Disc Type

Erle Stanley Gardner wrote crime fiction, and while many of his 100 or so works are unknown to most of us, he created a character who has become as identified with criminal lawyers as any other in fiction. It was in these crime novels that Perry Mason first faced a courtroom. He developed a style where he would investigate these terrible crimes his clients were on trial for. He would find the real killer, and in what has become a Hollywood cliché, reveal his findings in a crucial moment during the trial. While we may not remember the novels, we all remember the man in the persona of Raymond Burr.  Burr had a commanding presence on our screens and enjoyed a well-deserved 11-year run as the clever lawyer. What makes this run so amazing is that the show followed pretty much the same pattern the entire time. We always know what’s going to happen, but we wait eagerly for that gotcha moment when Perry faces the witness on the stand. We know when he’s got the guy squarely in his sights, and we can’t sit still waiting for him to pull the trigger. OK, so maybe that’s a little over the top, but so was Perry Mason. From the moment you heard that distinctive theme, the stage was set. To say that Perry Mason defined the lawyer show for decades would be an understatement. Folks like Matlock and shows like The Practice are strikingly similar to Perry Mason.

Perry Mason officially ended in May of 1966, but that wasn't going to be the end. Twenty years later the surviving cast members reunited for Perry Mason Returns. It was Perry and Della back together again. Both Raymond Burr and Barbara Hale returned to their roles. William Hopper had died in 1970, so William Katt joined the reunion as Paul Drake, Jr. Katt might not have really been Drake's son; he was Hale's son. When Katt left the films he was replaced by William R. Moses as Ken Malansky. Ken was a young law student helped by Perry once when he was framed in law school for a rival's murder. He ends up being both a legal assistant and investigator for Perry in the reunion films. Ken's girlfriend is Amy, played by Baywatch's Alexandra Hastings. Amy was a rich girl who had too much time on her hands. It led to her involving herself in Ken's investigations. The films also often starred James McEachin as Lt. Brock, the cop on many of the cases.  M*A*S*H's David Ogden Stiers would often play his rival in the prosecutor's office Michael Reston. The team would continue to do 30 television movies from 1985-1995. CBS has now begun to package these reunion films in collections like this.

Shout Factory has yet another Transformers animated series to unleash upon the legions of fans who must not be able to get enough of their robots in disguise.  Beast Machines takes place on Cybertron after the Beast Wars.  Beast Wars is yet another series about the Transformers that somehow has gotten past me while reviewing the other series.  The fact that Beast Wars precedes the events in Beast Machines caused a brief moment of confusion.  Thankfully with the target audience being under the age of ten, catching up wasn’t all too difficult.

This time around, there are no Autobots to be found, but instead we get a new breed of hero in the Maximals.  The introduction of Optimus Primal and his friends was a bit jarring considering this series takes place on Cybertron and Optimus is actually a gorilla.  In fact when we meet Optimus and his friends, they are all animals without the ability to transform.  OK, well, that’s not entirely true, they CAN transform, but in this series it’s not just in the physical sense but also on a metaphysical level.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, these are the Transformers of the modern age, or more appropriately New Age.

What would you do if you had access to a computer that was capable of giving you information that could prevent a crime from happening?  One step further, what if this machine could locate any person with only a few keystrokes?  This “God” like machine is the basis for what Person of Interest revolves around.  For two seasons we’ve watched as Harold Finch (Michael Emerson) and ex-CIA agent John Reese (Jim Caviezel) used the machine to protect those whom the machine feels are in danger.  But along the way, the lives of Finch and Reese have grown more complicated as their actions have intertwined them with HR (a mafia-like group run by dirty cops), the Russian mob, and numerous government agencies that would like to obtain the machine for their own personal agendas.

Helping out Finch and Reese are NYPD officers Det. Fusco (Kevin Chapman) and Det. Carter (Taraji P. Henson).  In the previous seasons we’ve watched as Fusco has struggled to clear his name after working as a dirty cop in league with HR; Fusco has been one of those characters we’ve seen change the most over the seasons while we see his genuine struggle of keeping his past behind him and showing that he is no longer a dirty cop.  But in season three (well, the first half of the season) the attention is mainly on the struggle Detective Carter has in her attempt to take down HR to avenge her boyfriend’s death in the previous season and clear his name.

Three-time widower Ben Cartwright  (Greene) runs his famous Ponderosa Ranch with the aid of his three grown sons from three different mothers. There’s Little Joe (Landon), Adam (Roberts) and Hoss (Blocker). Set some time in the mid 1800’s, this long-running series followed the family’s many exploits. In the late 1950’s, westerns accounted for six of the top ten programs on TV. Only Gunsmoke had a longer run than Bonanza. From 1959 to 1973, Ben Cartwright and his boys rode across the small screen. Years later in syndication the series re-emerged as Ponderosa, and a handful of TV movies continued the tale into the 90’s.We never have grown tired of the genre that gave us such heroes as John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.

Unlike many of the 1960's Western television shows, Bonanza was all about the characters. You rarely saw a gunfight. There was often a bit of fisticuffs, but usually it ended with a lesson that violence never pays. The show prided itself on using the Western genre to deliver a family kind of show, and it's no surprise that series star Michael Landon would use many of the same kinds of stories and lessons on his own Little House On The Prairie. The Cartwrights are always helping widows, the wrongly accused, and the local Indian population. That help often lands them in hot water.