Television Broadcasts and Home Video Releases
The film has been released to VHS and Betamax in the early 80s. Copies for those formats are extremely hard to find.
In 2002, Paramount Home Video released the film on DVD in a dual-format edition containing the film in the full-screen or theatrical 2.35:1 aspect ratios, (though there is some slight windowboxing with the widescreen version selected); Dolby 5.1 English Surround Sound stereo/mono mix, or Dolby 2.0 mono in English, French, and Spanish. No other extras are included.
This release has been long out of print in the United States and is hard to come by in today's market. Region 4 full-screen DVD releases are somewhat common though.
There have been rumors that Paramount Home Entertainment is planning Blu-ray/DVD combo release containing a new remastered transfer, though no official confirmation has been made.
The film made a television premiere on CBS in May 1980, albeit with edits in some adult content and language to meet broadcast content standards. It has been broadcast only a few times over the past 30 years on various channels, though it had been aired uncut as recently as early 2009 on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and Showtime.
As of 2009, Warner Bros. Television holds the USA TV broadcast rights while Paramount Pictures retains all other rights, which explains why only the current Warner Bros. logo appears on Showtimes airings (though the original Paramount Logo is preserved on TCM's print and the DVD).
Read more about this topic: The Big Bus
Famous quotes containing the words television, broadcasts, home, video and/or releases:
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)
“We spend all day broadcasting on the radio and TV telling people back home what’s happening here. And we learn what’s happening here by spending all day monitoring the radio and TV broadcasts from back home.”
—P.J. (Patrick Jake)
“Parenting can be established as a time-share job, but mothers are less good “switching off” their parent identity and turning to something else. Many women envy the father’s ability to set clear boundaries between home and work, between being an on-duty and an off-duty parent.... Women work very hard to maintain a closeness to their child. Father’s value intimacy with a child, but often do not know how to work to maintain it.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“These people figured video was the Lord’s preferred means of communicating, the screen itself a kind of perpetually burning bush. “He’s in the de-tails,” Sublett had said once. “You gotta watch for Him close.””
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)