South Park: The Complete Eleventh Season
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 13th, 2008
I often have trouble believing that
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Paramount
Dave’s World – The First Season
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 13th, 2008
The first season release of Dave’s World is going to upset the show’s fans a bit. Paramount has decided to change the opening theme from Billy Joel’s “You May Be Right” to some jazzy piece that doesn’t come close to saying the same thing. This wasn’t even Joel’s performance of the song we’re talking about on the original. I know that the musical rights issues can be a problem. Shows like WKRP suffered from being loaded with songs and racking up a fortune in royalties for home video release.
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Caroline in the City – The First Season
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 13th, 2008
While nowhere does anyone actually say it, Caroline In The City is obviously inspired by/ripped off from the popular newspaper comic strip Cathy. Each episode, for a time anyway, would begin with an animated scene from one of the “Caroline” strips. The topic mostly deals with the pitfalls of being a single
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Star Trek The Original Series – The Complete Second Season (Remastered)
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 8th, 2008
“Space…The Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship
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Family Ties – The Fourth Season
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 8th, 2008
Family Ties is likely remembered most as the series that launched the career of Michael J. Fox. There’s no question that he owes a great debt to Alex Keaton. It’s almost a bit awkward now to watch him as this young, extremely conservative teenager after Fox has spent so much of his life as a liberal poster boy in the last couple of elections. Politics aside, it’s hard not to credit his performances in Family Ties and the Back To The Future films
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Best of Manswers: The Season One Top 25 Manswers
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 1st, 2008
“Can you take the dump of death”, or What’s the fastest way to get drunk”. These are the types of questions and answers that make up the Spike TV series Manswers. The idea is that the show answers those pressing questions that you guys out there might have been to afraid to ask. On first look you might get the mistaken idea that this is a copy of A&E’s far superior Mythbusters. On the surface the premise appears the same. Both shows appear to tackle the oddball question and attempt to find the truth behind the BS.
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Evening Shade – Season One
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 23rd, 2008
Think of it as Coach meets Newhart. That’s about the best way I know how to describe this somewhat quirky sitcom from CBS. It was mostly intended as a television project for its star, Burt Reynolds. The character would echo Reynolds’ own life somewhat. His character, Wood Newton, was a running back who had moderate success, just as Reynolds himself had. In the show he retired to his rural hometown of Evening Shade.
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Stop-Loss
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 23rd, 2008
It should not have come as such a surprise to me what Stop-Loss really is. It presents itself as this generation’s Deer Hunter, but it’s actually just another mindless film that, once stripped down to its essentials, is intended only to further a blatant political agenda. I keep hearing that the film is intended to honor our troops, but it presents all of them as mentally messed up idiots who are a hair away from committing crime sprees akin to Natural Born Killers.
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SpongeBob SquarePants — Pest of the West
Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on July 16th, 2008
If it’s Wednesday, that must mean another batch of SpongeBob cartoons. The lead-off here is the is title episode, a 22-minute piece that recounts the adventures of SpongeBuck SquarePants, our hero’s 19th-Century ancestor. The rest of the episodes are an eclectic bunch, and the thematic consistency is less than that of some other collections (there is a vague adventure link that runs through several of the stories). At any rate, the silliness is just as engaging and bizarre as ever, and there are plenty of quick absurdist sight gags to keep you chuckling.
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The Ruins (Unrated Edition)
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 12th, 2008
When The Ruins opens, it doesn’t look quite so promising. We’ve got two American couples sharing a vacation in
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Jake and the Fatman: Season One, Vol. 1
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 12th, 2008
They say that it isn’t over until the Fat Lady sings. Did you ever wonder what “it” was or who the heck this Fat Lady is they keep talking about? I can’t help you there, but I do know who the Fat Man is. It’s William Conrad, who came back to television in 1987 as J.L. McCabe, better known as “the Fatman”. McCabe was one of those tough as nails district attorneys. He was actually an ex-cop, so had great criminal instincts. McCabe wasn’t above bending the law to put away the bad guy, and he wasn’t considered a very friendly type of fellow. He majored in stubbornness and plain speaking.
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Cannon: Season One, Vol. 1
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 12th, 2008
William Conrad was no stranger to audiences when Cannon joined the Quinn Martin stable of television dramas. In fact, most folks knew his voice before they got to know his trademark girth. Conrad was the original Matt Dillon when Gunsmoke was a radio drama. When the drama entered the visual medium of television, even Conrad admitted later that the audience, who thought of him as tall and handsome, would have been disappointed. His voice lent authority to any role he played, and on radio his size was never an issue.
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Drillbit Taylor (Unrated Extended Survival Edition)
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 7th, 2008
I don’t know what it is about Owen Wilson, but whatever film he’s in he seems to be playing himself. The soft-spoken, rather glib personality has taken him places over the years, but you have to ask yourself if he’s ever going to actually take any risks. Drillbit Taylor is no more a stretch for the actor than any of these other roles. What that means for us, the viewers, is that we’re sure to get a solid and quite believable performance. We know that we’ll end up warming to
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The Streets of San Francisco – The Second Season, Vol. 1
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 1st, 2008
Inspectors 81 are back on the tough streets of
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Walker, Texas Ranger: The Complete Fifth Season
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 30th, 2008
There was a new Cowboy in
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Early Edition – The First Season
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 20th, 2008
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Jericho – The Second Season
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 17th, 2008
Because I was fairly certain I would be asked to review this second season of
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Strange Wilderness
Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on June 13th, 2008
I’m not sure how many people are familiar with the process of moviemaking, but when a film is not up to studio expectation and takes a long time to finally arrive to theaters after filming has wrapped, the result is sometimes due to financial issues with the studio. But most of the time it’s due to the fact that the studio has seen the final product, and it’s so abhorrent and without any value, redeeming, comic or otherwise, that it will be released as quietly and without recognition as possible. Now I don’t know if there were any financial issues surrounding Strange Wilderness, but I will say this: the film was shooting as far back as December 2005 and was released in February 2008, and at this point on rottentomatoes.com, there is not one positive review from the three dozen that are on the site. I’ll leave it to you to decide what the reasons why are.
The Fugitive: Season Two, Vol. 1
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 11th, 2008
“The man is Richard Kimble and, not surprisingly, the man is tired. Tired of looking over his shoulder, the ready lie of the buses and freight trains. Richard Kimble is tired of running…”
The elusive “one armed man” is one of the best known television icons of all time. The plight of Dr. Richard Kimball has been the subject of numerous imitations and even a feature film staring Harrison Ford as Kimball and Tommy Lee Jones as his pursuer.
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The Odd Couple: The Fourth Season
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 10th, 2008
Felix and Oscar return for a fourth year of laughs in The Odd Couple. Not much has changed in the world of Oscar and Felix, but isn’t that what you were hoping to hear? What I found interesting in this somewhat weaker season is that even when the actors were beginning to realize that the show was slipping, the pair never missed a beat in their own chemistry. Often it seems they lacked interest in the material when their characters were apart
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Hawaii Five-O – The Fourth Season
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 10th, 2008
Working in
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Mannix – The First Season
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 4th, 2008
It sounds like nothing new. Hard boiled detective uses computers and other forms of technology to solve cases. It isn’t anything new, except the detective in question is Joe Mannix and the series aired in 1967. The computer that Mannix used took up an entire room and was queried using cardboard punchcards. This wasn’t science fiction. We’re not talking some newly discovered Irwin Allen series. Mannix didn’t go after aliens or robots. This was a down to earth gritty detective show.
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The Invaders – The First Season
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on May 29th, 2008
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not really out to get you. That old axiom has never been more true than for David Vincent in the Martin Quinn series The Invaders. Quinn was best known for his police procedural shows like The FBI. At the time of the The Invaders Quinn was going into the final season of one of his most popular shows, The Fugitive. While most people over the years have compared The Invaders to that Quinn production, they were really not as similar as all that.
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Rawhide: Season Three, Vol. 1
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on May 22nd, 2008
This is the first half of the third season of Rawhide. Long before Clint Eastwood was making our day as Dirty Harry or even roaming the badlands without a name for Sergio Leone, he was working the cattle drive on Rawhide. Rawhide was created to take advantage of the huge Western film and television wave that
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Gunsmoke: The Second Season, Vol. 2
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on May 22nd, 2008
The set comprises the second half of the second season of Gunsmoke. The show was still in black and white and in the half hour format. Some of the best episodes of the set included Bloody Hands. For once a western dealt with conscience. When Dillon begins to have haunting dreams and pangs of guilt over killing three bad guys, he tries to back down from a fight. Has Dillon gone yellow? Arness does a better than average job on this rather thought provoking episode.
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