Kolbe, Winrich

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.

Space Above and Beyond - The Complete Series

This 5-disc DVD set includes all 23 episodes including the two-part pilot episode! Its the year 2063. After 150 years of deep space exploration, the people of Earth feel certain they are alone in the universe. Then word comes that two Earth outposts light-years away from home have been brutally attacked by an advanced alien civilization. Now the new young recruits of the United States Marine Corps Space Aviator Calvary are heading for the front lines of space in the toughest battle the world has ever faced. Thrust into an intergalactic war beyond imagination, these untested fighter pilots suddenly find themselves waging a life-and-death struggle to protect Earth and to save mankind from total annihilation.

The science fiction series Space Above and Beyond, which enjoyed a brief run in the 1995-96 season, was created by X-Files producers Glen Morgan and James Wong as a revision of the classic war series Combat!. Set in the not-too-distant future, Space Above and Beyond follows the adventures of five inexperienced Marines of the 58th Squadron, who are involved in a war against the Chigs, a race of aliens bent on conquering the Earth. Morgan and Wong gave their main characters intriguing personalities--Nathan West (Morgan Weisser) has joined the Marines to save a girlfriend captured by the aliens, while Rodney Rowland's Cooper is an artificially created human whose service is inspired by a desire to escape the violent prejudice he faces on Earth. The action and stories are gritty and dramatic, and put a fresh spin on traditional wartime stories--highlights include "The Enemy," in which the 58th is stranded behind enemy lines; "Toy Soldiers," in which West's younger brother is serving under a dangerously reckless lieutenant; and the two-part "If They Lay Us Down to Rest…" and "Tell Our Moms We Done Our Best," which brought the series to a close with the Earth on the verge of peace talks with the aliens as the military launches a perilous operation. Commentary by Morgan and Wong and the cast would have been welcome, especially if the plans for the unseen second season could've been revealed, but unfortunately, no supplemental features are included in this slickly produced, no-frills set. --Paul Gaita

The Rockford Files - Season One

From the premiere of its first hour-long episode on September 13, 1974, The Rockford Files was a critical and commercial success that gained a large and loyal following. Like other private-eye shows of the 1970s (such as Columbo and David Janssen's Harry O), the series offered smart mystery plots in the hardboiled-sleuth traditions of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Rex Stout, given a sunlit spin in contemporary California. But ex-convict turned private investigator Jim Rockford (who served time for a crime he didn't commit) was anything but a conventional gumshoe; for one thing, he rarely carried a gun, and resorted to violence only when he'd exhausted his options. As played to perfection by James Garner (in what would become his signature role, surpassing his previous success as Maverick), Rockford preferred wisecracks over violence, and his going rate ("$200 a day, plus expenses") was typically applied to cold cases, missing persons, and family disputes, frequently leading to entanglements with organized crime and L.A.P.D. Sergeant Dennis Becker (Joe Santos), whose friendship with Rockford lent the series one of its pivotal character relationships. As Rockford pursued the truth from his rusty trailer-home on the Pacific Coast Highway, his inherent warmth and compassionate sleuthing were further enhanced by engaging interplay with his retired ex-trucker father "Rocky" (Noah Beery, Jr.), his lawyer and on-and-off girlfriend Beth Davenport (Gretchen Corbett), and his weasely former cell-mate "Angel" Martin (Stuart Margolin), a trio of supporting players as memorably appealing as any in '70s television. As a loose-knit ensemble, they followed Garner's capable lead with intelligent dialogue (the best of it written by series cocreator Stephen J. Cannell and frequent contributor Juanita Bartlett) and occasionally burst of stunt-laden action, typically involving Rockford's expert driving of a versatile Pontiac Firebird. (As Garner fondly recalls in the disc 1 bonus interview, "That car could do anything.")

With a catchy Mike Post theme song, The Rockford Files began each week with a new message on Rockford's telephone answering machine, usually a humorous indication that Rockford's life was always in some kind of financial disarray. Garner played this angle to the hilt, portraying Rockford as a nice guy who knew all the scams and wasn't above using them if it aided his case. His portrayal, and the show's excellent writing, attracted a wide variety of new and established guest stars, and these 23 episodes (24 if you count the two-part "This Case Is Closed," originally broadcast as one 90-minute episode) feature appearances by Joseph Cotten, James Woods, Sharon Gless, Lindsay Wagner, James Cromwell, Suzanne Somers, Ned Beatty, and others, along with lesser-known but familiar TV regulars like Sian Barbara Allen and Mills Watson, all adding flavor to a series that was routinely hailed by mystery writers as one of the best private-eye shows in TV history. Speaking of mysteries, one can only wonder why Universal failed to include the series' 90-minute pilot (originally aired in March 1974), and while this reviewer experienced no playback problems with these three double-sided DVDs (four episodes per side), many consumers have reported DVD freeze-ups likely resulting from lower-quality players less capable of handling high-compression DVDs. These caveats aside, season 1 of The Rockford Files is a bona fide treat, setting the tone for even better episodes that followed in subsequent seasons. --Jeff Shannon

The world's most unlikely detective comes to DVD for the first time ever in all 23 thrilling Season One episodes of The Rockford Files. Emmy(r) winner James Garner stars as the offbeat Jim Rockford, an ex-con-turned-private-investigator who would rather fish than fight, but whose instinct on closed cases is more golden than his classic Pontiac Firebird. From his mobile home in Malibu, this wisecracking private eye takes on the cases of the lost and the dispossessed, chasing down seemingly long-dead clues in the sun-baked streets and seamy alleys of Los Angeles. Including an interview with James Garner himself, this phenomenal DVD set contains 23 TV hours of classic Rockford action and includes such stellar guest stars as Lindsay Wagner, James Woods, Abe Vigoda, Suzanne Somers and Ned Beatty. The Rockford Files are now open and declassified for mystery fans everywhere!

Hunter - The Complete Second Season

Get ready to reload as L.A. homicide detective Rick Hunter (Fred Dryer) and his partner Dee Dee McCall (Stepfanie Kramer) return to toss out the rulebook and blow away every other cop show on TV! In this explosive second season, Hunter and McCall take on deadly heists, killer porn stars, gangland murders, international terrorists, street hookers, punk rockers, McCall's rapist and more. Bruce Davison co-stars as Captain Wyler in the legendary Saturday night series that shot down all critics to become one of the hottest action hits in television history! HUNTER - THE COMPLETE SECOND SEASON features all 23 episodes - including the shocking two-part "Rape & Revenge"- with such guest stars as Robert Englund, Jane Russell, Robert Davi, Stuart Whitman, Kay Lenz, Sheryl Lee Ralph, John Matuszak and Isaac Hayes.

Star Trek The Next Generation - Jean-Luc Picard Collection

Star Trek The Next Generation - The Complete Seasons 1-7

After Star Wars and the successful big-screen Star Trek adventures, it's perhaps not so surprising that Gene Roddenberry managed to convince purse string-wielding studio heads in the 1980s that a Next Generation would be both possible and profitable. But the political climate had changed considerably since the 1960s, the Cold War had wound down, and we were now living in the Age of Greed. To be successful a second time, Star Trek had to change too.

A writer's guide was composed with which to sell and define where the Trek universe was in the 24th Century. The United Federation of Planets was a more appealing ideology to an America keen to see where the Reagan/Gorbachev faceoff was taking them. Starfleet's meritocratic philosophy had always embraced all races and species. Now Earth's utopian history, featuring the abolishment of poverty, was brandished prominently and proudly. The new Enterprise, NCC 1701-D, was no longer a ship of war but an exploration vessel carrying families. The ethical and ethnical flagship also carried a former enemy (the Klingon Worf, played by Michael Dorn), and its Chief Engineer (Geordi LaForge) was blind and black. From every politically correct viewpoint, Paramount executives thought the future looked just swell!

Roddenberry's feminism now contrasted a pilot episode featuring ship's Counsellor Troi (Marina Sirtis) in a mini-skirt with her ongoing inner strengths and also those of Dr. Crusher (Gates McFadden) and the short-lived Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby). The arrival of Whoopi Goldberg in season 2 as mystic barkeep Guinan is a great example of the good the original Trek did for racial groups--Goldberg has stated that she was inspired to become an actress in large part through seeing Nichelle Nichols' Uhura. Her credibility as an actress helped enormously alongside the strong central performances of Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard), Jonathan Frakes (First Officer Will Riker), and Brent Spiner (Data) in defining another wholly believable environment once again populated with well-defined characters. Star Trek, it turned out, did not depend for its success on any single group of actors.

Like its predecessor in the 1960s, TNG pioneered visual effects on TV, making it an increasingly jaw-dropping show to look at. And thanks also to the enduring success of the original show, phasers, tricorders, communicators and even phase inverters were already familiar to most viewers. But while technology was a useful tool in most crises, it now frequently seemed to be the cause of them too, as the show's writers continually warned about the dangers of over-reliance on technology (the Borg were the ultimate expression of this maxim). The word "technobabble" came to describe a weakness in many TNG scripts, which sacrificed the social and political allegories of the original and relied instead upon invented technological faults and their equally fictitious resolutions to provide drama within the Enterprise's self-contained society. (The holodeck's safety protocol override seemed to be next to the light switch given the number of times crew members were trapped within.) This emphasis on scientific jargon appealed strongly to an audience who were growing up for the first time in the late 1980s with the home computer--and gave rise to the clichéd image of the nerdy Trek fan.

Like in the original Trek, it was in the stories themselves that much of the show's success is to be found. That pesky Prime Directive kept moral dilemmas afloat ("Justice"/"Who Watches the Watchers?"/"First Contact"). More "what if" scenarios came out of time-travel episodes ("Cause and Effect"/"Time's Arrow"/"Yesterday's Enterprise"). And there were some episodes that touched on the political world, such as "The Arsenal of Freedom" questioning the supply of arms, "Chain of Command" decrying the torture of political prisoners and "The Defector", which was called "The Cuban Missile Crisis of The Neutral Zone" by its writer. The show ran for more than twice as many episodes as its progenitor and therefore had more time to explore wider ranging issues. But the choice of issues illustrates the change in the social climate that had occurred with the passing of a couple of decades. "Angel One" covered sexism; "The Outcast" was about homosexuality; "Symbiosis"--drug addiction; "The High Ground"--terrorism; "Ethics"--euthanasia; "Darmok"--language barriers; and "Journey's End"--displacement of Indians from their homeland. It would have been unthinkable for the original series to have tackled most of these.

TNG could so easily have been a failure, but it wasn't. It survived a writer's strike in its second year, the tragic death of Roddenberry just after Trek's 25th anniversary in 1991, and plenty of competition from would-be rival franchises. Yes, its maintenance of an optimistic future was appealing, but the strong stories and readily identifiable characters ensured the viewers' continuing loyalty. --Paul Tonks

War of the Worlds - The Complete First Season

Tom Cruise and Gene Barry aren't the only ones to save Earth from a Martian invasion--from 1988 to 1990, an intrepid band of scientists and soldiers battled the Red Planet menace on the small screen in the action-packed syndicated television series War of the Worlds. The show operated on an intriguing premise that paid homage to George Pal's classic 1953 film version--the Martians, presumed dead at the end of the movie, are actually in a state of hibernation, and 30 years later, they have not only revived, but begun to inhabit human bodies in a second attempt to conquer our planet. Now, a team of scientists (led by dependable character actor Jared Martin) and soldiers (under the command of actor-playwright Richard Chaves) must convince humanity to fight against an alien onslaught. It's unfortunate that War of the Worlds caught on with only a small but loyal audience (the series lasted just two seasons), since its episodes delivered an entertaining mix of science fiction, action, and suspense; highlights from the first season include "Thy Kingdom Come," which introduces a supporting turn by Ann Robinson, who recreates her role from the 1953 film; "Eye for an Eye," which wryly revisits the famous 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds by Orson Welles that spread real panic over much of the Eastern seaboard; and the disturbing "Unto Us a Child Is Born," in which the human team and the aliens search for a half-Earthling, half-Martian baby. All 22 episodes of the debut season are included on this six-disc set; unfortunately for diehard fans, no supplemental features are included. --Paul Gaita

Veritas: The Quest

Scarecrow and Mrs. King