Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 25th, 2009
Look up in the sky. It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No, it’s…. well, Clark Kent. When Smallville was first developed for television, the showrunners made a few conscious decisions that have, for the most part, been kept for the show’s first 8 seasons. There was a strict “no flights, no tights” rule that was in effect for anyone hoping to pen an adventure for the show. Everyone knows we’re talking about Superman here, but the term is avoided like a deadly disease. All of the familiar places and names are firmly in place, but make no mistake. This is the world before Superman began to make his presence known to the world.
For those of you who have been living under a rock since the 1930’s, Smallville was the Kansas farm town where young Kal-El’s space ship from the dying planet Krypton crash landed. He was discovered by Jonathan (Schneider) and Martha (O’Toole) Kent and raised as their adopted son. The series began with Clark’s high school years. Clark always had a crush on neighbor Lana Lang (Kreuk). In a nod to the 1978 film, Martha is played by Annette O’Toole, who played Lana in that second film. Clark’s high school friends include Chloe Sullivan (Mack) who is somewhat of a computer whiz and ace school paper reporter. Clark also befriends local billionaire son Lex Luthor (Rosenbaum) after saving his life. In these early seasons the characters would slowly build towards the eventual hero/villain relationship that Luthor and Superman would share. Lex Luthor’s father Lionel Luthor (Glover) would go from being a bad guy to a good guy and back again as the show progressed. Much of these early episodes dealt with Clark discovering his powers as he matured. Eventually all but the flight ability would surface. The show also took on a freak of the week aspect at times. It seems that while Kryptonite robs Clark of his power, it has created mutant powers in many humans who have encountered it over the years. Clark and Chloe would spend many a season tracking down and stopping these “meteor freaks”.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 20th, 2009
“Unlike the rest of us, sex, lies, and scandal never take a vacation. Instead they take the Long Island Expressway and head East to the Hamptons. Some would say summer is their busiest season. Think Park Avenue, but with tennis whites and Bain de Soleil. The players change, but the game remains the same.”
And for fans of the series Gossip Girl, the place may have changed at least for the season two premiere, but it’s still the show that’s become somewhat of a guilty pleasure to so many viewers. The show picks up during Summer Break in the Hamptons for our East Enders, but don’t worry. They’re back in their East End familiar surroundings before too long at all. As the opening narrative implies, the game does indeed remain the same.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 12th, 2009
“Four turtles. Four brothers genetically reborn in the sewers of New York. Named after the great Renaissance masters and trained as ninjas. They battled many creatures and foes before defeating their arch enemy, The Shredder. But, now a greater evil is poised to destroy their brotherhood. An evil born 3000 years ago.”
What started as a low budget comic has grown into quite a sensation. The Turtles are everywhere. There are cartoons, books, comics, movies, and thousands of toys. They’ve been translated into just about every language in the world. The 1980’s and 1990’s were alive with Turtle power. With yet another film now in the works, the Turtles are about to make a comeback. While the characters might not have started with the 80’s cartoon series, that’s where it made its greatest leap in popularity. The show ran for over a decade, a rare record for cartoon shows of the era. Then came the inevitable movies. Three of them in all during the live action phase. The Turtles were part actor and part animatronics Jim Henson creation ala the Disney/ABC Dinosaurs television series. The fourth was a recent (2007) CGI film. All four are collected here for the first time in high definition Blu-ray in a rather righteous collection. The case is a pizza box, and each of the four discs resemble different kinds of pizza. There’s also a bit of swag to be found in the spacious box. You get character cards featuring shots from the live action films, a signed black and white sketch, a comic book detailing events from the first film, and a “radical” beanie for your head. It may be a bit corny and somewhat impractical, but it beats those crazy eco cases that are getting way too popular in the industry.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on August 10th, 2009
The Super Friends as a cartoon show had a long and sketchy past. It started out in the 1970’s and ran in nearly a dozen different incantations and over a hundred episodes until 1986 when it was put down for the last time. In the 1983-84 season, the series had been cancelled officially for a second time. This was due to the fact that they did not wish to compete with the syndication run of the original episodes that was already on air. Hence, the new episodes were dropped and didn’t appear until many years later. Here, the people at WB have compiled these 8 episodes (24 shorts) into a 2-disc set and dubbed them the “Lost Episodes.”
As mentioned, there are twenty-four shorts for this lost season of Super Friends. They run the gambit of subjects, villains, and heroes. In episodes such as “The Krypton Syndrome”, Superman is thrown into a time warp and has to deal with the impending doom of his home planet: Krypton. However, the decision he makes leads to some rather disturbing consequences.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on July 28th, 2009
The Green Lantern character has always been one of my favorite DC comic book heroes, right after the likes of Batman and the Flash. As far as Earth-born GL’s, Hal Jordan has always been first in my heart and even though the John Stewart was shown predominantly in the cartoon series: Justice League Unlimited, it was hard wrapping my head around him as the Green Lantern. I was excited to see that due to recent success with other characters, the people at DC decided to release a direct to disc release for the Green Lantern sub-titled: First Flight.
Hal Jordan is a test pilot for the military. He’s testing one of the newest planes when suddenly his ship is enveloped in a green energy beam to a crash site. There he finds a dying Abin Sur, the current Green Lantern of sector 2814. Before he dies, he bequeaths his ring to Hal Jordan, proclaiming him the new Green Lantern. Moments later after the passing of Abin Sur, several current members of the Green Lantern corps arrive and take Hal Jordan to the headquarters where the Lanterns and Guardians of the Universe meet.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 22nd, 2009
Since the events of 911 there has been a lot more appreciation, at least publicly, for the real life heroes who populate fire and police stations all over the country. Few jobs offer so little reward for such high risk all in the name of protecting our society from harm. It’s likely no coincidence that while Third Watch began a couple of years before those events, it reached its peak in popularity in the months and years that followed. A better than average procedural drama, Third Watch offered a look at both police officers and firefighters along with their paramedics. You could call it a cross between Hill Street Blues and Emergency.
The police officers and the fire fighters are all members of New York’s 55th Precinct. The Precinct carries the nickname of Camelot. While they work from separate facilities, they are across the street from each other and their duties often find them working together. The two houses share a bond, but there are also moments of stress and rivalry. But when there’s a crisis, these men and women are the best and get the job done.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 22nd, 2009
I grew up on the Peanuts creations of Charles M. Schulz. Most of us have, in some way or another. His newspaper comic strip is one of the longest running and most successful strips of all time. The work has been translated into every language currently spoken on the planet. The images of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, and the rest of the Peanuts gang have appeared on just about any kind of product imaginable. Our pop culture contains too many references to the strip to mention briefly. For me, it was the television specials starting in the mid 1960’s that brought the gang into my life. The classics are running annually, still after nearly 50 years. A Charlie Brown Christmas and It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown are the most mentioned and certainly beloved by generations of children and adults. I thought I never missed an airing.
Now Warner Home Video has brought together a special collection of the cartoon specials that started it all. It includes those annual greats and a few that I don’t really remember so much. The two discs include the following Peanuts specials:
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 10th, 2009
“It’s like one of those fatal attraction things, like they show on the Donahue Show, you know?”
It might not have exactly been “fatal”, but the attraction that Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau had for each other, and we still have for them, is on perfect display in Grumpy Old Men. Then again… it might just as well have been fatal, if not fate. The two men died just months from each other. Matthau left us in July of 2000, and just under a year later in June of 2001 we lost Jack Lemmon. Chris Lemmon, Jack’s son, doesn’t think it’s entirely a coincidence. He told me in a recent interview that the men loved each other. He joked that “if Walter had played golf, he’d have married him.” Whether it was the chemistry these guys had off screen or just their natural abilities, might be hard to pin down. Whatever the reason, there have been few Hollywood duos that put out as impressive a body of work. With Lemmon, it was the fact that he was always rather a dramatic actor who found himself in hilarious roles. With Matthau, he was always the lovable buffoon whose characters almost always got in their own way. They appeared in about a dozen films together, from the enigmatic Oliver Stone JFK to The Odd Couple, perhaps their most renowned comedy. Like all of their films the main attraction, fatal or otherwise, is watching these two buddies work together. Grumpy Old Men might not be anything like their best work, but I’d take these guys on an average day over most duos on their very best.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on July 4th, 2009
Everwood was a fairly long running show that started in 2002 and continued until 2006 for a total of eighty-nine episodes. It ran on the WB and was a casualty of the WB/UPN merger into the CW Television Network. Years later it has shown up on ABC Family and around the globe gaining fans here and there. It's a serious drama that involves the medical practice of Dr. Andy Brown (played by Treat Williams). Set in the fictional town of Everwood, Colorado (in reality it was a few towns located in Utah), we find ourselves figuring out how a death can alter the lives of everybody in the town and how they struggle to cope.
Colin Hart (played by Mike Erwin) has died to due to a very difficult medical procedure on his brain. The procedure was performed by Dr. Andy Brown and as a result the whole town shuns Andy and his practice. Amy Abbott (played by Emily VanCamp) who was Colin's girlfriend turns her back on the good doctor and lapses into a deep depression. As a result of the aftermath, Andy's children also face scrutiny. Ephram (played Gregory Smith) finds his good friend Amy turning away from him and Delia (played Vivien Cardone) is shunned by her click of young friends and not being invited to slumber parties.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 15th, 2009
We’ve seen many instances of American television shows that have been inspired by or directly copied from British shows. This has been particularly true of comedy series and is not a new phenomenon. All In The Family and Sanford And Son from the 1970’s are great examples of American sit-coms based on British hits, Till Death Do Us Part and Steptoe And Son respectfully. Recently The Office has been a successful British import. In the inspired by category you have to include Mistresses. There’s no question that the show comes from a combination of Desperate Housewives and Sex In The City. Like those shows, this series tells the story of friends who have somewhat risqué love lives. The episodes delve into their quests for sexual excitement. It’s very much a chick thing. Unfortunately, we don’t have any members of the fairer sex here at Upcomingdiscs, so I ended up with the short straw. I got to see Mistresses.
The problem with this series is that it’s not even terribly exciting from the bedroom point of view. The plot is so slow and plodding that the girls talk a lot more than they do. If there’s one thing I learned as a writing minor in college it’s the old axiom: “Show us. Don’t tell us.” This series never took that writing class, and so I’m afraid we hear a lot more than we ever see. None of the girls are that particularly interesting. The show takes on the pace of a daily soap opera with far less installments. The whole thing is a big tease.
![Smallville: The Complete Eighth Season [Blu-ray] dvd cover art](https://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/smallville-the-complete-eighth-sea-large.jpg)
![Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Film Collection (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles / Secret of the Ooze / Turtles in Time / TMNT) [Blu-ray] dvd cover art](https://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-film-c-large.jpg)
![Green Lantern: First Flight (+ Digital Copy) [Blu-ray] dvd cover art](https://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/green-lantern-first-flight-digi-large.jpg)
![Grumpy Old Men [Blu-ray] dvd cover art](https://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/grumpy-old-men-blu-ray-large.jpg)
