As I mentioned in my last post, The Iron Giant is one of my favorite things.
Showing posts with label DVDs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DVDs. Show all posts
Muppet Monday
Photo © 2011 and characters TM/® The Muppets Studio LLC.
Above is a neat homage to the iconic, oft-mimicked Robert Freeman photograph
used on the cover to 1963’s With The Beatles and early the next year for the US release Meet The Beatles! It’s from a recent Parade article titled “Meet the Muppets (Again!)” — which is also the general theme of this post.
Sight of the Living Dead
The other day, I spied a lone DVD combo pack of Angel Seasons 1 & 2 at Target
for $19.99, which suggests that if the retail geography is kind either still or again you should be able to pick up the first four seasons of the series for less than ten bucks apiece like I did last year; Season 5 will have to be purchased singly.
Meanwhile, The Vampire Diaries kicked off its summer repeats this week with Season 2’s premiere, and if you haven’t hit your
contrast in terms of approach between Diaries and either its predecessor Buffy or its contemporary rivals Twilight and True Blood — I highly recommend grabbing DVDs of Season 1 while recording Season 2 of this sudsy, escapist treat; I’m sorry that I didn’t get to warn you before it aired, because you really want to watch the series in full from the start and Season 2 won’t be out on home video until the fall.
Related: My Buffy Summer • Vampire Weekend • We Got a
Live One Here • Red Letter • The Vampire Slayer Diaries
End of an Origin
The series finale of Smallville repeats on CW stations tonight at 8 p.m. ET/PT. I watched it last Friday with hope, skepticism, and ultimately the same disappointment familiar to me from throughout the show’s 10-year run.
My in-depth reflections on this controversial adaptation of the Superman saga have proven difficult to wrangle, and if they’re not published soon they’ll have to hang out on the burgeoning scrapheap of abandoned posts. I certainly hope to get a piece online by November, when Smallville: The Complete Series is released by Warner in a 62-disc collectible package with all 218 episodes and special features not available on the season-by-season boxed sets. I just wish the subject was worth the effort. [Update: Here you go.]
Related: El on Earth • Box Set Full of Kryptonite • Failure to Launch
Box Set Full of Kryptonite
Warner Bros.’ 2007 Superman Ultimate Collector’s Edition DVD set is now
on sale at Amazon for an astounding $24.99. List price is $99.98 (per Amazon, a little higher or lower at other sites). You’ll still be a penny shy of free shipping, which is surely intentional.
As there were problems with the release of an almost identical set in 2006, when this Ultimate Collector’s Edition came out in 2007 I waited until it had a clean bill of health in online reports and then splurged the moment Borders held one of its very occasional 40%-off sales on DVD sets — knowing that if the set sold out we might not get another such package until there was another Superman movie to promote. I’ve still yet to watch everything in the set but no fan of the character or any part of the compilation should pass up this opportunity.
On 14 discs, packaged with a lenticular hologram of the Man of Steel in flight inside a tin case sporting both the 1978 and 2006 film versions of the big S, you get...
NCC-1701-DVD
J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek was released on home video this past Tuesday.
I look forward to sitting down on a cold, dark night during the post-sweeps/holiday
lull in new television and digging into its special features. The Abrams commentaries
on the pilot episodes of Lost and Fringe — the latter with Trek screenwriting duo Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci — were top-notch. I’m almost glad that I don’t have a Blu-Ray player since the regular 2-disc edition looks just right in terms of my level of interest in extras.
Deep Sit
A few years ago I was thrilled to find a DVD compilation of childhood favorite The Electric Company. You can read a bit about it — and in particular its crossovers with predecessor Sesame Street — on the Muppet Wiki, as well as in greater depth on Wikipedia.
I have fond memories of the show, from Rita Moreno’s familiar opening shout to the animated Adventures of Letterman shorts to Morgan Freeman as Easy Reader to Skip Hinnant in Fargo North, Decoder, to — of course — the strangely silent Spider-Man. What surprised me when I popped in the DVD was how much was unfamiliar, including the delightfully absurd soap-opera parody Love of Chair. The first episode of the serial is up on YouTube, albeit bootlegged; one minute long, just when you think it’s started running on fumes it finishes with a couple of laugh-out-loud moments. [Warning: Very brief smash cut to Bill Cosby.]
Some interesting but spoilery trivia follows in the comments section below.
Related: Brittality • This Is the Title of This Blogpost • Muppet Monday
