CBS/FOX Video

CBS/Fox Video was a home video company formed and established in 1982, by the split-up of the former MGM/CBS Video (MGM went off to form MGM/UA Home Video).

The company was responsible for distributing videos of Doctor Who episodes to American viewers from the 1980s until the summer of 2000, when distribution was handed off to Warner Home Video. Initially, the tapes were marketed under CBS/Fox's "Playhouse Video" imprint, which was a label targeted towards children. The boxes for these releases carried the Playhouse label instead of the CBS/Fox one. Around 1990 (after "The Deadly Assassin" had been released), they started to use the normal CBS/Fox (and later, Fox Video) logos instead of Playhouse.

All CBS/Fox's releases were identical in content to the original UK-PAL versions bar one: "The Deadly Assassin" was released in an edited (approx. 85 minute) movie version and was also notable for being the [i]only[/i] time that a Doctor Who story was released in the USA before anywhere else. When the story was finally released in the UK, however, it was in its original episodic format. There has been some speculation as to why an edited version was released in the US at all, since most censorship issues have to do with the UK. One popular theory is this: at the time of this story's release, there was an 'unwritten rule' at BBC Video that all Doctor Who releases had to carry the "U" video certificate, which is one reason why "Brain of Morbius" was so horribly edited (The "anti-violence" policy was seen as one of the main reasons that "Talons of Weng-Chiang" was delayed in the UK and ended up premiering on video in Australia instead, with a PG rating). There was a lot of fan backlash at the time about the BBC's editing of Doctor Who, not just for content, but also for combining the episodes into "movies."

It has been suggested that the video master used for the US release of "Assassin" was, perhaps, one that was originally prepared for UK release of the story, but then shelved after they decided to change policy and allow PG-rated Doctor Who videos, but perhaps this change in policy happened [i]after[/i] the US got hold of the video master (also, perhaps the US market liked the idea of having a "world exclusive" title).