The Dean Martin Show - DVD

DVD

From 2003 until August 2007, a 29-volume Best of The Dean Martin Variety Show collection was sold by direct marketing firm Guthy-Renker via infomercials and a website.

In mid-2007, NBC Universal filed suit in U.S. District Court against several parties, including Guthy-Renker, claiming copyright infringement, forcing G-R to temporarily withdraw the DVDs from sale. The lawsuit was in regard to a dispute over rights to footage used in the DVD series, material to which NBC claimed it still held the copyright. The conflict was discovered when NBC Universal looked into plans to release its own DVD set.

Also named as one of the defendants in the lawsuit was longtime Dean Martin Show producer Greg Garrison, who, NBC claims, had rights to use only excerpts from selected episodes of The Dean Martin Show for the DVDs—episodes which, according to NBC, Garrison purchased years earlier from the network for a syndicated run of The Dean Martin Show that aired worldwide from 1979 to 1981. Garrison died in 2005, before the lawsuit was brought forward.

A settlement among all of the parties to the suit was reached on January 2, 2008. As a consequence, the Guthy-Renker website once again began selling the collection, and infomercials advertising it returned to the small screen.

There remain two other lawsuits pending over rights to material used in the Best of Dean Martin Variety Show series, but neither of those suits affected sales of the home video collection.

Unaffected by legal disputes were the Dean Martin Celebrity Roast specials, which continue to be marketed on DVD by Guthy-Renker. Total revenues from Dean Martin DVD sales have been rumored to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The Martin shows have not been on television since their original telecasts.

On February 3, 2011, it was revealed that a brand new package of DVDs featuring footage from The Dean Martin Show would be released on May 24, 2011 by Time-Life Video. Unlike the earlier Guthy-Renker collection, which was marketed via mail order subscription, these new sets would be aimed largely at the retail sector.

On March 21, 2011, NBC Universal TV Consumer Products Group issued a press release disclosing its participation with Time-Life on the project.

In an online report posted July 9, 2011, Deana Martin, one of Dean's daughters, told columnists Marilyn Beck and Stacy Jenel Smith that the first sets of Dean Martin Show DVDs released by Time-Life in the late Spring had sold so well that a second collection was already being planned, and that she (Deana) would be contributing commentary to it. This information has been independently confirmed by officials at both Time-Life and NBCUniversal.

By the end of the summer of 2011, release dates were disclosed for the second wave of Dean Martin Show DVDs produced by Time-Life and featuring footage supplied by the series' originating network, NBC. Entitled King of Cool: The Best of The Dean Martin Variety Show, the new collection would be made available in 1- and 6-disc configurations.