Classic TV Comes to DVD From Mill Creek: What Holds Up the Best?, Part 1

Recently, Mill Creek Entertainment have been releasing a number of classic TV and movie projects from years past, including comic book favorites like Dilbert: The Complete Series, The Tick: The Complete Series (live action) and the old Batman and Robin theatrical serials that the Rifftrax guys have been having fun with lately. With an eye toward the ones that seem relevant or interesting to our audience, we figured we'd take a look at some of the recent releases and try to figure out which of them still hold up as an entertaining watch outside of just being a relic of cinema/television history. This week, most of the new seasons are pretty tangentially-related to comics and animation, but bear with us...and next week, it'll be a lot more on the nose. The Cosby Show (Seasons 1 & 2 just released in a single box set) Bill Cosby, best known around these parts as the genius behind the seminal animated series Fat Albert, changed the face of network television when his series debuted in 1984. The fact that there isn't a feature-rich Blu-ray release for this series is surprising and sad; if you ever take a college course in broadcast television, one of the things you'll learn is that The Cosby Show and Sesame Street are profoundly influential, and that you can still see the very direct impact of these decades-old show on TV today. The series holds up remarkably well; I'm no great fan of family sitcoms in general, but Cosby's personality is magnetic and the writing is solid. Despite the occasional groaner (primarily brought on by virtue of the fact that the series is loosely based on Cosby's oft-repeated stand-up act), the show remains better than nine out of every ten sitcoms on modern TV.

Charlie's Angels (Season 1 and pilot "movie" just released in new box set)Charlie's Angels is the stuff of genre TV legend, having spawned a pair of movies and a short-lived spinoff over the course of the last several years. It is, however, as dated as any action movie is and the performances are a bit wooden. It's not a bad show--but it feels a bit like weaker episodes of Columbo--action and stilted delivery taking lead over a script that could be quite good with just a bit of polish. Perhaps the hardest thing to adjust to in Charlie's Angels is the music. It's remarkably dated, and takes you out of the show in a way that the score on some of these other classic series don't--even Bewitched, which is older than Charlie's Angels, feels a bit less dated by virtue of the fact that its sitcommy music cues are less keyed to the time than they are the medium. Charlie's Angels is an enjoyable watch, but it feels a it like one of those things that's a classic in spite of the fact that its successors have done the same thing better--Chuck managed to merge humor, sex appeal and the spy stuff better than this series does, but couldn't have happened without Charlie's Angels. The season is worth picking up, arguably, just for the pilot--clocking in at 75 minutes, the episode has higher production values than you'd usually see on TV and sets the stage nicely for the show. It's certainly better than either of the theatrical movies that Chuck producer McG brought us. Bewitched (Seasons 1 & 2 just released in single box set) It's really no surprise that the movie version of this beloved series turned out to be rubbish; it's a good source for reliable laughs, but incredibly dated and the epitome of a situational situation comedy. There's no organic element to it that feels familiar and grounded like The Cosby Show or even workplace comedies like Just Shoot Me, Cheers and Wings. On top of that, the performances are very theatrical; meant for a live audience, and the early days of television, it feels more like a stage production than the naturalistic acting that we've gotten used to on TV as the technology has improved. The pilot is great in that it spends a whole episode setting up this premise and their relationships--that's not something that would be done all that often back in the day. Look at Get Smart, for instance: that show was into its case of the week in the pilot.

Dilbert: The Complete Series This one's an odd duck. I remember loving this shortly after it went off the air (I never saw it on TV, only one home video later) but have never really been able to marathon through it like I can most dopey animated comedies for background noise. There's arguably just too much going on; it demands too much of your attention—and if there's an A, B and C plot in any given episode it's basically guaranteed that one of them isn't working. It looks like the strip, which is something that comic strips seem to get more than comic books do when translated to the small screen (Garfield & Friends, Peanuts, The Boondocks and more), but the downside to that is that the dour office environment of Dilbert doesn't really serve the visual splendor of animation. Later in the series, as they started to get out of the office, it was taking advantage of the form more...but Dilbert's humor, both on TV and in print, never worked nearly as well when it strayed from the cubicles, leaving the later shows feeling a bit odd for the attempt.