The list of Sunny's removed episodes from Hulu is insane to me:

- Season 4 Episode 3: America's Next Top Paddy's Billboard Model Contest

- Season 6 Episode 9: Dee Reynolds: Shaping America's Youth

- Season 8 Episode 2: The Gang Recycles Their Trash

- Season 9 Episode 9: The Gang Makes Lethal Weapon 6

- Season 14 Episode 3: Dee Day

They're all in my home server, though :)

One of the best episodes in my opinion, and an excellent introduction to DnD for people who don't know what they are getting into.

Or sometimes the licensor just doesn’t feel like paying for it. Netflix famously removed the iconic version of “Fly Me to the Moon” from the ending credits of their copy of Neon Genesis Evangelion and even more weirdly stripped the vocals from the similarly iconic ending credits theme of Naoki Urusawa’s Monster, both because they didn’t want to shell out the cash for the rights.

I was so surprised and bummed when I discovered this was a thing. My wife and I started watching the original Beverly Hills 90210—a sort of ridiculous snapshot of American pop culture in the early 1990s—on some streaming service, and after a few episodes I noticed the music was just...super wrong.

Reading online, I learned that a lot of the original music had been licensed only for the original run of the show, so even when it went to DVD in the early 2000s they had to remove a whole bunch of the original music. It's terrible on two fronts: one, the show is an awesome snapshot of 90s music, with tons of great stuff featured both as background music and in extended live performances, but they cut whole scenes and entire episodes that had too much of it, and two, whoever managed the process of picking replacement music clearly did not care at all, and used awful generic music that sounds like it came from a file called "BeachRiff.aiff" on a $29.95 CD library of royalty-free 60 second stock music samples.

I admit to finding a source of video files patched together from various sources with the original soundtracks intact, and it's simply MUCH more enjoyable. It seems, though, that some episodes of live performances are lost to time—or at least lost to the corporate owners who'd rather sit on the tapes in a warehouse somewhere than make them available.

The TV series Scrubs was hit really hard by this — The soundtrack and sound-design in that show really drove home the emotion in the episodes, and when replaced, it really doesn't hit the same mark.

the DVD/streaming releases of Daria suffer from this. i used to have old TV rips of the show with the original contemporary MTV soundtrack but i'm not sure what happened to them. the stock music just doesn't carry the weight of the times.

Ugh, the music licensing issue is horrible. I sold a movie to Netflix many years ago and they "couldn't afford" the awesome soundtrack so they switched it out with garbage which makes a so-so movie into a total turd.

> They also often time have versions of old movies and shows that have been modified due to silly things like license agreements on music expiring! I have felt gaslighted when I rewatch and old movie and some scene isn’t how I remember.

1990s Beavis and Butthead episodes seem completely bizarre/pointless without the music.

When Mike Judge started releasing new episodes back in 2012-ish, it's noticeable how he mostly avoided music clips and focused on satirizing reality shows that were on the same network (MTV.) I assume this was to avoid licensing nightmares.

They are choosing not to host a movie on their service, which I think is a bit different than say, Disney not allowing anyone to access Song of the South.

> cost them nothing to have in their library

I cancelled Netflix too, but it's not true that it cost them nothing to have it in their library. Everyone in the movie still needs to get paid and simply having the show in the library costs them money.

Centralized services are low-stakes levers of power that encourage people to form outrage movements to pull them.

What groups are you talking about

Not directly related to streaming services, but this happened: https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2025/08/13/noisy-le-s...

I can definitely see how streaming services would adapt to bigots.

If a tshirt rental store was renting me my favourite tshirt (not available to buy) for two decades then decided it wasn't available any more because other people don't like the shirt design, I would be pissed and not want to support the tshirt rental industry any more.

That’s a bad analogy. It works against your point. It seems entirely, entirely reasonable to avoid a clothing store that refuses to stock hip styles simply because they’re “offensive”. For an example using the cliche, many people find a naked ankle to be completely acceptable.

That's a really awkward analogy. A better one would be: Would you buy an album with all the curse words bleeped out? A lot of people would, but others would prefer the uncensored version.

Sure, someone can upload a new edited version. But the unedited one doesn't get removed. That's not really censorship.

What was that specific show?