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Mission Impossible - The Fourth TV Season

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE:THE FOURTH TV SEASON (DVD MOVIE)

Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Special Edition)

Arguably the greatest black comedy ever made, Stanley Kubrick's cold-war classic is the ultimate satire of the nuclear age. Dr. Strangelove is a perfect spoof of political and military insanity, beginning when General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), a maniacal warrior obsessed with "the purity of precious bodily fluids," mounts his singular campaign against Communism by ordering a squadron of B-52 bombers to attack the Soviet Union. The Soviets counter the threat with a so- called "Doomsday Device," and the world hangs in the balance while the U.S. president (Peter Sellers) engages in hilarious hot-line negotiations with his Soviet counterpart. Sellers also plays a British military attaché and the mad bomb-maker Dr. Strangelove; George C. Scott is outrageously frantic as General Buck Turgidson, whose presidential advice consists mainly of panic and statistics about "acceptable losses." With dialogue ("You can't fight here! This is the war room!") and images (Slim Pickens's character riding the bomb to oblivion) that have become a part of our cultural vocabulary, Kubrick's film regularly appears on critics' lists of the all-time best. --Jeff Shannon

Tammy And The Bachelor / Tammy Tell Me True / Tammy And The Doctor (Triple Feature)

Porky's the Ultimate Collection

Porky's
Reviled by critics and embraced by the public during its initial run (1981), Porky's is interesting to watch after all these years. What holds up about this horny coming-of-age tale is remarkable. Writer/director Bob Clark has little more than sex and practical joking on his mind, and his high school seniors from Angel Beach, Florida, rapidly move from one to the other. Clark displays a sense of timing and, perhaps rarer still, a sense of male friendship--its brutalities and its bonds--that feels right, not artificial. Surprisingly, the showcase practical jokes are still funny: the Everglades encounter with Cherry Forever, the hole in the girls' shower, and Beulah Balbricker, the humongous gym teacher. The comedic set-ups and payoffs surprisingly still work. Clark's insistence on a subplot about anti-Semitism, however, still sticks out as A MESSAGE. Kim Cattrall really got her start here (although almost no one else did) as Ms. Honeywell, a.k.a. "Lassie." Clark later distanced himself from the irritating Porky's sequels and went on to make the wonderful Christmas Story, the tale of a little boy who wants a BB gun for Christmas. --Keith Simanton

Porky's II: The Next Day
The inevitable sequel to the surprise hit movie marks a noticeable change in tone, as the horny kids from the first film fight religious fanatics in order to put on a stage show. Though the gang is still as mischievous as they were the night before, most of the raunchy humor from the first film has been dropped. In its place are some surprisingly effective passages dealing bluntly with sex, love, anti-Semitism, and religious tolerance in the repressed South of the 1950s. It's this turn that makes the sequel a surprise and something distinctive from its predecessor. --Robert Lane

Porky's Revenge
Bare breasts, practical jokes, greaser hairdos, and cars with big fins--it must be another Porky's movie! Porky's Revenge continues to fuse sexploitation and 1950s nostalgia, though by this point the adolescent hijinks feel a bit rote. On the verge of graduation, Pee Wee, Meat, and the other three interchangeable guys (winnowed down from the larger gang of the first two movies) try to help their basketball coach out of a jam by revealing to the authorities that fat, foul-tempered Porky has rebuilt his illegal casino/whorehouse--but when they get caught, they promise Porky they'll throw the state championship to save their lives. This flimsy plot is intertwined with other disconnected bits about Pee Wee having the hots for a foreign exchange student (Playboy Playmate Kim Evenson), Meat being forced to marry Porky's daughter, a contraband stag film, a biology teacher with a sideline as a dominatrix, and of course the eternal presence of women's coach Beulah Balbricker (Nancy Parsons), that towering mixture of prudery and repressed lust. Writer/director Bob Clark had nothing to do with this sequel, so it's unsurprising that the genuine fondness he brought to the characters is long gone; now they're just generic horndog teenagers. Still, most fans of the series rate this one higher than Porky's II: The Next Day. --Bret Fetzer

Fox Western Classics (Rawhide / The Gunfighter / Garden of Evil)

Disc 1: Garden of Evil (1954) Feature Film Disc 2: The Gunfighter (1951) Feature Film Disc 3: Rawhide (1951) Feature Film

Grease (Rockin' Rydell Edition)

John Travolta solidified his position as the most versatile and magnetic screen presence of the decade in this film version of the smash hit play Grease. Recording star Olivia Newton-John made her American film debut as Sandy Travolta's naive love interest. The impressive supporting cast reads like a "who's who" in this quintessential musical about the fabulous '50s. Grease is not just a nostalgic look at a simpler decade--it's an energetic and exciting musical homage to the age of rock 'n' roll!System Requirements:Running Time: 110 minsFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY Rating: PG UPC: 097361183947 Manufacturer No: 118394

Riding the strange '50s nostalgia wave that swept through America during the late 1970s (caused by TV shows like Happy Days and films like American Graffiti), Grease became not only the word in 1978, but also a box-office smash and a cultural phenomenon. Twenty years later, this entertaining film adaptation of the Broadway musical received another successful theatrical release, which included visual remastering and a shiny new Dolby soundtrack. In this 2002 DVD release, Grease lovers can also now see it in the correct 2:35 to 1 Panavision aspect ratio, and see retrospective interviews with cast members and director Randal Kleiser. All these stylistic touches are essential to the film's success. Without the vibrant colors, unforgettably campy and catchy tunes (like "Greased Lightning," "Summer Nights," and "You're the One That I Want"), and fabulously choreographed, widescreen musical numbers, the film would have to rely on a silly, cliché-filled plot that we've seen hundreds of times. As it is, the episodic story about the romantic dilemmas experienced by a group of graduating high school seniors remains fresh, fun, and incredibly imaginative.

The young, animated cast also deserves a lot of credit, bringing chemistry and energy to otherwise bland material. John Travolta, straight from his success in Saturday Night Fever, knows his sexual star power and struts, swaggers, sings, and dances appropriately, while Olivia Newton-John's portrayal of virgin innocence is the only decent acting she's ever done. And then there's Stockard Channing, spouting sexual double-entendres as Rizzo, the bitchy, raunchy leader of the Pink Ladies, who steals the film from both of its stars. Ignore the sequel at all costs. --Dave McCoy

Star Trek Voyager - The Complete First Season

Star Trek: Voyager began life in 1995 with some truly fascinating prospects in its two-hour pilot episode. Opening in the 24th century, a setting contemporary with that of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and carrying over story elements from each of those series, "Caretaker" finds Starfleet Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) stepping into the middle of Federation troubles with the Maquis, an army of rebels violently resisting the interplanetary organization's treaty with the brutal Cardassians. In the process, both Voyager and the Maquis ship under surveillance are accidentally catapulted out of the galaxy's Alpha Quadrant (the familiar stomping grounds of Starfleet personnel) by a benign but dying being called the Caretaker. Voyager ends up in the unexplored Delta Quadrant, some 70,000 light years away.

So much seemed dramatically promising in this debut, especially the unwieldy alliance of Starfleet regulars and hostile Maquis, and the likelihood that a lifetime spent in isolation, trying to get home, would lead to the development of a self-contained society on the ship, yet Voyager never entirely made up its mind what it was supposed to be about. The curiously cheesy sets and fascinating, progressive management style of Janeway (half mommy, half taskmaster) were also new developments in Star Trek culture. As the 16-episode season continued, character backstories were developed in such episodes as "The Cloud" (arguably the best episode of the season), "Eye of the Needle" (underscoring Janeway and the crew's sadness), "State of Flux" (in which a search for a traitor reveals a past romance between Commander Chakotay, played by Robert Beltran, and sexy Bajoran engineer Seska, played by Martha Hackett), and "Jetrel" (which explores the character of Neelix, the Talaxian played by Ethan Phillips, during a parable about scientific ethics and moral responsibility).

Among other notable episodes, "Phage" strikes a nice balance among character development, story hook, and moral and emotional conflict when Neelix is literally robbed of his lungs by the Vidiians, a once-civilized people who are combating a deadly disease called the Phage by stealing organs. (The disease would return in "Faces," a fine showcase for Roxann Biggs-Dawson as Chief Engineer B'Elanna Torres.) "Emanations" stirred controversy among the series' producers and some fans for its philosophical look at death, and "Time and Again" is a unique time-travel story in which Janeway and Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill) get caught in a subspace fracture that places them just hours before they know a planet is going to be destroyed. In "Prime Factors," latent tensions among Voyager personnel erupts into serious conflict, an issue revisited in the season finale, "Learning Curve." Despite a pat ending that resolves the Maquis conflict much too easily, the episode drives home the fact that Voyager and its crew are all alone, making the most of a difficult predicament. --Tom Keogh and Jeff Shannon

In the first season of STAR TREK: VOYAGER, while in pursuit of a Maquis ship in the Badlands, Captain Kathryn Janeway and the crew of the U.S.S. Voyager are pulled into the Delta Quadrant. After making a decision that saves an entire species from being destroyed, but leaves both crews stranded, they must join forces to begin a 75-year journey across 70,000 light years of space to return to the Alpha Quadrant, the Federation and home.

The Wild Wild West - The Fourth Season

James West and Artemus Gordon are two agents of President Grant who take their splendidly appointed private train through the west to fight evil. Half science fiction and half western the Artemus designs a series of interesting gadgets for James that would make Inspector Gadget proud. A light hearted adventure series.System Requirements:Running Time; 1216 Mins.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: TELEVISION/SERIES & SEQUELS Rating: NR UPC: 097368532144 Manufacturer No: 853214

At one uncharacteristically poignant point during Wild Wild West's final season, secret service agent James West raises a glass to toast "absent friends." That would be Artemis Gordon, West's resourceful sidekick and a master of disguise and the odd "diversion." Ross Martin, who portrayed Gordon, had suffered a heart attack and was missing in action for several episodes, so missed that it took several actors to fill his shoes: Charles Aidman as Jeremy Pike, William Scharlett (who early in the season portrays a villain in the episode, "The Night of the Gruesome Games") as Frank Harper, Pat Paulson, the hangdog mock-Presidential candidate on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, as the seemingly milquetoast Bosley Cranston in "The Night of the Camera," and Alan "The Skipper" Hale, Jr. as chemist Ned Brown in "The Night of the Sabatini Death," (which also features Jim Backus and contains a cute Gilligan's Island in-joke at episode's end). With or without Martin, this was a wild, wild season that offers genre-bending kicks in episodes that evoke James Bondian espionage, Jules Verne fantasy, bizarre Avengers-style villainy, and even The Phantom of the Opera. James and company are up against some entertainingly over-the-top megalomaniacs bent on world domination. Of course, the sun couldn't set on the West without one last encounter with the series' most popular villain, the "dictatorial, vain, short-tempered, and occasionally unreasonable" Dr. Loveless (Michael Dunn), who re-emerges yet again to pass judgment over those he professes to have wronged him in "The Night of Marguerite's Revenge." Two of TV's comedy icons, Harvey Koran and a pre-Mary Tyler Moore Show Ted Knight, play it straight as formidable foes in "The Night of the Big Blackmail" and "The Night of the Kraken," respectively. "The Night of the Winged Terror," the series' only two-parter, is an effective creep show featuring a hypnotizing bulging-brained adversary. Conrad, as one character compliments him, is "better than ever," whether dispatching goons (he performed all his own stunts) or romancing the ladies ("He said something about showing the big dipper to the daughter of the Lithuanian ambassador," Artemis explains West's absence in "Big Blackmail"). While there are signs that the series was poised to jump the shark, it is too bad it ended before further encounters with Professor Montague, who is introduced in "The Night of the Janis" as the Q-like creator of such nifty gadgets as a harmonica gun. --Donald Liebenson

Flight of the Navigator

Disney's 1986 Flight of the Navigator combines a strong ensemble cast and classic '80s soundtrack with dazzling special effects for a high-flying sci-fi adventure. While searching for his little brother in the woods, 12-year-old David Freeman (Joey Cramer) falls down a ravine and is knocked unconscious. After what seems like minutes, he returns home, only to discover that eight years have passed since he was declared missing and presumed dead. Even more mystifying is that David hasn't aged, nor can he account for the time lapse. Meanwhile, NASA officials stumble upon a futuristic spacecraft and are determined to assess what David knows about it by locking him in a top-secret lab for scanning and testing. His only chance of escape is in the spacecraft manned by Max, a wisecracking robot. Cramer gives an earnest performance, which overcomes an imperfect script, while enough one-liners and imaginative animation will keep families engaged. Watch for Sarah Jessica Parker in one of her first film appearances. Rated PG for language. (Ages 6 and older) --Lynn Gibson

Magnum P.I.: The Complete Eighth Season

Left for dead at the end of Season Seven Magnum's back in the eighth and final season of Magnum P.I. the unforgettable Primetime Emmy® Award- and Golden Globe®-winning series nominated for an incredible 30 awards during its impressive eight-year run. For thrilling adventures rejoin Tom Selleck as the stylish private investigator Thomas Magnum along with Higgins T.C. Rick and some of television's hottest guest stars including Amy Yasbeck (Wings) Carol Burnett (The Carol Burnett Show) and Joe Regalbuto (Murphy Brown). This must-own 3-disc collector's set includes every Season Eight episode as well as a bonus episode of The Rockford Files featuring Tom Selleck in a performance that led to his most iconic role. Take home Magnum P.I.: The Complete Eighth Season and say goodbye as the red Ferrari drives off into the sunset forever!System Requirements:Running Time: 603 minutes Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: TELEVISION/GAME SHOWS UPC: 025195016964 Manufacturer No: 61102098