Box Set

Paramount has decided to standardize their DVD releases. This goes from everything to the DVD disc art, which is now just a two tone silver on all releases, to the cases. The new cases are a mixed deal. You get 6 discs inside of a single DVD space. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the disc holders are quite brittle and end up chipping and breaking. You save space but ultimately endanger the discs themselves. I hope someone at Paramount takes a look at the packaging and comes up with something a little better.

“Every story has a beginning. Every life has meaning and potential…”

Kyle doesn’t really know his story, and he’s beginning to understand his potential. But that was last year. This year things are about to change for our adolescent boy without a belly button. The series Kyle XY returned first to ABC Family and now returns to DVD.

The series known as Duckman can be explained in one phrase. Guilty pleasure. The series ran on USA during the 90’s before they decided to re-brand themselves as something more serious. Though for some reason they still tend to show the dog show every year. Anyhow, as I remember it came on right before another guilty pleasure of mine from the 90’s, Rhonda Shear and Up All Night. I miss Rhonda deeply, plastic never looked so good. Heck Tupperware was jealous. Duckman was a series like no other; full of debauchery and indecency just like Grandma intended. Grandpa will never be the same. Paramount has brought us forty-eight episodes over seven discs to compose season 3 & season 4. One has to wonder if it will hold up after all of these years.

One of the hardest parts of reviewing DVD’s for this site is getting dropped in to the middle of a show I neither followed nor cared to follow and being told to judge fairly and objectively. Getting one’s bearings can be the toughest part of such a task, but this I will attempt to do with Seventh Heaven – The Seventh Season. As if playing catch-up with only one season to go on isn’t enough, the series hurls character after character at the unsuspecting viewer at a furious pace.

TNA Wrestling is currently a very exciting place in the world of wrestling. Two factions have formed: Main Event Mafia and the Frontline. MEM is five former & current world champions and they are a deadly combination not seen since the heyday of the NWO. They want to teach respect to the other faction known as the Frontline, composed of TNA Originals and young upstarts who have worked their tail off and believe that the MEM should step aside and pass the torch to them. However, one forgets what led to these two factions forming. Three pay-per-views that happened from July 2008 to September 2008 laid the groundwork of the current state of affairs in TNA. Victory Road, Hard Justice and No Surrender.

Working in Hawaii on one of televisions hottest shows in the 1970’s was too good a job for most of the cast and crew of Hawaii Five-0. This meant that there was very little cast turnover for the series in general, and none going into the fourth year. Jack Lord saw his star rise considerably, and while he began to see some serious pay hikes, even he wasn’t about to kill the golden goose.

I’ve spent more than a few hours in the company of Ray Harryhausen over the years. I’ve handled many of the original armatures and have seen the original hand drawn storyboards and conceptual drawings he had created for most of his films. Maybe that’s why I love his films so much. I doubt it. They do speak for themselves and you owe it to yourself to see three of his best pictures, which have been collected here in one set.

James West (Conrad) was a Union Army vet. He’s the kind of act first think about it later kind of guy. Artemus Gordon (Ross) was a typical con man. He could create the most convincing disguises and was also a master of sleight of hand. Together they worked for the Secret Service in the days of the western frontier. The two of them were the prototype of the future spy. They would use incredible inventions and Bond-like gadgets, along with their own skills at trickery, to investigate major Federal crimes, often plots against the United States. Think of James Bond in the Wild West.

After 7 years JAG had pretty much settled in. It’s usually at this time that a show has to shake things up a bit or become somewhat stagnant. I think that JAG took the latter course. I have to believe that much of the creative talent was already working on the NCIS spin-off that was now 2 years away. The characters don’t appear to be taking any risks, and there is a little more of a return to the soap opera elements that began to fade away, making it a better show for some time.

With the ember finally burning out too soon, the 4400 has come to rest as a complete series release from Paramount this month on DVD. Unfortunately there really is very little new to add to the set. Except for a single extra disc, all of the discs included here are identical to the individual set releases. To make matters a little worse, the discs are in a large book format with overlapped discs. Not only is the bottom disc hard to get out without removing the top disc, but it slips under the top disc’s hub, making it all the easier to damage.