So since the end of April season two of Everwood has really appeared in stores, MTV’s The State’s pre-orders for July 14th haven’t been canceled, and TVshowsondvd.com has just announced that both a US version of season one and a compete series boxset of Ally McBeal are being released this year.
Where do we submit our “popular demand” forms for the other shows in this thread?
The “Get A Life” DVD’s are only a couple episodes. I rented those and it just made me crave seeing the rest of them.
Cool on the “Parker Lewis Can’t Lose” DVD of season one!!
Thanks for the info…
Thank you for putting Lou Grant on your list. It’s been on my short list forever, but everyone else seems to have forgotten that it existed. It’s still in the top 10 of my all-time favorite T.V. shows.
1.) Men Into Space --The ,most obscure TV SF series ever. I might be disappointed when I finally see it, but I’m curious. I haven’t seen this since its initial broadcast in the late 1950s. To my knowledge it’s never been rebroadcast or syndicated, and never on VHS or DVD. Even finding out about it through other media has been tough – even books specializing in science fiction television never had more than a general brief statement aout it, and never listed individual episodes. It wasn’t until the internet came around that I found a listing of episodes, and stills from the series. It was “hard” SF, with (as far as I can recall) competant effects for the time. It was about the Conquest of Space, and avoided fantastic elements like aliens, FTL drive, and the like.
I’m not sure my other choices even exist on tape. They’re British series:
2.) Judge Dee – there was a six-episode British TV series based on the novels of Robert Hans van Gulik about 7th century T’ang jurist Djien-Djieh Dee. He was the hero of a one-shot American TV-movie made by Nicholas Meyer from one of van Gulik’s books. That movie I’ve seen (and have a copy on DVD – but I dubbed it myself. To m knowledge it’s never been released in any form, and is shown very rarely). The American film was clearly supposed to be a pilot for a series that never happened. I’m curious to see how it fared as a series in Britain. That version predates the American Tv-movie. Timothy Dalton is in one episode.
3.) Out of This World – British TV SF anthology. It features Asimov’s “Little Lost Robot” and Ton Goodwin’s “The Cold Equations” (ages before Sci-Fi did it, and probably more faithfully, too.)
4.) Out of the Unknown – Another, later British SF anthology. One episode, at least (“Thirteen to Centaurus”) is or was up on YouTube in full. This series ran four seasons, and featured stories by J.G. Ballard, Frederick Pohl, E.M. Forster (!), Robert Sheckley, Isaac Asimov (The robot stories “Liar!” and “The Naked Sun”!), C.M. Kornbluth (“The Little Black Bag”, years before Night Gallery did it), and others.
Street Hawk (available on crappy VHS bootleg I think)
I can sort of understand that all the digital remastering and cleaning up can be expensive, the hell, just do a decent digital transfer and release it at a reasonable price and I’d buy it. Better an OK version that I can own than letting these shows just disappear. Somehow I don’t think the studios will be willing to keep storing them forever if it’s not profitable to release them.
To be far, there’s only .5 seasons +1 episode more worth having. Most of season 3 was sub-par. It went from being a serious show that used the gargoyles as a metaphor for racism, prejudice, and the human condition, all while exploring mythologies from over a dozen cultures, that just happened to be a cartoon, to a cartoon about gargoyles.
My contributions:
The aforementioned Daria, Rocko’s Modern Life, and The Maxx.
I’ll add: The Adventures of Pete and Pete, The Head (a show on MTV the same time as The Maxx that i actually liked a little better.)
Is it weird that these are all Nickelodeon or MTV shows? Curse you, Viacom!