Sign up for the FREE Tell Membership and receive benefits that include the digital edition of Tell Magazine sent straight to your inbox, product giveaways, coupons and much more!
Sign up for the FREE Tell Membership and receive benefits that include the digital edition of Tell Magazine sent straight to your inbox, product giveaways, coupons and much more!
Welcome back, TV fans. I do hope you’ll join me now for a look at the latest and greatest TV releases on DVD and Blu-ray Disc:
Boston Legal: Season 5
Fox | DVD
In this Star Trek-intensive installment of TV-on-DVD Picks, it seems fitting that we kick things off with William Shatner. Granted, the only beaming taking place at Crane, Poole & Schmidt is Denny Crane’s dopey smile after saying something juvenile and/or chauvanistic – but that’s all part of the fun. Fox presents all 12 episodes of this fifth and final season on DVD with attractive widescreen video and Dolby surround. Fans should also enjoy the trio of featurettes and a handful of deleted scenes which round out the package. Denny Crane!
Caprica (Pilot)
Universal | DVD
A prequel spin-off to the Sci-Fi hit series Battlestar Galactica, Caprica takes place on the planet (wait for it) Caprica more than 50 years before the events of BSG unfold. If you haven’t finished watching watching BSG yet, there’s no need to worry about spoilers; this is a completely separate story with all new characters. Some of the characters’ names should sound familiar ("little Willy Adama") and you’ll certainly hear "frak" used more often than necessary, but executive producers Ron Moore and David Eick have a new story to tell here. I can’t say it hooked me in the same way BSG did but I’ll definitely give them a few episodes to let them work their magic. Universal’s DVD looks and sounds good, but it’s a shame we couldn’t get a Blu-ray release for this pilot movie. Unlike BSG, Caprica has a more natural color pallette with little of the grain and grittiness that was very much a part of the BSG look.
Dexter: Season 2
CBS/Paramount | Blu-ray
I used to think the lush jungle greens and blue Hawaiian oceans on Lost were the ultimate showcase for TV-on-Blu-ray, but damn if Dexter doesn’t give it a run for its money. This sharply-written series with a likeable serial killer as its titular protagonist is endlessly entertaining, but the bigger story here is the boldly-colored, spotless and richly-detailed 1080p image adorning this Season Two Blu-ray. Looking every inch as good as the Season One Blu-ray, Dexter is a must-see title when it comes to high def TV-on-disc.
Earth: Final Conflict: Season 1
Universal | DVD
Although best known for giving us the U.S.S. Enterprise and its crew, the mind of Gene Roddenberry also gave rise to another sci-fi series – one that actually ran longer than the original Star Trek series – Earth: Final Conflict. Although E:FC bears his name and Roddenberry is given multiple writing credits, the series wasn’t actuallly produced until 1997, six years after Roddenberry’s death. Despite its dated small screen special effects and an abundance of present day cars (circa 1997), E:FC holds up well thanks to some interesting ideas and a compelling what-if scenario: a key to all respectable science fiction. Although later seasons have been previously available on DVD, Universal finally gives us the debut season with full frame 1.33:1 video and Dolby 2.0 sound. The show looks and sounds about as well as you could for, but Eugene Roddenberry’s introduction to the show is a fluffy letdown. It would have been nice to hear Gene’s son offer a personal anecdote or two about the show’s genesis but all we get is basically, "this is wonderful and I hope you enjoy it." Still, E:FC is definitely worth a spin and here’s hoping Universal brings us the remaining seasons and soon.
Best of Star Trek: The Original Series
Best of Star Trek: The Next Generation
CBS/Paramount | DVD
Undoubtedly anticipating a wave of new Starfleet cadets in the wake of J.J. Abrams’s stellar new Trek film, Paramount has released a pair of "Best Of Star Trek" collections, one for the original series (TOS) and one for The Next Generation (TNG), the best of the subsequent Trek shows. Each collection consists of a single disc containing the four best (or at least most memorable) episodes of that series. Thankfully, the choices are all excellent and if "The City on the Edge of Forever" doesn’t thrill you, you may as well stop there because "old Trek" doesn’t get much better than this classic episode from Season One of the original series. Fans of TNG will be pleased to see that both halves of the Borg-filled "Best of Both Worlds" episode has also made the cut. Episodes of TNG look and sound as they did in their previous DVD incarnations and that is to say they look perfectly adequate with intelligible dialogue. As for TOS, the episodes are the newly remastered versions with new and improved visual effects (as opposed to Star Wars, where they’re just new). However, after watching the beautiful Blu-ray editions of the complete Season One (below), it’s hard not to view this TOS collection as inferior. Still, these DVDs seem squarly aimed at bringing new fans into the Star Trek universe and these two collections represent some of the best of what Star Trek has to offer.
Star Trek: The Original Series: Season 1
CBS/Paramount | Blu-ray
As I hinted at above, this long-awaited Blu-ray edition of the original series’ debut season is absolutely gorgeous. Fans of the original series have never seen classic Trek looking this clean or boldly-colored. In fact, before now the only way to see these remastered episodes looking so good was on Paramount’s HD DVD release, but even still the new Blu-ray edition comes out on top. In addition to packaging that’s smarter and more attractive than its HD DVD counterpart, this Blu-ray set boldly goes where fans have been dying to go. For the first time, you can now have the original, non-remastered episodes along with the shiny new versons – and you can toggle between the two thanks to the seamless branching technology afforded by Blu-ray Disc. Very cool. And the special features? In a word, they’re wonderful. In addition to the first genuinely smart execution of BD-Live, there’s also a ton of great stuff on disc, much of it in HD no less. My favorite is an HD featurette on Disc One entitled "Spacelift: Transporting Trek into the 21st Century" where you can see first hand the magnificent and painstaking work done by CBS Digital to enhance the effects and music of Trek while remaining faithful to the original creators’ intentions. Bravo, guys. You knocked it out of the park. Although list price on this set is an admittedly hefty $129, in reality you can get it for half of that at places such as Amazon. After you’ve seen J.J.’s superb new film two or three times, spending some time with the original series seems like a great way to rediscover why we all fell in love with Star Trek in the first place. Highly recommended.
X-Men Vols. 1 and 2
Disney | DVD
I may have been in high school and college during the mid-90′s, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t watch a few cartoons. (Perhaps it should mean that, but let’s not go down that road.) Anyway, for fans of Stan Lee’s X-Men, the animated Marvel series from that time period is still one of the best representations of everyone’s favorite band of mutant superheroes. It’s certainly better than X3 and though I have yet to see Wolverine, my expecations have lowered considerably in recent weeks. Although I’m a huge fan of Bryan Singer’s two X-Men movies, I’m still bummed that we haven’t seen a proper live action portrayal of "The Phoenix Saga." Maybe some day. Until then, these new DVDs from Disney will do nicely. The five-part "Phoenix Saga" represents just 5 of the 33 classic episodes now available on DVD. Split into two 2-disc volumes, the show looks and sounds precisely like a Saturday morning cartoon – as well it should, minus the commercials of course. These discs may not win any technical awards and they sure don’t feature any bonus material, but that doesn’t take away from the fun of watching a yellow and blue -clad Wolverine call Gambit "Gumbo" before storming off to brood.
EVALUATION SYSTEM:
Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 1080 projector
Carada Masquerade screen system (92")
Panasonic DMP-BD35 Blu-ray Disc player
Oppo DV-983H DVD player
Onkyo TX-SR805 A/V receiver
Noble Fidelity L-55 LCRS speakers
Datacolor SpyderTV PRO 2007 video calibration
Monster Power HTS5100 power center
BetterCables interconnects
UltraLink speaker wire
Related Posts