Hawaiian Eye

[Mr. Mike]

I was snooping around with Google trying to find references to reviews of Hawaiian Eye. This was a private eye show from 1959 and the early 1960s which predated Classic H50. The show was actually filmed at the Warner Brothers studios in Burbank and incorporated location shots done in Hawaii. In addition to Robert Conrad, Anthony Eisley, Connie Stevens and Poncie Ponce, the series starred Doug Mossman, who was in 119 of the show's 134 episodes, mostly as the security guard Moke.

I found the following page on Amazon.com which is reviews of what looks like a DVD release of the show, but there is no "product information" link at the top of the page which would normally take you back to a previous page where the item was offered for sale. If you look up the ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) for this product, which is B00005JN7R, there is nothing ... which makes me think that the original listing was for a bootleg release of the show, which was eventually removed.

https://www.amazon.com/Hawaiian-Eye-...pe=all_reviews

[epaddon]

"Hawaiian Eye" has never been released on DVD by Warner. All of their detective shows ("77 Sunset Strip", "Sufside Six" etc.) have been MIA because they're loaded with music clearance problems based on characters doing songs multiple times over the course of a season and in the case of "Hawaiian Eye", Connie Stevens got her share of singing spotlights. Warner's policy has been to either clear everything or don't release period so that's why they don't put out titles with music replacement like other studios have.

[Mr. Mike]

Those are interesting comments about the music rights affecting whether something is released on DVD. However, in Peter Gunn (1958-1960), there were also songs in episodes, very similar to Hawaiian Eye, and I don't think this caused any problems. In fact, Peter Gunn (see my WWW site, http://www.petergunn.tv) was released on DVD by Timeless Media Group, kind of a low-budget outfit which has put out many classic TV shows. Some of the Gunn shows are now public domain, and may have become so in certain jurisdictions. There is also the Henry Mancini music on Peter Gunn, which has been released on CDs of questionable legality and quality, again in certain jurisdictions. You can even listen to some of Mancini's musical releases from the late 50s and early 60s on Itunes and Amazon Music in presentations which are obviously bootlegs. I have seen the latter with totally crazy titles for the albums which make no sense.

[epaddon]

Music clearance has been the bane of many TV shows on DVD. CBS/Paramount would often go the route of music replacement and slashing as we saw in a few Five-O episodes (what they did with "The Odd Couple" was criminal in which any time a song line was part of dialogue they would make a cut and so paranoid were they, they even cut scenes of public domain songs! Even a stock music library has caused problems for releases such as how the use of the Capitol Records library for background music on "The Fugitive" led to the infamous debacle of CBS actually hiring a composer to replace ALL of the underscore in Season 2 episodes when fan uproar forced CBS/Paramount to go back and do the show right (CBS/Paramount was even replacing music cues they owned free and cue from the CBS Music Library!) It all depends on the nature of the contracts that existed covering the reuse of music in new video formats. I have read that "Peter Gunn" was a case of a limited license by a small company and not a license in perpetuity that would allow Shout! (who took over Timeless) to be able to reissue the series on DVD. But with Warners and the shows they produced, they want deals where they would have the licensing in total perpetuity so there would be no questions of any legal action in the future and Warners is also rigid in that if so much as one episode from a season has music issues, they won't release. One episode with music issues is why the detective series "Cain's Hundred" was never released on DVD despite streaming all episodes except the one in question. They have streamed a limited number of "77 Sunset Strip" episodes that are free and clear but every season has at least one episode with trouble and likewise "Hawaiian Eye." When "Dr. Kildare" was released on DVD, there was a gap of nearly two years before it's fourth season was released after quick releases of the first three and the reason was clearing all the songs for one episode which involved "the hospital puts on a variety show".

Other Warner shows affected by this: "The Alaskans" (Roger Moore western) and "The Roaring 20s" both of which featured Dorothy Provine and had a load of singing spotlights. Even background music gets impacted by this too and if Cole Porter standards are being played there's trouble there too.

This thread at Home Theater Forum gets into this issue further. The difference with the "Peter Gunn" situation does come up.

https://www.hometheaterforum.com/com...he-60s.367801/

[Mr. Mike]

There are some other interesting things about Hawaiian Eye on Wikipedia.

If you go to the main page, there is a link for a list of episodes. If you click on that, you end up here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...n_Eye_episodes

It seems kind of incomplete, because there are further links to directors, writers and sometimes stars of individual episodes, but nothing about the episodes themselves.

However, a long time ago, I recall seeing that someone had done individual Wikipedia pages for episodes of the show in a manner similar to what I later did with Peter Gunn (http://www.petergunn.tv), where the "reviews" of each show are broken up into specific parts: Synopsis, Music, Edie Sings (songs sung in the episode by Lola Albright's character), Best Lines and Trivia.

If you look up the above link at archive.org, and click on various things, which take you back to 2015, you will eventually get to this page:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150324...n_Eye_episodes

Notice below where there is a list of season one episodes under the heading "Season 1: 1959-1960":

Each episode has a link by its title.

If you click on the first one of these, Malihini Holiday, you will go to a specific page for that episode, which has this URL:

https://web.archive.org/web/20171017...(Hawaiian_Eye)

You will see that this page has information about the show under the headings Synopsis, Episode cast (including the four Series regulars, Recurring characters (which includes Doug Mossman from Classic H50), and Guest stars), Music interlude (the song(s) which Connie Stevens sings in that episode) and Episode notes (equivalent to my "trivia" section on my Peter Gunn pages).

I wonder why this format for the episodes was seemingly abandoned?

It should be noted that clicking on the links for the episodes on this last page does not work for all the episodes. Some of these links will just redirect you back to the current Wikipedia page for the show.

[Mr. Mike]

Here is an interesting article on the music from The Fugitive:

http://www.filmmusicsociety.org/news...08/081508.html

[epaddon]

And thank goodness this was one case where the backlash made a difference. First, CBS/Paramount went back and redid Season 2 and restored better than half the music so now it was something of a hybrid but predominantly the original music. This continued in Season 3 but there were some episodes still significantly impacted (the episode "Coralee" was still 95% new music). Only in Season 4, when the library music primarily shifted to Dominic Frontiere composed cues from "Outer Limits" and "Stoney Burke" that everything was free and clear again.

But because Seasons 2 and 3 were still hybrid, fans still weren't happy. So finally, they came up with a complete series set that restored all the music but amazingly, because of one minor library music glitch they actually recalled the boxed sets just as they were ready to ship and it took a year for them to replace everything until it was finally fixed 100% (ironically I was one of the handful of people that got an initial set shipped out before the recall).

That shows how CBS/Paramount was just skittish to the point where if there was any doubt they went replacement whereas Warner takes the approach that if there's any doubt they don't release period since they don't do music replacement.