MTV's "The State".

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/f5...__&_ccid=7da570a9-07ee-4520-b42c-ab0addb6f71e

 

For a show that heavily referenced such specific 90s things, "The State" holds up really well. The Stieglitz and O’Keeffe sketch just about killed me!

 

television's greatest moment, in my opinion

 

No arguments here, I would've linked it too!

 

It sucks they had to change all the music when the DVD came out for licensing reasons, but it was either that or nothing.

The bathroom attendant sketch just isn't the same without "Voodoo Lady" by Ween though.

 

It's lucky most sketches don't lean too heavily on specific music, but securing the rights to “November Rain,” "Voodoo Lady," “Cannonball,” and “Sexual Healing” would've made such a difference!

 

Ah, yes...the "you need pants" wasn't the same without The Breeders.

Same for Barry and LeVon needing Marvin Gaye.

"Ahhhhhhh Yeah"

 

Let's go to the zoo and watch the monkeys do it!

 

Penguins ain't natural, they was man made like the Incredible Hulk.

 

I didn't realize how intertwined the music was. The real culprit in all this was that many MTV programs were not immune from having soundtracks altered for home video releases simply because those rights were never cleared to begin with outside the broadcast. I got to the point where I wondered why they even had to use it anyway, realizing that was the ONLY LINK they ever had to "MUSIC" in their namesake. That was one of the final nails in MTV's coffin prior to the removal of "MUSIC TELEVISION" we see today.

 

Now I forget if they changed the Boyz II Men song for the dead Ken Marino tribute. They probably did though....I recall "I Got The Power" being the only real song on the DVD for when Thomas Lennon is that guy who becomes a guidance counselor.

Would the musicians even really care? It's just free advertising for their music.

 

You would think. Sometimes it's the record companies themselves who can't take a joke now and then.

 

Yeah, there is so much film only available via shady "collector's market" because music rights belong to another entity. This was far from an unforeseeable problem.

But I'm under the impression that MTV never quite knew what they had with "The State," imagining it would be an SNL clone only with hip tunes for the young people. When the actual show veered more conceptual and early reviews were calling it singularly unfunny, the network had little motivation to secure music rights for eventual home distribution. In hindsight it seems so silly that they didn't leverage MTV's then-considerable influence to establish favorable terms, but in the mid-90s, the idea of a long-tail revenue stream wasn't yet a thing.

I'm glad the ex post facto soundalike soundtrack freed things up for the DVD release, though!

 

I sorta wonder if that's why there weren't too many episodes of the show at all. One of the things that did annoy me was that the show was in reruns too easily since the way they aired the show, it was broken down into seasons that were roughly 6-7 episodes each, they'd run those episodes initially for the first month or so and then cycle over it for the next half year, never playing earlier seasons at all, nor mix it up so I knew the order they were show each time. The show seem like it could stand to be 13 episodes long per season I thought. I suppose this might go back to MTV's confusion over what "The State" was/is (which I thought was the closest America got to something like Monty Python or Kids In The Hall). I suppose that explains for all the unreleased skits that were made per season I see listed on Wikipedia, an episode in the fourth season called attention to one, explaining how they wasted a large sum of money on filming it and not show it because it sucked and went on to show a skit they did at the last minute for the same amount, messing around on a beach, set to a track from Green Day, after seeing that, I was pretty curious to know what else there was that I couldn't find out in those pre-net days.

 

"You Pineapple! You fuzzy cootie! They gave my job to fudge-eating nickel pickers!"

 

Suck on soil, lounge act! Pus rug spurting maggot-bagger...

...oh sorry; wrong show.