Adventures in Dinosaur City – JEFFREY ASCH

Quoting Nosferatu:

Quote:
According to IMDb, he is uncredited in Friends, S07E15. I've checked the episode and he has no credit, so the IMDb information is correct.

Not quite. I didn't have the chance to pull out the actual disc earlier, but now I have. Keep in mind that IMDb is profiling the "as broadcast" episode, and in that version, indeed, he isn't credited. But we profile what's actually on the disc, and that's not always the same. In this case, many DVD releases of 'Friends' all over the world actually contain "extended" versions of all episodes (often there's "now with footage you've never seen" on the covers), and in that extended version of this particular 'Friends' episode, he actually is credited. Here's a screenshot taken from the credits of the actual DVD:



Note that Mr. Asch isn't the only person affected by this: over the course of ten seasons of 'Friends', there are many, many people credited in the extended versions of those episodes (available on DVD) than there are in the regular versions (available on Blu-ray). So whenever someone says: so-and-so isn't credited in a 'Friends' episode, then we should always keep in mind that there are two versions to be checked...

Quoting Nosferatu:

Quote:
Interesting. In this case, there is a difference between the episode on the physical media and the version which is shown on Netflix. (I looked on Netflix and he wasn't credited.)

I assume Netflix shows the widescreen versions, right? They'll likely be the same versions as available on the show's Blu-ray release, but the Blu-ray version doesn't contain these extended episodes - those are available on DVD only (in the original 1.33:1 aspect ratio). So I'm guessing that Netflix *does* match the physical media release in that it matches what's on the Blu-ray - it just doesn't match the extended episodes released on DVD earlier. So it matches a particular physical media release - just not all of them. There should be a notable difference in running time, too.

Checking credits from a streaming platform is always a bit wonky, though - there can always be differences. In case of 'Friends', it's pretty well-documented that there are extended versions out there, so it's not a matter of "the credits differ from the physical media", but of knowing that there are two different versions available on physical media, and knowing which one you're looking at. But actual differences between physical media and streaming versions are occurring more and more, too. We've seen it on high-profile titles ('Ted 2' springs to mind), but I've also already stumbled upon decades-old BBC shows where there are slight differences between the credits on the actual discs versus what can be seen in the streaming version. And those differences are often inexplicable - it's not as if someone who's since become a major star gets a typo in his name fixed, but instead, it's actually some fairly insignificant wardrobe supervisor's credit that's been slightly changed - I honestly can't imagine why. It almost seems like someone has been redoing those credits from scratch, manually copying the old credits line by line, and introducing a few typos along the way. Inexplicable, but it's happening. I also stumbled upon this news item recently:

Netflix amends Elliot Page's name on all past credits

They can do that, of course, but I've still got seven films with an "Ellen Page" credit in my collection, and the credits on those seven discs won't retroactively change. Such practices really mean that we can't rely on streaming to determine common names...