[JasonB]

DVD releases of stuff (particularly TV series) used to just use whatever copies they came across first, whether they were broadcast, syndication, alternative edits... which may be what happened with Sonic above (of the most recent copies made for a broadcaster) so no guarantees you'd get what was made in the first place...  And even if they had the right copies for home media release didn't mean they'd screw up something else along the way.

I remember when The Thin Blue Line was pushed out on DVD.  The first series episodes are in the wrong order from broadcast for a start, and the second series episodes (in Region 2 anyway) often run longer than the original broadcast slot (one episode is about 42 minutes long - it went out in a 30 minute slot).

This doesn't happen with film releases as - well there's only one feature length thing on those, and that's the film itself, plus any extras - and the film companies tend to do all that compiling and packaging themselves of their material.  TV stuff releases tend to get farmed out for one reason or another.

I remember buying Friends on DVD as a teenager in 2001, these DVD's had "now with footage you've never seen" on the front cover. It took me a while to workout that the episodes on side B were the unedited broadcast versions with extra dialogue and extended scenes and the episodes on side A were the original TV broadcasts.

I watched the one where Chandler didn't like dogs several times claiming the  "now with footage you've never seen" line was false advertising as it just appeared the same to me at first until i was really paying attention and finally saw a scene that didn't appear on side A.