You know what, Death? That's actually pretty fair of you. I frankly expected you to say that just because it wasn't like the movies as you knew them, they were outright blasphemy. Considering my clashes with the good people here over the Winegardner books, I had been led to believe that the general opinion is that anything that wasn't what the movies said it was was just plain wrong. Thanks just for saying that you're prepared to give it time to grow on you.

As to the confusion about what the Epic is, as opposed to the Saga, and so on, here's the answer:

In 1977, the project was named The Godfather: A Novel for Television. That name (my personal favorite) couldn't survive the transition to home video, because, well, that's VHS, not TV. The first video release that I know of, therefore, was called The Godfather: The Complete Epic 1902-1959 (yeah, I know they got the first year wrong). But others here will attest that it really didn't have all the scenes from the TV version, not even close. Later on, once the Godfather Part III had come out and needed to be incorporated into the chronological version, the whole kit-and-kaboodle was put together for VHS and called The Godfather Trilogy: 1901-1980. That version, aside from having all of Part III, had a lot more of footage from the TV version, but still not everything.

And of course, they still occasionally ran the original TV version on TV in syndication now and then. Whenever it's been run either on AMC or Bravo, they keep the Novel for Television name, but for some reason, when it was run on USA, they used video technology to just blot out the "Novel for Television" name and subtituted the word "Saga" in its place. Hence, the name The Godfather Saga. Why'd they rename it? I don't know, probably personal taste on the part of the USA people.

So the answer is that the Epic, Saga et. al. are all variants of the original Novel for Television, with a selection of a few minutes of footage either there or not there depending on what the network needs to edit for time and commercial space. The Epic and Trilogy are the video releases of same, but they never seem to get it all in. A true video release of the complete Novel for Television, VHS, DVD or other, has never appeared, much as we'd like it to.