Hi-dy hi there, friends and neighbors! This is your old pal, Honest Ivan—and I’m
going to do whatever I can to put you behind the wheel of this little beauty
right here…um…yeah. Sorry about that,
cartooners—just a new character I’m trying out for my one-man show that will be
touring in a city near you as soon as I convince some
sucker angel to
put a little mazoola into it.
I thought it might not be a bad idea to check in on the blog
since it’s been about a week since I posted last (and it’s a good thing, too,
because one of you has been drinking my Sun Drop)—I had originally planned to
have something up Sunday for the
Terrorthon! that was to be hosted by my pal Page at
My
Love of Old Hollywood and equally good chum Rich at
Wide Screen World. It was about twelve noon on Sunday (April 21)
when I had the oddest feeling I had forgotten something and then I got that
stomach knot you get when you realize that thing you forgot had a due date but you can’t
remember when it was. So after moseying
on over to Page’s, I learned that my entry for her blogathon was due that very
day…but upon further reading, was told that
the ‘thon had been postponed for a myriad of reasons—chiefly the craziness that went down in Massachusetts and
Texas last week (promoting a “terrorthon” seemed a little…unseemly). They will reschedule at a later date, and in
the meantime I’ll probably change the movie I’m going to write about to
Dimples
(1936). (Okay, I’m just teasing about
that…kinda.)
But I am most certainly
not
teasing about
the upcoming blogathon to be sponsored by
Comet Over Hollywood—it’s
scheduled for May 24 thru May 26th, and the subject will be…
wait for it…child stars! (You know the mantra of the blog by now:
irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.) I
thought maybe I could push aside my lifelong enmity for kiddie thespians and be
able to participate in this…but I just can’t bring myself to do it. (I did discuss this with J.P. on the Twitter
machine, and she understands why I have to opt out.) J.P. doesn’t have a banner up yet (she’s
currently having a blast at TCMPalooza, as is roughly 80% of the classic movie
blogosphere) but when she finishes them in the lab, I’ll stick one up here as a
reminder. (I thought about making one
myself, but was unable to find any online photos of Shirley Temple with a spike
through her head. Internets, you have
failed me again.)
Although
Thrilling
Days of Yesteryear tendered its resignation with
a certain gargantuan movie blog association shortly after its one-for-the-record-books clusterfudge last year, when they
awarded the
Inigo Montoya Classic Movie Blog Prize to a blog that was
anything but, the organization did nominate several friends of
TDOY for this year’s Classic Movie trophy…and I’d like
to single them out for praise: The Ol’ Perfesser (no, not Kay Kyser) at
Where Danger Lives, Aurora at
Once Upon a Screen and Kristen from
Journeys in Classic Film. (The other two nominees,
Criterion Reflections and
100 Years of Movies,
are also represented on the blogroll.)
Despite my detailed e-mail to this movie blog aggregation (though it’s really more like
aggravation) informing their officers, founders and any
other dumbasses defending the decision to award that Best Classic Movie Blog
attaboy (to a blog that, once again, couldn’t quite measure up to the
parameters of such) that they could go pound sand, I’m still getting notices
inviting me to participate in their democratic process. It’s worse than trying to get off the mailing
list for
Entertainment Weakly
Weekly. (As for voting…I’ll get
right to that as soon as I finished alphabetizing my
DVD’s. But I do wish the nominees all the best, and if you still participate in that strokefest vote for one of these fine bloggers.)
Well, with that rant out of the way…what’s doin’ in the
world of TV-on-DVD? Only this little bauble, which I hope to be
able to offer a good home come July 2:
The Shout! Factory press release for this set is
available for your perusal at the go-to website for all vintage TV shows on disc,
TVShowsOnDVD.com…and though the
SRP
on this collection is a king’s ransom at $139.99, I’ve found it (the lowest price
so far) at
ImportCDs.com for $80.79.
I’ve ordered two TV-on-
DVD collection
from ImportCDs so far; the second season of
The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp
and the fourth and final season of
Route 66. Even though it’s a slight inconvenience in
that I have to have these mailed to my P.O. box (some nonsense with my bank card), they have not disappointed me.
Now…faithful
TDOY
readers know that when it comes to purchasing TV-on-
DVD
sets, I often display the bartering ferocity of a rug merchant. If I can get the price down on any
collection, I will venture down any dark avenue to do so. (It’s not for nothing that Jack Benny is one
of my comedy idols—the man who made cheapskatedness a virtue.) But I’m going to make an exception for this
one: the Benny set will be available only on the Shout! Factory website
beginning June 18th…and will then have its official release on July 23rd. You can probably get a good deal on the set
at Amazon, or even my new favorite online shopping place…but if you’re willing
to pre-order it on June 18 and pay the Factory price (heh) by
using this link
and clicking the “buy” button—a portion of the proceeds will go to The
International Jack Benny Fan Club. And
that, my friends, is a cause most worthy of the extra shekels. To quote an e-mail from IJBFC President Laura
Leff: “So smash that piggy bank, tell Ed to let you into the vault, and order
with abandon! The more you buy, the
better the chances of future volumes!”
(You had me at future volumes, L.L.)
In other disc news,
here’s a little further information on
that
Lone
Ranger: Collector’s Edition collection to be released on June 4th. It
will
contain all 221 episodes of the iconic TV western series (plus some eye-popping
extras), and because it will be presented in coffee book form it should be a
cinch to smuggle this into Rancho Yesteryear.
(I’ll also have to smuggle in a
coffee
table…but those are just
minor
details.)
$125.99 is the asking price over at ImportCDs…oh, I’m going to have to go into major hand-kissing schmooze
mode to pull this one off.
Shout! Factory also has the sixth season of the veteran
forensics drama
Quincy, M.E. scheduled for release on July 9th—all eighteen
episodes from the 1980-81 season (due to the strike) will be made available in
a 5-
DVD collection that will retail for
$39.97
SRP.
(I need to get cracking on these—I’m a few seasons behind.) One final stop before we leave the
Factory—their Timeless Media Group (
TMG)
subsidiary has
announced the release of the eighth and final season of
The
Virginian for July 16th; a 9-disc set that will contain all twenty-four
episodes from the last season the show was officially called
The
Virginian (with a
SRP of $59.97). (The following season, the show changed its
name to
The Men from Shiloh—and those episodes were already released to
DVD in October 2011.)
Which brings me to a brief detour in this post—only because
the segueways are working so well.
TDOY’s
good friend Melissa Prince at the
INSP
Network was kind enough to send me an e-mail last week promoting the family
cable channel’s upcoming
The Virginian Cast Favorites
Marathon which will get underway this Saturday (April 27) at 1pm and feature
seven episode favorites from members of TV’s first ninety-minute western
series. The lineup is as follows:
01:00pm The
Mountain of the Sun (James Drury)
02:30pm Beloved
Outlaw (Sarah Lane)*
04:00pm The
Evil That Men Do (Roberta Shore;
also repeated @ 11:30pm)
05:30pm Felicity’s
Spring (James Drury)
07:00pm Yesterday’s
Timepiece (Don Quine)
08:30pm Duel
at Shiloh (Gary Clarke)
10:00pm Nobody
Said Hello (Diane Roter)
Here’s a link for a sneak peak at the presentation, and if
you see something on that page about a giveaway for seasons 1-7 of
The
Virginian on
DVD (plus season 9,
The
Men from Shiloh)…
do
not under any circumstances enter it.
I have already entered, and if I knew that your participation would
lower my chances of scoring this sweet collection it’s liable to make me
cranky.
Well, back to the TV-on-
DVD
announcements…and it’s fitting that the next one is a western: CBS
DVD-Paramount
will
bring the sixth season of western perennial Bonanza to disc July 9th. This shouldn’t come as any
surprise, of course, but the company will be releasing Season 6 in split-season
sets (Volume 1 with eighteen episodes on 5 discs, Volume 2 the remaining
sixteen episodes on 4 DVDs), with both sets priced at $45.98
SRP. Now…here’s the dun-dun-DUN! moment: if you
buy
both sets in a shrink-wrapped
bundle it will only run you
a SRP of only $58.98. How did they allow this to happen, you may be
asking? I have no response to this—my
theory is that they experienced a temporary state of amnesia and completely
forgot they were money-grubbing weasels.
This generosity seems to have spread to the Warner Archive,
which has announced that the long-awaited debut season of TV medico fave
Dr.
Kildare will be released on May 7…and even though it is a split-season
set (and MOD), they’re charging a solitary price for it (
$49.95 SRP for all thirty-three episodes from the first season). About three years back, I got an e-mail from
someone who stumbled across the blog (my fault, really—I have a bad habit of
leaving it out in the driveway at night) and she asked about the availability
of the
Kildare series; I had to tell her at the time that I knew of no
plans from anyone to release the show to disc and sadly suggested she might
have to make arrangements with her friendly neighborhood bootlegger.
She had inquired in particular about an episode from the
show that “crossed over” to another medical series on the air at the time,
The
Eleventh Hour (1962-64)—a short-lived program about psychiatrists that
starred Jack Ging (as Dr. Paul Graham) and Wendell “Hic!” Corey (as Dr.
Theodore Bassett). (Our pal Wendell was
replaced in the show’s second season by former man against crime Ralph Bellamy,
who played Dr. L. Richard Starke.). Both
Kildare
and
Eleventh
Hour episodes were titled “Four Feet in the Morning,” with the story
starting on one and ending on another.
I sent her a recent e-mail alerting her to the Warner
Archive release—for which she was most grateful, since the set she bought was
of pretty crappy quality—and once again she brought up the episode; I replied
that I didn’t know of any plans from Warner to release
Eleventh Hour to disc but
if or when the Archive got to
Kildare’s third season I’d give
someone over there a shout-out. It
sounds as if the Archive is ahead of us; there’s a bonus episode of
Eleventh
Hour to be included in the set—not the episode which my friend asked
about, but “the ORIGINAL, never-aired pilot for the Wendell Corey psychiatric
drama.” (Quotes theirs.) Also in the
description: “Initial quantities of this release will be traditionally
replicated (pressed) in anticipation of high consumer demand.”—which sounds
like if you get in on the ground floor of this, you won’t get a MOD set.
That’s all the news to report from the TV-on-
DVD
front but I do have one last addendum: I had high hopes this past Saturday that
AMC’s acclamation of
Rawhide might mean I
could avoid shelling out some dough for the
DVD
sets (I’m stopped at Season Three, and was gambling that they might do them up
right in the manner of Encore Westerns) but after witnessing their marathon
presentation of the show I knew it was not meant to be. They “squash” the closing credits to promote
that other garbage on the channel, not to mention running promos at the bottom
of the screen during each episode for more
AMC
garbage. So I’m forced to save every nickel
and dime I can scrape together and put them toward the purchase of the missing
sets. (It’s tough out there being a
TV-on-
DVD collector.)
*This is also, I
believe, the favorite episode of Linda at Yet Another Journal…though to my knowledge she has not been
asked to participate in the marathon.
