete release DVD sets which I have to thank them for); the individual season sets of said Nick shows also had picture issues on each one; Rocko’s Moden Life in particular comes in mind. Then there’s also issues with later Mystery Science Theater volume releases between 2015-2017 where you can tell they were really starting to rush out the releases with many picture and sound issues (and while I’m grateful they got half the series released on home media as a big fan of the series, I’m not too happy with how they treated their later releases by the time they got to volume 34).

TLDR: Basically I’ve had a lot of issues with many of Shout Factory’s DVD releases, and while I understand DVD marketing is tough and I am someone who also wanted to start my own home media company, there have been many instances it felt like the company didn’t even try when it comes to planning out their DVDs, and just ripping a segment from another home video compilation instead of just using the original master source of the song (which I am quite sure still exists) is one of many reasons I haven’t been as happy with Shout Factory’s DVD releases (and the 50th DVD release has also been a bit of a let down for me with just how the picture quality looks).

 

[LittleJerry92]

I would also like to mention this isn’t the first time Shout Factory has gone the “easy” way with taking source material from another easy-to-access source:

Going back to MST, there was a documentary of the show that aired on the Sci-fi channel in 1997. They just ripped an upload from YouTube and put it out on the DVD it was featured on, instead of going to the vaults (which they had mentioned they go to when releasing episodes) to release it. The same thing happened to many Comedy Central commercials for individual episode promos when they released them on DVD. They’ve also taken a YouTube release of a season 2 Mst3k episode (The Sidehackers) and put that out on their re-release of volume 3 (previously from Rhino Home Video), resulting in a very blurry copy. All of these mentioned were issues many fans of the show also had (you can see discussions about them on the forrestcrow forums).

Again, this is why I have some issues with Shout Factory’s releases - because very often it feels like they just try to go the easy way to release something instead of trying to search for what they can use with what they currently have the advantage of accessing to (vaults) when releasing shows on DVD. It feels rushed when this happens.

 

[Oscarfan]

You do realize that Sesame is the one producing the actual footage for the DVD, not Shout?

 

[LittleJerry92]

Then why the heck would they just hand over a sample of Letter B from Count It Higher? I would at least imagine they’d still have the original master for the segment on its own.