Year:  1968
Genre:  Sci-Fi, Cult, Classic
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Jane Fonda, Anita Pallenberg, John Phillip Law  
Director:  Roger Vadim
Run time:  98 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     I have a hard time picturing Jane Fonda as anything other than the grandmotherly fitness instructor on so many workout videos.  I’ve even reviewed some of her workout videos, and to me, that’s who Jane Fonda is. A very fit grandma with big hair and a friendly smile. Maybe the oldest person alive who can still make yoga pants work for her.

     So when I started watching Barbarella, on Blu-Ray July 3^rd from Paramount Home Entertainment, it took me a while to reconcile THAT Jane Fonda with the current Jane Fonda. The Jane Fonda in Barbarella is not going to bake you cookies and gush over your performance at your piano recital. She’s going to get naked, dance around and have sex with everyone she meets. This is Jane Fonda circa 1968, and I was surprised to discover that she was, at that time, the hottest woman in the world! 

     Now of course, when Barbarella isn’t having sex or running around in skimpy outfits, the rest of this movie is god-awful. It’s just a lot of cheesy science fiction talk and flying around with an angel and a spaceship that looks like electronic brass knuckles for some reason. But naked Jane Fonda? In high-definition? That’s why Barbarella became a cult classic in the 70s, and that’s why it’s the best thing being released today!

     Four of the earliest post-war German movies dealing with World War II are packaged together here in this new release from First Run Features.  The Anti-Nazi box set, however, is more than just a historic curiosity or a collection of films more notable for when and where they were made than for anything else.  No, it’s a collection of four quality movies.  Which are as follows:

  The Murderers Are Among Us (********8/10)

Year:  1946
Genre:  Drama, Romance, War
Country:  Germany
Language:  German w/ English subtitles
Starring:  Ernst Wilhelm Borchert, Hildegard Knef, Arno Paulsen 
Director:  Wolfgang Staudte
Run time:  85 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     The first movie made in post-World War II Germany, The Murderers Are Among Us follows two people trying to rebuild their lives following the war.  Susanne returns home to Berlin after being released from a concentration camp to find a man named Dr. Mertens living in her apartment.  His home has been destroyed by bombs, and neither of them has anywhere else to go.  They find a way to live together, then form a sort of tentative bond, then eventually fall in love.

     They fall in love, I think, because it’s a movie and that’s what people did in movies in 1946.  He loves her because she’s super hot and waits on him hand and foot and tends to his every need.  She loves him because…he broods a lot and drinks to ease his tortured psyche?  No…Susanne falls in love with Dr. Mertens because it’s in the script.  That’s it.

     That’s my one complaint about the film.  But setting the implausible love affair aside, it plays only a small part in an otherwise stark but excellent movie.  The two protagonists aer interesting.  Dr. Mertens has come back from the front where he was a soldier.  Susanne has returned from a concentration camp.  And yet she seems vastly less damaged, mentally, by the war than he is.  She is the one who provides the strength for him to conquer his demons.

     His one, biggest demon, it turns out, is his former army commanding officer Captain Bruckner.  Bruckner ordered the massacre of dozens of people, including women and children, on Christmas Day in 1942 in Poland.  It’s a little simplistic to think that killing Captain Bruckner will exorcise all of Mertens’ demons, but that ends up being his plan when he meets up with Bruckner again by chance.  The captain is now selling pots in Berlin (pots made from what used to be Nazi helmets).

     And that is the best reason to see this movie.  Horrible, inhuman monsters return home to become pot salesmen.  The city of Berlin is a complete ruin.  (The movie was shot in the real ruins of Berlin, which is something incredible to see.)  And the awkwardness between all the people – the two main characters and the secondary ones and the bit players who pass by – is tangible.

     Susanne is played by Hildegard Knef, who has an amazing story herself – she was a POW during the war where she disguised herself as a boy, and after this movie she did the very first nude scene in German movie history.  No nudity in The Murderers Are Among Us though.  Just harsh, brutal reality.

  The Gleiwitz Case (********8/10)

Year:  1961
Genre:  Drama, History, War
Country:  Germany
Language:  German w/ English subtitles
Starring:  Christoph Bayertt, Hannjo Hasse, Georg Leopold
Director:  Gerhard Klein
Run time:  70 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     Perhaps the most interesting movie in the box, from a historical perspective.  This is the true story of ”The Gleiwitz Incident“, an attack on a German radio station staged by German soldiers posing as Poles in 1939.  That way, Germany could say they were “attacked” by “Poland”, and respond with force – the invasion that led to the start of the second World War.

     This wonderfully shot black-and-white movie lays out the German plan meticulously in great detail, without becoming stale or feeling like one of those made-forTV re-enactments.  While the outcome of that plan is a foregone conclusion, the politics and personalities that put it into action are fascinating, and this one is a must-see for those who are into the history of World War II.

  I Was Nineteen (*********9/10)

Year:  1968
Genre:  Drama, History, War
Country:  Germany
Language:  German w/ English subtitles
Starring:  Jaecki Schwarz, Vasili Livanov
Director:  Konrad Wolf
Run time:  115 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     A semi-autobiographical movie from director Konrad Wolf, I Was Nineteen is the story of a 19-year-old (obviously) German soldier fighting for the Russian army.  Gregor Hecker fled the Nazi regime with his family, settling in Russia.  Now a lieutenant in the Russian army, he returns to Germany as part of the victorious Russian force, and deals with some craziness. 

      That craziness includes Germans who refuse to surrender, and Germans who do surrender and then turn guns on their own army to help the Russians.  When young Gregor gets on the phone to try to convince a German officer that yes, in fact, the Russians have captured a platoon, that officer thinks he’s a German soldier who is drunk and refuses to allow the platoon to surrender.  Gregor, as the best German speaker in the Russian unit, makes the loudspeaker announcements trying to convince the Germans to surrender.  He is also the one sent in as a translator to the most perilous situations.

     There are angry citizens, happy citizens, and philosophizing Nazis all over the place.  The film does a wonderful job of capturing the chaos surrounding the fall of the Third Reich, from a Russian soldier’s point of view and also from a native German’s point of view.  Gregor, of course, is both.  There is a blind German soldier who believes Gregor to be one of his fellow infantrymen because all he can hear is his voice.  There is a surprise attack from German forces who have stolen Russian army uniforms and a tank.

     It’s chaotic, it’s confusing at times, but that’s appropriate.  I Was Nineteen is the best film in this box set, and one of the great war films I’ve seen from post-war Germany.

  Naked Among Wolves (*********9/10)

Year:  1963
Genre:  Drama, War
Country:  Germany
Language:  German w/ English subtitles
Starring:  Armin Mueller-Stahl, Fred Delmare, Erwin Geschonneck, Krystyn Wojcik 
Director:  Frank Beyer
Run time:  116 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     Naked Among Wolves is the only film on this box set with a star most people might recognize.  Armin Mueller-Stahl is a well-known actor thanks to his recent work in Eastern Promises, The Game, The Peacemaker and many other Hollywood movies.  This is one of his earliest films, and it is also the first post-war German film to depict life in a concentration camp.

     Mueller-Stahl plays Hofel, a prisoner at Buchenwald in the closing days of the war.  The prisoners suddenly find themselves with a problem – a young Jewish child has been smuggled into the camp by a Polish prisoner (presumably because NOT smuggling the child into the camp would have ensured death).  Now Hofel and the other prisoners must protect the kid while still working on their own resistance plan.

     The most interesting part of Naked Among Wolves is the dynamic between the prisoners and the guards.  As it becomes increasingly clear that the war is unwinnable for Germany, the prisoners start to become more and more powerful – if the camp is liberated, and the freed men say that one officer in particular was kind to them, that officer might be treated better by his eventual captors.  The prisoners now have the power to threaten their jailers, and it’s a fascinating relationship that develops. 

     It’s another magnificent movie, wonderfully acted and actually funny at times.  Another must see on an excellent box set.

Year:  1967
Genre:  TV series, Drama
Country:  United States
Languages:  English
Starring:  David Janssen, Barry Morse
Guest star of note:  Jacqueline Scott, Beau Bridges, Charles Bronson, Bill Raisch, Jack Lord, Joseph Campanella, Celeste Holm, Jack Warden, Bill Erwin, Susan Seaforth Hayes, Martin Balsam, William Windom, James Farentino, Arthur Hill, Diana Sands, Diana Hyland, Ivan Dixon, Laurence Naismith, Diane Baker, JD Cannon, Diane Brewster, Richard Anderson
Narrator:  William Conrad
Creator:  Roy Huggins
Run time:  12 hours 51 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     I hate to call Season Four Volume Two of The Fugitive “much anticipated”.  I mean, it HAS been 44 years since the series finale, and I don’t imagine anyone has been holding their breath that long to see it come to DVD.  But I will say that I have been anticipating the end of this series, having watched every episode from the beginning until now.  It has been frustrating, waiting for the next volume of the next season, but the end is finally here!

     As it turns out, aside from one early episode starring one of my favourite actors (Charles Bronson), there is little that is interesting until the final two shows.  It’s still good stuff, and I still like The Fugitive, but I was kind of hoping that the Big Conclusion would have been something that built throughout the final season.  This just isn’t the case.  There are still a few episodes that star David Morse as Philip Gerard, the police officer obsessed with the capture of Richard Kimble (David Janssen).  But he’s getting no closer to Kimble, and Kimble is no closer to the one-armed man who actually killed his wife (Bill Raisch).

     That is, until the final two episodes, where everything comes together and witnesses come forward and things are resolved and Gerard lets Kimble fight to prove his innocence.  There isn’t much drama left, because we all know the thing has to wrap up in two episodes, no one important is going to die, and the good guy will be vindicated and the bad guy will lose and all will be revealed.

     And so it goes – and it’s  kind of a letdown.  The witness who comes forward to explain that he was there, and that he saw everything, has a piss-poor excuse for NOT having come forward before.  He’s let poor Dr. Kimble run and hide and hang on for 100 plus episodes now, and is still willing to pay a ton of money to cover up his involvement, when in reality he was barely involved at all.  And so with a tiny bit of side drama involving this local man who has little to do with anything, it’s straightforward – bad guy is caught.  Good guy shows up to expose bad guy.  Everybody wins.

     So now I have the entire Fugitive TV series adorning my DVD shelf – eight DVD sets that encompass four seasons.  It looks great, and it will likely sit there for a good, long time without being watched again.  I think I will occasionally pop in a disc and watch one episode at a time, because it’s still good watching, but I’ll never sit down and spend a weekend watching the whole thing.  I’m far more likely to go back and watch the movie for a fifteenth time.

Year:  1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1986
Genre:  TV series, Comedy
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Andy Griffith, Don Knotts, Ron Howard, Frances Bavier, Jim Nabors, Danny Thomas
Creator:  Sheldon Leonard
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     I have never before seen the Andy Griffith Show.  Of course, it’s one of those iconic shows that is so famous that I knew all about it.  I know that classic whistling theme music.  I know Andy and Opie and Barney Fife and Gomer Pyle and Aunt Bee.  (To be fair, I know Aunt Bee only because of her appearance on Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C.  Yes, I saw Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C. before I saw The Andy Griffith Show.)  At any rate, with the release of the 50th Anniversary collection Best of Mayberry, on DVD December 21st from Paramount Home Entertainment, I was excited to finally sit down and see what this show was all about.

     The Andy Griffith Show was off the air ten years before I was born.  It depicts a community, an ethos and warm-apple-pie values that I am not convinced ever actually existed.  That being said, this is one of those shows that makes me feel nostalgic for something that may never have actually taken place, for a place that was never on any map, for a lazy friendly community that was probably impossible no matter what era.  There’s something terrifically familiar about The Andy Griffith Show, even for someone like me who has never seen it before, and who has never experienced this idyllic portrayal of life in the 60s.

     I assume it’s shows like this one that create that sense among older people today that things were just better back in the 50s and 60s.  Remember how back then, women always made apple pie and cooled it on the window sill, boys would be boys, girls would wear pretty dresses and play with dolls, and every father in America would come home after a hard day’s work, kiss his wife, eat his dinner, and dish out wise advice to his children with appropriate gravitas.  I keep hearing people saying that “family values” were better in this era, that people worked harder and were happier and loved their spouse more and blah blah blah.  Watch Andy Griffith for ten minutes, and I can see that people might think that.

     Then again, watch Andy Griffith for thirty minutes, and you might remember that things really were not as idyllic and lovely as they seem through the revisionist lens of a television camera that shows a non-existent world.  At the end of every episode on this DVD, the characters in the show do a quick endorsement for a product of some kind.  Often it’s coffee and breakfast cereal, sometimes other food.  I love seeing this stuff – I think the scripted endorsements actually make me feel more nostalgic for this time than the show itself. 

     And they are more telling than is the show – especially the one for Jell-O cake mixes, which tells me that the little woman is working herself to distraction in the house, what with the laundry and the cleaning and having to cook dinner – how can we make dessert easier on her?  Well, with the easy-bake Jell-O cake mix, of course!  She will be so much happier if we take nine minutes off her prep time for cakes – and then imagine how the counters will sparkle!  She’ll have nine more minutes to clean!

     So these are my first impressions of The Andy Griffith Show.  My second impression is one of Andy Griffith himself.  I’m very familiar with Griffith from Matlock, because I’ve watched that show for year.  I love me my Matlock.  Now, I’ve never seen Andy Griffith interviewed.  But I suspect that maybe, more than any other actor in the world, he is just like the characters he plays.  I really get the sense that if I were to run into this man today, he would invite me into his house just because, and he would stop by a hot dog cart on the way, and he would have a rocking chair and slippers and extra guitars so he can jam with random guests who stop by.  This is what I picture.

     At any rate, this is a DVD set that I just love.  I think this show was one of the best ever, and it still makes me laugh today.  When Don Knotts gets all smarmy and pompous, I giggle.  He wants to be in the town choir even though his singing makes everyone cringe.  Maybe my favourite episode is the one where he gets into a war with Gomer Pyle over traffic tickets and arrests himself.  And the one with his motorcycle and sidecar is hilarious.

     There isn’t a ton of Gomer Pyle on this DVD set, I guess because he didn’t show up until later.  There’s a lot of Opie and a couple of episodes with the Darlings, a backwoods bunch of Bluegrass-playing hicks with a slutty daughter.  The special features are great too – the first episode on the first disc is the episode of the Danny Thomas Show which introduced sheriff Andy Taylor and his family to the world, and the final disc has the TV movie Return To Mayberry, where Andy Griffith, Ron Howard, Don Knotts, Jim Nabors and twelve other cast members reunited to drum up some nostalgia.  And there’s a monster in a lake, a plot straight out of Scooby-Doo.  Well…not everything in the Andy Griffith Show can be a winner, I guess.

“Tribbles.”

Years:  1967, 1968
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, James Doohan, Walter Koenig
Creator:  Gene Roddenberry
Run time:  21 hours, 50 minutes
Blu-Ray distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     For a review of the actual Season Two of Star Trek, click here.  This is a review of the Blu-Ray, which should appeal to all the techno-geeks out there.  And the techno-geeks love their Star Trek.  So it works great.  There really is a higher standard that must be applied to Blu-Ray editions of Star Trek seasons, because the nerds hold the show to that much higher a standard than do fans of other series.  And thankfully, the first two seasons of Star Trek: The Original Series on Blu-Ray have delivered.  The Blu-Ray transfer is impeccable, the added detail and enhanced content is terrific, and the show really does look a lot better in both Season Two and Season One. 

     It’s the special features that matter, however, and those are hit-and-miss.  I still have no idea how that Tribbles episode managed to become the most famous of the Star Trek canon.  I am so sick of the Tribbles episode.  I thought it was cute once, but cute doesn’t hold up over time, unless it’s E.T. cute.  And the tribbles are not E.T. cute.  Yet, the Season Two Blu-Ray of Star Trek comes with an entire bonus disc devoted entirely to tribbles.  Including cartoons and commentary and so forth.  Seriously, Star Trek.  Enough with the tribbles.  The Starfleet Access Mode remains pretty cool, though, and should delight the geek world who revel in their Star Trek.

     OK, I have now run out of links to place with the words “Star Trek” in this review.  So that’s over.  And so’s the review.  This is a wicked Blu-Ray, but enough with the tribbles.  It was forty years ago.  Let it go.

“In other words, you’re throwing me out.”
“Not in other words!  Those are the perfect words!”

   It’s the dialogue in The Odd Couple that makes it an absolute classic.  Well, the dialogue and the chemistry between lead actors Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon.  I am going to assume everybody knows the concept behind The Odd Couple, that of a compulsive neatnik living with an out-and-out slob, and the chaos that ensues.  Of course, it has been done to death in the years since 1968, starting with the Odd Couple TV series which is decent, but after a while (like, two seasons), the joke has run out.  In the original movie, based on the Neil Simon Broadway play.  It’s tough to miss with a formula as tried-and-true as this one, but it’s also difficult to make it genius.

   It’s a testament to director Gene Saks, actors Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, and Neil Simon (play author and screenwriter) that they were able to turn a concept such as this one into something so transcendantly funny.  The Odd Couple is absolutely hilarious.  Very few comedies, in that era or this one, open with a relatively serious suicide attempt.  Jack Lemmon, preparing himself for a leap from a tall building, is both sad and compelling, and hilariously inept, all at the same time.  From there, when he moves in with his slovenly sportscaster friend, Walter Matthau, Lemmon is the heart and centre of the film.  Matthau is pretty much a supporting character, but one of the best in movie history.  And he gets almost all of the best lines.

   “Don’t come to me with your petty problems.  You get this one stinkin’ night a week.  I’m cooped up here with Mary Poppins 24 hours a day.”

   Matthau is such a powerful comedic force in this film that although Lemmon is the central character, Matthau is the one you remember when it’s over.  A total man’s man, Matthau is also a disgusting pig, and although both Oscar and Felix manage somehow to meet in the middle, at least a little, by the end of the film, Oscar (Matthau) does not undergo a ton of personal growth here.  In fact, neither one of them really does.  And that’s part of the brilliance of the original play and this screenplay.  Nothing could sap the comedic value of The Odd Couple faster than an ending where Oscar agreed to clean up and Felix agreed to loosen up and get dirty, and they had a big hug and forgave everything.

   The Odd Couple comes out as the seventh volume in Paramount Home Entertainment’s excellent Centennial Collection, on two discs, March 24th.  There are some terrific special features, including a feature-length commentary by Matthau and Lemmon family members, and vignettes about the movie on the second disc.  I think this is also the only Paramount Centennial Collection movie so far that does not have a featurette on costume designer Edith Head.  Because a costume designer for The Odd Couple would be a silly job.  Matthau and Lemmon are the keys to this film, and they get their little pieces on the special features.  I would have liked to see something on Neil Simon, because this is his film, through and through, but no DVD box set is perfect!

Years:  1968, 1969
Genre:  TV series, Drama
Country:  United States
Languages:  English
Starring:  Mike Connors, Gail Fisher, Joseph Campanella, Ward Wood, Robert Reed
Creator:  Lalo Schifrin
Run time:  21 hours 18 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment
DVD extras:  Not much of anything
Related reviews:  Mannix Season Two, Mannix Season Three

     Season Two of Mannix is, in almost every way, superior to Season One.  One of the few ways in which Season Two is worse is in the titles of the episodes.  Season One had some classic, silly titles.  Like, “Skid Marks On A Dry Run”, and such and such.  Season Two can’t manage that level of hilariousness, the best they can come up with is “The End Of The Rainbow”.  Lame.  The episodes aren’t much different than they were in the first season.  They are either formulaic and obvious, in a generic way, or formulaic and obvious to the point that none of the characters’ motivations make any sense.

     The best thing about Season Two is Gail Fisher, who plays Mannix’s assistant Peggy.  She adds some much-needed charm to the show, and also provides a convenient means to introduce new cases for Mannix to crack.  Peggy, you see, seems to date several men, and each one is either a crook out to do something dreadful, or a sweet innocent man being framed for doing something dreadful.  And that way, Mannix can delve into some kind of conspiracy without leaving the office.  His office, in Season Two, is his own – that’s another good thing. 

     In Season One, he worked for a detective agency, a massive Big-Box Detective Company called Intertect.  Now he works on his own.  This is good, because the concept of a Big-Box Detective Agency called Intertect was ridiculous.  He may as well, at that point, have been Batman, with the big supercomputers spitting out the identity of killers and so forth.  It took the cleverness out of the work.  Of course, in Season Two, he occasionally sends Peggy back to Intertect when he needs some data from a supercomputer of some kind.  But at least a privately-owned detective business makes more sense.

     Then again, it really doesn’t matter.  He could be a construction worker or a graphic designer and the show would be the same, as long as he was a nosy and smart busybody construction worker or graphic designer.  Because almost no one ever hires him by walking into his office.  Just about every case he tackles is one he stumbles across.  Either Peggy is dating a bad guy, and Mannix investigates.  Or he overhears a conversation in a police station where a deaf girl describes a murder plot.  He’s like Jessica Fletcher – always in the right place at the right time to Stop Murders.  And since just about every case he takes is done solely to help one of his friends, or to save himself, I have no idea how he actually makes money.

     I suppose we are to believe that between the cases that are interesting enough to make it onto TV, Mannix is running around finding lost cats, and taking pictures from his car of wayward wives and philandering husbands, and convincing runaways to return home, and whatever else it is that private investigators do for money.  I’m not sure what he would do if some stranger came to his office with a real case.  I suspect that he would immediately question their motives, investigate them, and discover that yes, they were indeed a part of a vast criminal conspiracy.  No one is innocent in Mannix.

     The second season IS considerably better than the first, but I would still like to see a few things happen.  Every episode, as in the first season, involves some smoking hot woman.  I would like to see Mannix sleep with them all.  Or Peggy could sleep with them all.  Either way.  I could also use a little more wisecracking.  Mannix is way too serious, and from what I understand, there is not a private investigator alive who is both serious and successful.  They all crack wise.  Why not Mannix?  (Or Cannon, for that matter?)  Also, I’m a little worried about Mannix and his brain function.  He gets knocked out cold a lot.  Like, twice every three episodes.  I’m certain Eric Lindros’ doctors wouldn’t let him back into the Private Eye game after that.  He can’t possibly be cleared to play.

     All in all, Mannix is improving from season to season.  Peggy is a nice addition, Intertect is a nice omission, and the hot chick guest stars are always welcome.  The Second Season of Mannix came out January 6th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.  I am looking forward to Season Three now.  Perhaps then he will be knocked out less, take actual cases, have sex with the women he should be having sex with, and start to loosen up enough to crack wise.  All of that ought to get him a seven-star rating, at least!

Boy, did I ever miss out when I was younger. Or, more accurately, by being born too late. I did not get to see Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Syd Barrett, The 13th Floor Elevators or the other cultural icons of the sixties do their thing. I never got to see the Beatles perform, I was nowhere when JFK was shot, I was unable to experience Paul Henderson’s goal for myself, and I missed out on The Mod Squad. Well, thankfully this fine show was preserved in a sixties time capsule for me by the good people at Paramount and released in a glorious 4-disc DVD box set! The main thing I took from this show was that at one point, Clarence Williams III was a major star of a major show. Was this a major show? I don’t even really know. Oh, he’s still around, playing bit parts in movies such as American Gangster and ridiculous parts in movies such as Half Baked and Reindeer Games. But he is the only cast member I recognize. Michael Cole looks a lot like Roger Daltrey to me, which was likely a perfect casting choice for the time, but I don’t see his name in the credits of any movie since 1992′s classic Triple Impact. And Peggy Lipton was definitely hot in 1969, and she has kept working over these past 40 years, but in nothing significant enough that anyone would have seen it.

The main premise of the show is that three “street kids” are recruited by the cops to work undercover, rather than go to prison. They are continually referred to as kids, despite the fact that Michael Cole was clearly 48 at the time of filming. I guess he paved the way for the likes of Luke Perry in later years. The “kids” talk jive to one another, and at the end of each episode, ruminate wisely about the events that have just taken place, and how those events may well shape the rest of their bright futures. I assume this show was a fairly big one , simply because in later years Claire Danes was recruited to create a movie version of the program. Much like Starsky and Hutch, Miami Vice, and every other movie based on a TV program, The Mod Squad movie sucked.

But watching this show reminded me of the old days. Days when I would come home after a night out and sit by the TV, watching The Simpsons late, and afterward a program called Funky Squad. Does anyone remember this show? It was clearly something that CTV had dredged up from the 70s, and was also an obvious parody of The Mod Squad. Since I was rarely in a straightforward state when I watched this program, I can’t recall if it was good or not, but I do remember finding it hilarious at the time. If there is one show that is ripe for parody, it’s The Mod Squad. It just isn’t ripe for a Hollywood movie ripoff. The Mod Squad, Season One, Volume 2 contains some classic episodes, like When Julie’s Mom Comes To Visit, and The Crime Ring That Extorts The Parents Of Young Babies.