Posts by Gino Sassani

"Good evening. My name's Wayne. Some of you may have seen me before. I hope so. I've been kicking around Hollywood a long time. I've made a lot of pictures out here. All kinds. Some of them have been westerns, and that's what I'm here to tell you about tonight. A western. A new television show called "Gunsmoke". When I first heard about the show "Gunsmoke", I knew there was only one man to play in it. James Arness. He's a young fellow, and may be new to some of you. But I've worked with him, and I predict he'll be a big star. And now, I'm proud to present "Gunsmoke"."

That was John Wayne introducing the television audiences of 1955 to Gunsmoke. Gunsmoke fans have had a long wait to get the full series on DVD, and that long wait is finally ended. If you have been picking up the seasons as they have been released along the way, sometimes in half-season sets, you only had a season remaining to complete your collection. If you waited or have become a recent fan of the classic western, another alternative has presented itself. CBS has released the entire 20 seasons in one collection. Even if you have been collecting all along, you should consider selling or gifting your single or half-season sets and opt to have them all in one place anyway. Those cases take up a lot of room on the DVD shelf, and while this collection isn’t exactly tiny, it does take up less space, with an option to store on its side where it takes up very little shelf space, but you’ll need almost 13 inches of headroom on your shelf. Even on its side it's a good third less space than all of those cases. The design is simple and quite functional. Inside of a strong cardboard case you'll find the 20 seasons split out over six large plastic cases. The seasons are contained in the following six groups: 1-4, 5-7, 8-9, 10-12, 13-15, 16-20. The boxes avoid those stacked spindles, a choice I highly approve of. The box is an attractive case that looks like it's leather-bound with a panoramic color photograph of the main characters on one side. It's open on the back, allowing easy access to the discs. If you're facing a considerable amount of "Shelter In Place", this is going to make those weeks fly by. There are 635 episodes. The early episodes are a half-hour; the majority are one hour each. The series is also split almost 50-50 in black & white or color. Seasons 1-11 are in black & white, while the remainder of the seasons are in color. We're talking the original full-frame presentation. These episodes have not been monkeyed with. Subtitles show up starting with Season 5. There's not much in bonus features. There are some production promos and vintage television commercials. There are a couple of commentary tracks spread throughout. There is a rather nice wrap-up feature on the final season. There are a few other brief extras throughout this collection that spans 143 discs. Finally, if you want to know how that all adds up, how about 440 1/2 hours? That's going to be some binge-watching right there. It'll make a great gift if you are already thinking about getting an early start on your holiday shopping.

For all intents and purposes, Season 7 is the final season of Ray Donovan. The end came rather suddenly and after it was too late to create and film some kind of satisfying finale for the series. The cast and crew were taken by surprise, so you can imagine how the fans of the show are taking this. To make matters worse, the last episode, while not a complete cliffhanger, leaves too many strands of thread that weren't connected. There's nothing satisfying about this finale, and that created waves in the world of fandom. Star Trek is famous as being the first television show that a network cancelled and then brought back because of a huge letter-writing campaign that flooded network executives and pushed them into an unprecedented action for that time. The show was brought back. Imagine what those rabid fans could have done today with the internet and social media. The call has gone out, and while Showtime has made no move to offer any kind of reversal or concession, the show's star reached out with a somewhat cryptic message of hope. He assured fans that the Donovan family isn't finished just yet. What that reprieve might be, there isn't a clue offered, but it's doubtful at this point that the show will return as an 8th season. The likely scenarios include a Showtime film like we saw recently for Deadwood. There's a shot at a feature film at the theatres, which is where Star Trek's original crew ended up. There's always a chance of a revival mini-series like we've seen over at Fox for The X-Files and Prison Break. I don't know what form it might take, but I do believe the characters will return in some way. Unfortunately new global circumstances have placed pretty much all television shows, films, and other outlets for entertainment in doubt, at least in the short term. Eventually we will get out of this, but I suspect Ray Donovan won't be the first priority out of the gate. Fans are going to have to be patient here. I believe it will happen, but I'm as equally convinced that it won't happen soon. So for now you're going to have to savor these last 10 episodes for a while, and this DVD release gives you the means to do just that.

There are two events from the past that are driving the events of this season. Ray (Schreiber) and the family still feel the loss of Abby. That death from Season 5 hangs over everyone as if it had just happened. The other event deals with the circumstances from last season. The cops that waged war on the Donovans and took daughter Bridget (Dorsey) hostage. It ended with a bloody massacre that baptized Bridget's fiancée Smitty (Rogers) into the family. Bodies were dismembered and heads disposed of ... but not for long. Fishermen come up with a bowling ball bag containing one of those heads. Detective Perry (Bernstine) uses it to launch a full-scale investigation into the Donovan family, and it's going to be brutal.

Paramount is borrowing an old idea from Walt Disney Studios and making it a bit more modern. They’re digging into their vault of classic films and doing 4K restorations and releasing them under the new Paramount Presents banner. Now, as much as I’d like to see actual 4K UHD releases, I suspect that these are intended to be feelers for various classic films to try to gauge the demand for these trips into the archives. I also suspect that the titles that show the most promise will likely end up seeing a UHD release. It’s actually a pretty good plan and a chance for you to “vote” with your dollars and show each film what kind of interest still exists. I’m sure some will falter and fall by the wayside, while a few polished gems will show the kind of promise that calls for the 4K release. Now the restoration work is done, and it’s just a matter of printing some discs. So here’s a look at the first three films served up for consideration. Each is sold separately and comes in a cardboard case covering the plastic case that folds out to reveal a release poster for said film. The presentations are nice and geared toward the collector.

Fatal Attraction (1987)

It started with Kentucky Fried Movie, which was a somewhat modest box office success mainly because of the genius of Joe Landis as director, but this game really took off three years later with the box office hit Airplane. It was a spoof of all of those Airport films we saw during the 1970’s and 80’s. They all had the same formula and were almost spoofs of themselves by the time the string ran out. The film pulled in an impressive $85 million on a measly $3 million budget. The team of Jim Abrahams along with brothers David and Jerry Zucker was born, and comedy would never quite be the same. The comedic form they developed relied on a lot of deadpan delivery of one-liners and some rather stilted wit. But it was something different, and it wasn’t really a surprise that the team would want to keep it going. A second Airplane film wouldn’t come along for a couple of years, and it would be guided by a completely new team. This trio was on to bigger and arguably better things. The first step was to land on the television screen with a police comedy called Police Squad. It was hoped the show would help capitalize on the same kind of comedy that took Airplane to the stratosphere. They would also maintain the film’s star, Leslie Nielsen. It should have been a no-brainer and an instant hit. It lasted six episodes and was gone in a hot flash. But that wasn’t quite the end of the story.

The series stared Leslie Nielsen as Detective Frank Drebin, a member of the Chicago police’s elite unit called Police Squad. His boss and partner was Captain Ed Hocken, played by Alan North. The show ran for a half-hour, and that time was filled with pretty much the same routines week after week. The show’s staple comedy came from a few limited sources. There was the vintage routine of taking a phrase literally. The backgrounds had all kinds of non-sequiturs going on through each scene, while the rest of the cast had to play it straight and pretend to not notice. Examples include a Japanese garden that has Japanese people standing in plant pots.  A building might start to collapse around the characters while they go on with their questioning without taking any notice. Two of the regular gags involved the squad’s lab tech Dr. Olsen, played by Ed Williams. Each episode would have him doing a kind of “Mr. Wizard” experiment with a young child which hinted that the doctor had “other” motives for having the children around. It’s a gag that might not fly very well in today’s culture. The second involved shoeshine boy Johnny, who was played by William Duel. Frank would come to have his shoes shined when he was stumped. For a couple of bucks Johnny would fill him in on what was going on in the street. But the gag didn’t end there. After Frank leaves, some professional from a surgeon to a firefighter and even Dick Clark would come for professional advice which Johnny would know “nothing” about until his palm was greased with cash. Then he’d have detailed suggestions on how to perform a tricky operation or explain a new trend in music to a stumped Dick Clark. It was actually one of the show’s better gags, and actor William Duel sold it brilliantly. The problem is it was the same gag every week. That’s the trouble with all of this humor; the repetitive nature of the schtick made the show grow incredibly old in just six weeks. Ratings were a disaster, and the show ended as quickly as it had begun.