Years:  1972, 1973, 1974 
Genre:  TV series, Comedy
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Jack Klugman, Tony Randall, Betty White
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     I love the old Odd Couple TV show.  It’s a little dated now, since we’ve seen so many TV shows based on the same basic premise since then.  Frasier and Two and a Half Men and countless other shows owe a big debt to Tony Randall and Jack Klugman.  Their chemistry was fantastic, and it’s showcased admirably in the new DVD from Paramount Home Entertainment, The Odd Couple Fan Favorites, out March 6th.

     There are eight great episodes on the best-of DVD, my favorite being the one where Oscar and Felix team up to go on the game show Password.  Which I guess was pretty big in the 70s.  The show was hosted by Alan Ludden, who guest stars on the episode with his wife at the time, Betty White. 

     What I found hilarious was that they made fun of Betty White’s age.  Her AGE!  Haha, she’s an old woman!  Remember, this episode was from 1972!  That’s right, Betty White was hilariously old FORTY years ago.  Ah, some things never change!

     There are some other guest appearances on the disc, including Bubba Smith who was playing for the Raiders at the time.  The best thing about the Fan Favorites DVD set though, is that at eight episodes, it is all the Odd Couple that you need.

Years:  1972, 1973
Genre:  TV series, Drama
Country:  United States
Languages:  English
Starring:  Mike Connors, Gail Fisher, Robert Reed
Guest stars:  Martin Sheen, Burgess Meredith, Abe Vigoda, William Shatner, Anne Archer, Marion Ross, Robert Reed, Jessica Walter
Theme music composer:  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 One, Mannix Season Three, Mannix Season Four, Mannix Season Five

     As you can see from the picture above, very little has changed in the world of Mannix for the sixth season.  The DVD cover of all six have featured basically this exact same picture…a pastel background and Mike Connors looking at me.  Then six bullets.  You know, to reinforce that this is season SIX.  For those who can’t read, but can count.

     The sixth season itself is indistinguishable from the previous five, in that Mannix takes on a series of investigations – from finding a little kid’s stamp collection (which is probably plausible for a private investigator) to going undercover in a mob organization (which probably isn’t).  No matter what case he takes, though, one thing is for certain – Mannix will be shot at.  Even when attempting to recover a stamp collection, he will have shots fired his way.

     So the only thing that will set Season Six apart from other seasons is the guest list, which is highlighted by Martin Sheen, who appears as an amnesiac war veteran being conned into a heist by some nefarious characters.  This episode came just before Sheen became a major star – a year before his star turn in Terrence Malick’s Badlands and eight years before his definitive role in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. 

     Other stars who appear in the sixth season, like Marion Ross and Jessica Walter, have appeared in previous seasons of Mannix, then there’s William Shatner who used to show up in every single TV series ever created.  And Burgess Meredith and Abe Vigoda.  So…not a stellar guest list this time around. 

     I like Mannix, and I find myself rooting for him not to be shot in most episodes.  And sure, it’s the same thing episode after episode, season after season.  But there’s something to be said for knowing just what you’re gonna get, and liking it.  Which means there’s something to be said for Mannix.

Years:  1971, 1972
Genre:  TV series, Drama
Country:  United States
Languages:  English
Starring:  Mike Connors, Gail Fisher, Robert Reed
Guest stars:  Rosemary Forsyth, Dean Stockwell, Shelley Fabares, Marion Ross, Geoffrey Lewis, Vic Morrow, Joanna Pettet, Pippa Scott, Milton Berle, Ed Begley Jr, Jon Cypher, Jessica Walter, Corinne Camacho, Jeanne Cooper, John Vernon, Jean Byron, Mariette Hartley, Elsa Lanchester
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 One, Mannix Season Three, Mannix Season Four

     Mannix is back, as Season Five of the series comes to DVD July 5th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  Mike Connors once again embodies the intuitive tough guy private detective admirably, and I continue to enjoy the series.  There are always a ton of hot women around – on the ski slopes, in the freak-show hippie hangouts, or just running around committing murders.

     In season five, Mannix is rarely hired to help any actual people – he just happens to be around when things get all murderous.  He has a certain amount of charm, just enough it appears to have all the hot women in all the episodes decide it would be nice to have sex with him.  Which must be pretty cool for Mannix, a nice ego boost – except they never seem to actually get around to it, because all that murder ends up getting in the way.

     As always, Mannix gets into lots of car chases and fistfights.  Some of those car chases take place on mountain roads, and almost all of them end with a car bursting into flames and exploding the second it hits the bottom of the adjacent ditch.  Almost every fistfight ends in a knockout punch, and often a hit from behind is enough to knock someone out for (presumably) hours.

     The thing I like best about Mannix is the way it’s paced.  I feel like I’m following the private eye around in real time.  I see what he sees, I learn what he learns, I talk to his assistant Peggy only when he does (usually).  That means that I can’t figure out the case until HE does.  Some people like to know ahead of time who the killer is, so they can watch the net close around him (Columbo).  Some people like to be surprised at the end (Matlock).  And others like to feel like they’re in it with the investigator.  I’m one of those people.  And Mannix is one of those shows.

Years:  1969, 1972
Genre:  Kids, Cartoon, Classic
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring (voices):  Johanna Baer, David Carey, Linda Ercoli, Christopher de Faria, Robin Kohn, Linda Mendelson, Hilary Momberger, Stephen Shea, Chad Webber, Bill Melendez, Peter Robbins, Pamelyn Ferdin, Glenn Gilger, Andy Pforsich, Sally Dryer, Anne Altieri, Guy Pforsich, Erin Sullivan
Director:  Bill Melendez
Run time:  166 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Charlie Brown and the rest of the Peanuts gang are so familiar to most of us that watching them in an animated movie is not much different than reading the old Charles M. Schultz comic strips.  And since all the jokes and scenarios are exactly the same, it actually IS just like that.  Charlie Brown is bad at baseball.  His team loses all the time, and every pitch he throws comes right back up the middle and knocks all his clothes off.  He can’t fly a kite and trees want to eat his kites and his kites attack him and break all the time.  He gets psychiatric advice from Lucy at her booth for the low low price of a nickel.  Lucy takes the football away when he’s about to kick it.  Linus carries a blanket, Schroeder plays piano, Pigpen is messy.  You know how it goes.

     That familiarity both helps and hurts the first movie on this 2-disc double feature from Paramount Home Entertainment.  A Boy Named Charlie Brown is the first Peanuts feature length film, from 1969.  The familiarity of the story works well, as does the homey feel generated by the now-classic Vince Guaraldi theme music.  Really though, the film is just a series of vignettes – Charlie Brown’s kite, Charlie Brown playing baseball – spread out by some filler animated sequences – Snoopy’s record player playing the Star Spangled Banner, Schroeder playing the Pathetique on his piano – and finally, the actual story, which involves Charlie Brown entering a spelling bee.

     Of course, Charlie Brown will fail at the spelling bee, as he does at everything else – that is, after all, the theme of Peanuts.  But he DOES place second overall, nationally, in a televised spelling bee.  He returns home with the stench of failure all over him, and gets depressed, and hides in bed.  Today, a movie that ends like that would be a success story – if any kids in school made fun of the guy who came in second in the country in a spelling bee, he would just say “oh, yeah, I did lose.  How…did you do in the nationally televised spelling bee?  Oh, you didn’t make it?  You weren’t there?  I see.”  And the movie would be a success story.  Not for Charlie Brown though, of course.

     The second movie in the set is Snoopy Come Home, a surprisingly – no, staggeringly – sad story about Snoopy running off to find his original owner, a little girl who has been hospitalized for some reason.  While the gang pines for Snoopy and worries about where he may be, Snoopy takes Woodstock and his briefcase off on a series of adventures as they try to get to the hospital.  They are kidnapped by a creepy little girl, they sink a raft in a river, they camp out in a giant nest and under an overpass.  Of course, Snoopy and Woodstock don’t speak, so maybe the most interesting thing about the 1972 film is that it operates almost entirely visually.

     For our eleven-year-old, Snoopy Come Home was more interesting.  A Boy Named Charlie Brown is a little more inaccessible for the young ones, although of course he is familiar with the comic strips also, so he found it cool that he knew what was coming next.  Lucy’s gonna take the football away and Charlie Brown’s gonna get hurt!  Just watch!  I was amazed that he wanted to watch these old movies, and even more amazed that he enjoyed them.  And I also admit that I found a good deal of enjoyment in the set as well.

Years:  1972
Genre:  Crime, Gangster, Drama, Classic
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, James Caan, John Cazale, Diane Keaton, Sterling Hayden, Richard Conte, Talia Shire, Al Lettiere, Al Martino, Lenny Montana, Abe Vigoda
Director:  Francis Ford Coppola
Run time: 177 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment
Related reviews:  Godfather trilogy on Blu-Ray

     Although I absolutely love The Godfather, and it is certainly one of the great movies in the history of the world, and all that…it is with certain caveats that I bestow the 10/10 rating on this Blu-Ray edition.  Yes, it’s on Blu-Ray.  And it looks unbelieveable, and it’s still as great as it ever was.  What gives me pause is simply how necessary I think this edition is.  There are few noticeable differences between this Blu-Ray and the one that came out a few months ago with the rest of the trilogy. 

     I would simply suggest that if someone already owns the trilogy on Blu-Ray, there is little reason to purchase the individual Blu-Ray as well.  Also, there is something incongruous and almost sad about putting The Godfather, the greatest most manly tough-guy movie of all time, into a collection called The Sapphire Series.  That’s kinda weird.  Then again, the Sapphire Series also involves Braveheart and Gladiator.  Go figure.  I am giving the Blu-Ray Sapphire Series edition 10/10 because I will never rate The Godfather at less than that.  So it’s certainly worthwhile if all you want is the first one.  But I hope you want the second one too, and the third is under-rated.  Buy the trilogy.

“It’s that walrus pretending to be a private investigator.”

      Cannon is starting to grow on me a little, even as William Conrad grows a lot.  Still the fattest guy ever to star in his own TV series, Conrad remains perplexingly compelling as private investigator Frank Cannon in Season Two, Volume One, on DVD June 2nd from Paramount Home Entertainment.  As I’ve said before, Cannon has no real distinguishing characteristics that set him apart from other TV detectives.  He’s certainly not an attractive ladies man.  He isn’t particularly brilliant.  He’s not the quintessential tough guy.  He’s just a morbidly obese private eye who uses his moderate skills and a lot of tenacity to bring the bad guys to justice.

     There is little to set apart the show as well.  The scenarios in each episode are diverse, but pretty common in shows such as this one.  Cannon has to find a draft dodger who witnessed a murder in a northern mountain range, and then of course has to fight the bad guys on this unfamiliar turf.  Or, he infiltrates a gang of bank robbers in a bid to bring a Vietnam vet home to his wife.  Really, none of it is particularly impressive.  And yet, the show is decent, and watchable, and thankfully William Conrad was not yet unpleasantly fat, like he was when he played Jabba the Hut in Jake And The Fatman.  There isn’t much reason to go rushing out to buy this DVD set, but then there aren’t a lot of reasons not to do so either.

“Your mission, should you choose to accept it…”

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Years:  1971, 1972
Genre:  TV series, Spy, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Greg Morris, Peter Lupus, Bob Johnson, Peter Graves, Lynda Day George, Sam Elliott
Guest stars:  Joe Don Baker, William Shatner, Tyne Daly, Anthony Zerbe, Jon Cypher
Creator:  Bruce Geller
Run time: 20 hours plus
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment
Related reviews:  TV sets: Action Packed, Mission: Impossible Season Five, Mission: Impossible Season Four

   Every season of Mission: Impossible is distinctly different.  And that’s a good thing.  Oh, the structure is still the same, and the characters fulfill basically the same roles, and the team still goes after the same sort of bad guy.  But the approach in, say, Season Six is a little different from that of Season Five.  Season Six comes out April 28th, from Paramount Home Entertainment, and the show is still very good.  Gone are Barbara Bain, Martin Landau, and Leonard Nimoy, perhaps the three most recognizable actors in the series.  Sam Elliott is still around (you may know him from such films as The Big Lebowski and The Golden Compass), but only for two episodes, then he’s gone too.

   Replacing Bain (and Leslie Ann Warren) is Lynda Day George, as the designated Hot Chick, and her style is of course different, which changes the series a bit.  She certainly is smoking hot, and that appears to be all she needs in order to get close to the bad guys.  Every bad guy in Season Six seems to be some kind of horny gangster, and as soon as Lynda Day George walks by they follow her like puppies with their tongues hanging out.  The few bad dudes who don’t pay attention to her are the Hardcore Bad Guys – like, they have trained their minds SO thoroughly with evil, and they are SO consumed with their evil mission, that they can’t be bothered with this sexy babe.  And THOSE guys were the ones to reckon with!  I guess there were just no gay bad guys in the ’70s.  And personally, I miss Leslie Ann Warren.

   The central core of the cast – Jim Phelps (Peter Graves), Wily Armitage (Peter Lupus), Barney Collier (Greg Morris), and that annoying voice on the tape (Bob Johnson) – remains intact for Season Six.  The standard episodes ensue – Jim Phelps kicks off the season posing as a blind secret agent to take doen a mob organization, then William Shatner guest stars in an episode where the gang makes him believe he has been transported back in time to the ’30s.  A lot of it (like this episode) is far-fetched and ridiculous, but that’s part of the charm.

   I found myself missing Leonard Nimoy.  I liked his character, not least because his name was The Great Paris.  Like some kind of superhero.  I can’t tell why he left, really – it wasn’t Star Trek, because the original series of Star Trek had been canceled by the time he joined the cast of Mission: Impossible, and I’m not sure he had anything else to do.  Burnout maybe.  On the plus side, Star Trek, The Original Series Season One is out on Blu-Ray today as well, so I can get my Leonard Nimoy fix this week one way or another.

“Book ‘em, Danno.”

Years:  1972
Genre:  TV series, Cop, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Jack Lord, James MacArthur, Kam Fong, Al Harrington
Guest stars:  William Shatner, Ricardo Montalban, Diana Muldaur, Clu Gulager, Keenan Wynn, Andy Griffith, Patty Duke, Robert Foxworth
Creators:  Leonard Freeman
Run time:  20 hours 9 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment
Related reviews:  Hawaii Five-O Season Four, Hawaii Five-O Season Six, Hawaii Five-O Season Seven

In my review of Hawaii Five-O Season Four, I suggested that the program was a blueprint for the career of David Caruso. Jack Lord and his bizarre hair and his silly-tough-guy delivery are very Caruso-esque, just thirty years earlier. And I also suggested that Hawaii Five-O is campy, dated, and totally hilarious in retrospect. And I was totally right. Season Five remains equally campy, equally hilarious, and equally worth watching while under the influence of…irony. Throw back a gram or two of irony, and you can enjoy Hawaii Five-O as much as you can enjoy Spongebob, Scooby-Doo, or anything done by Cheech and Chong.

Unfortunately, when I got my copy of Season Five of Hawaii Five-O, I was totally out of irony. I had an ounce on order, and I was waiting for delivery when I began watching the show. Eventually, I had to turn it off. Without a keenly developed sense of irony, this show just plain sucks. Even the episodes with Wo Fat, who is still awesome. Even the one with Ricardo Montalban is not very hilarious without irony. So make sure you roll up some quality ironic sensibilities before purchasing Season Five of Hawaii Five-O, out November 18th from Paramount Home Entertainment.