"Moonlighting is an American comedy drama television series that aired on ABC from March 3, 1985, to May 14, 1989. The network aired a total of 67 episodes. Starring Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis as private detectives, Allyce Beasley as their quirky receptionist, and Curtis Armstrong as a temp worker (and later junior detective), the show was a mixture of drama, comedy, mystery, and romance, and was considered to be one of the first successful and influential examples of comedy drama, or "dramedy", emerging as a distinct television genre.
"The show's theme song was co-written and performed by jazz singer Al Jarreau and became a hit.
"The show is also credited with making Willis a star and relaunching Shepherd's career after a string of lackluster projects. In 1997, the episode 'The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice' was ranked number 34 on TV Guide's 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time. In 2007, the series was listed as one of Time magazine's '100 Best TV Shows of All-Time' .The relationship between the characters David and Maddie was included in TV Guide's list of the best TV couples of all time." -- Wikipedia
This was shown on Norwegian telly in the 80s (with a title roughly translated as "The Brute and the Blonde"), and I watched it avidly. Don't remember anything from it now, though. It's strange to consider that I'm so old now that I remember Bruce Willis BEFORE he did DIE HARD.
All the background atmospheric music in restaurants, etc (mostly instrumentals of old standards) has been changed.
However, the bigger deal is that the pop songs used as score throughout the show have also mostly been dropped and replaced with innocuous soundalikes. The show would often have 4-5 such songs in every episode.
Linda Ronstadt, Patti LaBelle, Patsy Cline, Stevie Wonder, The Supremes, The Rolling Stones, The Shirelles, The Marvelettes, The Ronettes, Darlene Love, Aretha Franklin, Martha and the Vandellas, Percy Sledge, Billie Holiday. All gone.
The show was famous for its brilliant, groundbreaking use of major pop songs, the 60s sound totally defined it. They were the songs of the youth of David and Maddie and added tremendous emotional depth to the show. For example, the Christmas episode was set to songs from the album "A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector." I bought the album because of that. Those songs are now gone.
A few of the absolutely key pop songs, like "Be My Baby" for the love scene, have been kept, but most of them are gone, and the replacements sound pretty bad, in my opinion.
The people involved in restoring it truly loved the show, and put their hearts into it, a few have talked about their work at the Moonlighting fan site. It's not the fault of the team who restored the show.
Disney just decided it was too expensive to license the songs again, sadly. At least Lionsgate licensed them all for the DVDs.
The good thing is that the one episode that got screwed up on the Lionsgate DVDs, "The Lady in the Iron Mask," which accidentally had a rejected score used on the DVD, has been corrected for the Hulu stream with the correct broadcast score, and there are no other music changes in that episode.
It's been restored in hi-def with the original music and songs and it's now on Hulu.
A blu-ray box set is bound to happen, but it's not been announced yet.
No Blu-Ray set has been announced, and I wouldn't hold my breath for one, sadly.
I'm not positive, but I believe streaming rights are separate from home video rights. I believe streaming is functionally like broadcast rights. I don't think a certain limited number of songs being cleared for Hulu necessarily means they can also be included on BDs.
Also, Disney doesn't really do BDs of catalog TV titles, and they don't license their catalog shows out to third-party boutique labels for BDs, the way Universal does (30 Rock, Quantum Leap, etc).
