In the Florida everglades, the Wedloe family have a 650-pound tame bear for a loyal pet. A very young Clint Howard stars as Mark, the son of a game warden (played by Dennis Weaver),who leads Ben around on several adventures and merry mishaps. Though “merry” may be the wrong word as Mark and Ben encounter their fair share of real life dangers.

On paper, the premise of Prince Avalanche sounds about as exciting as watching paint dry. The film follows a pair of squabbling workers whose job it is to paint yellow lines in the middle of a country road in the aftermath of a devastating wildfire. They're basically the only two characters in the movie, and the story never moves away from their desolate surroundings. Although his film is occasionally self-indulgent (by design, I suspect), director David Gordon Green finds the strange beauty in that desolate landscape. He's also armed with stars who bring this meandering character study to life.

Ben Tennison is back in the action packed collection of Ben 10 Omniverse from Cartoon Network.  In 10 newly released episodes we follow Ben and his fellow Plumbers as they do battle against the meanest and the ugliest aliens the galaxy has to offer, in our universe or any parallel universe out there. This cartoon is infectious.  From its catchy opening music, imaginative characters and fun action sequences this is a cartoon that simply grows on me more and more, and I have no shame in admitting that I’m a fan of this “kids’” show. 

In 1986, AIDS was all over the headlines. Now AIDS is forgotten and ignored by most, but the pandemic remains a world wide disaster. It's not like syphilis is all over the news either, but AIDS is both an insidious killer and one with a stigma all its own. Aside from the stigma is the world wide spread of HIV (the precursor to AIDS) which had reached 34 million people by 2010. Across the world, the majority of new infections are male to female. Modern pornography is exponentially more available than it has ever been and does nothing to promote safe sex, and condom use is still something that has strong opponents in society.

It's been six months since last we visited with Dexter (Hall) and his pals. Deb (Carpenter) had just shot and killed Lt. LaGuerta (Velez), and the blame went to another killer. It was LaGuerta or Dexter, and she made her choice. Now she's suffering some post-traumatic consequences for her actions. She's left the force, and no one has heard from her in weeks. She's hanging out with lowlifes doing drugs and playing undercover cop as a private investigator with Jacob Elway, played by Sean Patrick Flanery. Dexter is trying to track her down and possibly save her life from a hitman. Needless to say, it's going to be a long road for the siblings.

"What if a child dreamed of becoming something other than what society had intended? What if a child aspired to something greater?"

It's appropriate that exactly 75 years ago this very month Superman was born at the hands of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. He was born to be the patriotic hero symbol for a nation on the brink of a devastating world war. The war came and went as many others would since the hero's inception. Styles would change. Technology would come and go. Superman would find himself invading each and every medium that has come along since.

So what made The Carol Burnett Show such an outstanding hit? You have to start with Carol herself, of course. She'd been doing this kind of show for years and was paying attention to what worked and what didn't. She knew it started with the writing staff, and she hired only the best and the brightest. When it was time to put together a cast, she knew the first thing she wanted was a "Harvey Korman type". She did better than that. She got Harvey Korman. She knew you had to have a ladies’ man in the cast, and she got that element with Lyle Waggoner. He was relatively unknown at the time, but she knew how to spot talent.

Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol is vastly re-imagined with characters from Dora. Swiper replaces Scrooge as the one who travels through time in order to learn the true meaning of Christmas. This special is twice the length of a normal episode.

They've been seen over 2 billion times on Youtube. Of course, I'm talking about the cult cartoon sensation Happy Tree Friends. Now our friends over at The Media Grind want to bring some happy times to three lucky Upcomingdiscs readers. We're giving away 3 copies of Happy Tree Friends: Complete Disaster. It's Mondo Media's most popular series and now it can be yours.

To win just follow these instructions.

"Ladies and gentlemen. You are about to see the Naked City. I'm Bert Leonard, the producer. As you can see we're flying over an island, a city, a particular city...and this is the story of a number of people, a story also of the city itself. It was not photographed in the studio. Quite the contrary. The actors played out their roles in the streets and the buildings of New York itself."

On September 30th, 1958 television audiences heard this narration for the first time. They had no way of knowing this, of course, but they were about to watch one of the most influential police dramas in the history of the industry. They were about to watch, for the first time, The Naked City.