Walker: Texas Ranger: The Complete Second Season – Honestly, we really shouldn’t even cover this release, given how poorly the poor bastard did in our Badass Bracket. I mean, honestly, it was shameful…almost as shameful as the fact that there ain’t a single special feature on this seven-disc set. Then again, if you’re enough of a fan of the adventures of Chuck Norris’s Texas-based Martial Arts master, you probably won’t care, anyway.
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea: Season 2, Volume 2 – So tired…so very, very tired…of this show coming out on DVD. If they cared enough to release the first two seasons on DVD, why in God’s sake did they feel obliged to stretch it into four separate sets? I mean, good lord, they’re releasing “Land of the Giants” (another Irwin Allen series) in a Complete Series set. They couldn’t at least put each season of “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” in its own box? Oh, well, the DVD producers at least deserve some credit for stretching out the special features as well, so that each set gets some; this time, you get still galleries as well as interviews with David Hedison (Captain Crane).
Moonlighting: Season Five – It’s nice of Lions Gate to finish up the release of “Moonlighting” by getting the show’s final season into stores, and it’s even nicer that we continue to get special features – audio commentaries (one with producers Glenn Gordon Caron and Jay Daniel on the season premiere, another with director Dennis Dugan on the series finale) as well as the original screen test of Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd as an on-screen couple – but we could’ve done with a little more details as to where to find them. The accompanying booklet provides in-depth episode synopses and a reference to the existence of the special features, but no clarification as to what features are on what disc. If you’ve forgotten how the show ended, David Addison returned to the offices of Blue Moon Investigations after Bert and Agnes’s wedding, only to find an ABC executive packing things up. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but you’re cancelled.” After tearful goodbyes are said, we get a closing title card which reveals that the agency ceased operations on May 14, 1989, and the Anselmo case was never solved. Damn!
JAG: The Third Season – It still mystifies me how this tremendously melodramatic show spun off the consistently enjoyable “NCIS.” Clearly, “JAG” has its fans – it did, after all, last for ten seasons – but, personally, I’ve always been underwhelmed by it…and the fact that this 3rd season set is devoid of special features (compared to the 3rd season of “NCIS,” which is full of them) leaves me wondering if the series’ producers have grown indifferent to it over the years as well.
The Wild Wild West: The Second Season – Wow, what happened between the releases of Seasons 1 and 2 of “The Wild Wild West” on DVD? That first season contained brand-new audio introductions for each episode by Robert Conrad, as well as a few other special features here and there. This time around, we don’t get a single feature at all. Surely the difference in the show’s quality didn’t drop off that much when it went from black and white to color. Well, maybe a bit. Things definitely got weirder, anyway, as is evident from the season premiere, “The Night of the Eccentrics.” (Look for a very young Richard Pryor playing…a ventriloquist?!?) There’s an episode where Dr. Loveless wants to shrink the world, another that involves zombies being made into duplicates of Jim West and Artemis Gordon, and, in “The Night of the Lord of Limbo,” we get an adventures that literally crosses time and space. Shame about the special features, but it’s still a show worth revisiting.
7th Heaven – The Fourth Season – I think this is where I’m supposed to say that, with “7th Heaven” finally coming to a conclusion this year (for real, this time), there’s no better time to revisit the earlier adventures of the Camden family. But I’m not really a fan of the show, so let’s just pretend I said it, okay?
The Jeffersons: The Complete Sixth Season – I’m not exactly sure when you’d say the quality of “The Jeffersons” dropped off, but it definitely wasn’t in the sixth season. Things started on a good note, with Mike Evans returning to the role of Lionel (he’d left the show for a few years) just in time to announce that George and Louise…and Tom and Helen Willis, too, for that matter…are going to be grandparents. The impending birth takes up the plot for several episodes, including concerns about the baby’s color, the purchasing of new furniture, and, of course, the inevitable arrival of the child, but that’s certainly not all. This year brought us “The First Store,” which flashes back to George opening his first dry-cleaning location in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, as well as the 2-part classic where Louise looks through Mr. Bentley’s telescope and sees a man in a rabbit costume murder someone. No special features, though.
