Ally McBeal on DVD

I was going to write about my frustration with Ally McBeal not being released on DVD for Region 1 (the U.S. and Canada). It’s available in the PAL format for Region 2 (Japan, Europe, South Africa, and the Middle East) at Amazon.com and has been for a long time. Before I started to write, I looked at the Wikipedia page for Ally McBeal, and got the explaination I was looking for.

Due to music rights issues, the first complete season of Ally McBeal has not been made available on DVD in the United States (only 6 random episodes can be found on the R1 edition), though it has been available in Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Japan, France, Germany, the UK, Mexico, Australia and Brazil.

I still don’t like that it’s not available, but I can understand how it would be difficult to clear all the wonderful music used on the show for a DVD release. That’s a lot of people to pay. I’m wondering how difficult it would be to convert the Region 2 set to Region 1.

There are players, like the Philips DVP5960 All Region PAL /NTSC that will play everything. We happen to have a Philips DVP5960, also available on Amazon.com. It’s about $37 less, but the title doesn’t say anything about being multi-region. Would a two players with the same model number have different functionality? Don’t know.