These screenshots are from “30 Rock: A One-time Special” (watch it on the Internet Archive once it comes back online). The original “night cheese” scene was from S3E17 “The Ones”
After the ‘Night Cheese’ incident — which is where Tina sang ‘Night Cheese’ — which was like a second and cost, like, $50,000, the network was like, ‘You guys gotta chill it.’
https://www.vulture.com/2013/03/jeff-richmonds-best-musical-moments-on-30-rock.html
I thought parody is protected? Isn’t that the whole deal with weird al, he asks the original artists but he doesn’t technically need permission?
They prefer to pay than open a precedent against themselves.
Listening to the office ladies podcast, the music rights in those days were absurd. I think they’re better now but even having a character sing a song lyric without music or anything cost at least 10k.
I think some songs like tiny dancer would go up to30-50k just to be allowed to play them in the episode
🎵 You have won a tiny Dundie 🎵
TIL there are people who haven’t heard Night Moves before.
here’s the part :
![TIL Liz's famous "night cheese" line was sung to the tune of an actual song, which cost NBC a ridiculous amount of money to secure the rights to just for that quick joke [detail] [captioned screencap]](https://files.catbox.moe/hymmz9.jpg){kind=link}