Merry Christmas Darling-The Video

[Rick-An Ordinary Fool]

Since it's the holidays, I got out my DVD of "Close to You-Remembering the Carpenters" and re-watched track #16 the intro to Merry Christmas Darling it is exactly 1 min and 5 seconds of DVD quality from this song. This would be the only known prestine copy ever given to the fans in a DVD digital format. Watching this tonight, the quality was just amazing, Bob Henry spoke before the intro to say it was one of their big biggies of all time, happy to hear it being played on the radio each year.

This question is up for anyone who might want to reply, I know there are alot of engineers, producers, radio/tv backgrounds or know someone who is so here goes. This DVD Close to You-Remembering the Carpenters was distributed by MPI Home Video, a search for this name on the net shows this:
MPI Home Video
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
MPI Home Video is a company that produces videos of historical films and rock films since 1976; it has owned the rights to the cult TV series Dark Shadows on video since 1989 and on DVD since 2002. It also distributes various TV series on DVD

So my question is this, Does MPI own the video rights of this clip of Merry Christmas Darling? If no, then who owns it? It also stands to reason that if MPI showed 1 min and 5 seconds of Karen singing Merry Christmas Darling (taken from the ABC tv special A Christmas Portrait) and MPI showed this segment, why could they not provide the whole video perfrormance of Merry Christmas Darling? MPI DID show the whole video performance of Ave Maria, why not Merry Christmas Darling?

 

[Mike Blakesley]

They probably had to make it fit into a time frame, or it was done for some other artistic reason. Maybe they didn't want to include a whole Christmas song in a non-Christmas program.

MPI likey licensed the song for use in the video and would have been free to use as much of the song as the film-maker deemed necessaary.

 

[Harry]

CLOSE TO YOU: REMEMBERING THE CARPENTERS was produced originally for air on PBS stations. They used it with pledge breaks to encourage viewers to become members and send them money.

The version that MPI released on video and DVD was expanded slightly from the slightly shortened-for-TV version that ran on PBS. MPI likely has rights to the "program", but not to the individual videos contained therein.

Harry