A very Vidiot
holiday

Movie and TV collections to
please the home entertainment palate

by MARK SLUTSKY

We might be rapidly approaching the end of something as old-fashioned as physical media when it comes to how we consume our entertainment—look what happened to CDs when the MP3 revolution took over. The home video market hasn’t been socked in the gut by the Internet quite yet, but savvy studios are realizing that they’re going to have to step up their game in terms of how they package their goods to attract the all-important holiday dollar.

TV has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the DVD revolution, and there is no shortage of excellent sets out this season. There’s lots of “complete series” sets, which is kind of bittersweet, as so many great series have ended recently. By far the mama of them all is The Sopranos: The Complete Series, a truly magnificent collection that comes wrapped in faux-velvet, in a funereal black box. It’s basically a gigantic brick of what may be the greatest single accomplishment of the television medium, all told. Included are of course every episode of every season, as well as three soundtrack discs (appropriate for a show that used music so well) and two DVDs of bonus content: interviews, lost scenes and the like.

Another HBO masterpiece can be viewed in its entirety in The Wire: The Complete Series, compiling all five seasons of the Baltimore-set, cops-and-dealers drama, which is up there with The Sopranos as far as compelling, long-form storytelling is concerned. Deadwood fans shouldn’t feel left out, as the entire foul-mouthed Western series is available in one box too.

The success of the Judd Apatow comedy factory has had many happy results, but I’ll say one of the most exciting is the re-release of Freaks and Geeks: Yearbook Edition. The too-short-lived high school dramedy, which launched the careers of Seth Rogen, Jason Segel and James Franco, to name a few, has been available on DVD for a while, but this special edition—made especially for super-fans of the show and previously only fleetingly available from a Web site—is finally back in print, and it’s widely available for the first time.

As the name suggests, the set takes the form of a yearbook, with 80 pages of photos, essays and cool stuff. There’s of course all the episodes of the show, plus two bonus discs featuring panel discussions, audition footage and other special features.

BEST PICTURES

It’s not all small-screen sets, though: there’s plenty of collections of actual motion pictures out there for the film fan in your life. If you want to really go big, you can’t miss with the Hollywood Musicals Collection from MGM and Fox. It’s a staggering 61-disc set, and Hello Dolly, Oklahoma, South Pacific, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, All That Jazz and A Chorus Line are just a few of its offerings.

Columbia’s Best Picture Collection is the kind of repackaging grab-bag you see all the time when the holidays roll around, but this is an especially nice set, with 11 genuine classics from the studio’s history, including Lawrence of Arabia, It Happened One Night, You Can’t Take It With You, From Here to Eternity and On the Waterfront, among others, all presented in a tasteful book-like object.

This is an interesting one: Murnau, Borzage and Fox collects a dozen works produced by the latter name (producer William Fox): two masterpieces by F.W. Murnau (including the immortal Sunrise) and 10 by Frank Borzage, a lesser-known director of the ’20s and ’30s. A must-have for serious film fans, though my vote for the coolest gift of the season for cineastes has to go to the 10 Years of Rialto Pictures set. Celebrating a decade in the life of the American distributor, well-known for reviving slept-on classics, it contains stylish flicks like Rififi, Billy Liar, Band of Outsiders, Au hasard Balthazar, Mafioso and The Third Man—old-school arthouse, in the best sense. You also can’t go wrong with Janus Presents: Essential Art House Volume One, featuring Grand Illusion, Rashomon, Wild Strawberries and more.

One of the classic-est classics around, Casablanca, gets a juicy re-issuing with the “Ultimate Collector’s Edition.” Where to start with this one? There’s the special features previously available, like commentaries by Roger Ebert and Rudy Behlmer and lots of vintage footage. But there’s also a full-length doc on studio legend Jack L. Warner, a photo book, lobby cards, reproductions of gimcracks from the movie like the all-important transit letter and other fun stuff.

Finally, David Lynch’s oeuvre on video has always been a frustration to fans, with weird, erratic releases. He’s looking to rectify that with The Lime Green Set, a new collection featuring Eraserhead, Wild at Heart, The Elephant Man, Industrial Symphony No. 1, tons of unreleased special features pertaining to the films, a bunch of shorts and, most interestingly, a “Mystery Disc” of extras from the director’s archives—an offer too intriguing for serious Lynch fans to pass up.

Master of disasters

Ill-starred stuntman Super Dave Osborne on his new, retrospective DVD

WILL STUNT YOUR GROWTH: Super Dave Osborne

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Self-described as “the greatest daredevil superstar entertainer of all time” (take that, Evel Knievel), Super Dave Osborne and his ambitious feats of foolishness are fondly remembered by viewers of the classic, turn-of-the-’80s comedy show Bizarre—never to mention Letterman, Leno, Kimmel, the mid-’80s Super Dave show, a feature film and a Fox cartoon series, Super Dave: Daredevil for Hire (the cancellation of which he blames on an appearance before the U.S. congress by Shari Lewis and her “stupid puppet,” Lambchop). Today, Super Dave, his sidekick Fuji and their elaborate yet unreliable contraptions are the stuff of legend.

Though he’s hidden from his hordes of fans by cleverly assuming the identity of comedian/actor/writer/producer Bob Einstein—a family name few would associate with Osborne’s antics—Super Dave dropped his ruse and spoke with the Mirror about Super Stunt Spectacular: Volume 1 (Video Service Corp.), his new DVD of clips that, oddly enough, all seem to end in his being mashed and mangled in mirthful mishaps.

Mirror: This new DVD anthology, it’s really only highlights of an incredibly complex and illustrious career, but by what criteria did you select the particular segments that made it in?

Super Dave Osborne: Oh, we just took the ones that I thought were memorable to people. We have a lot more, don’t kid yourself, but these are the ones that are the immediate favourites—King of the Road, Slam Dunk, Geiger Cart, the ones that people talk about. Have you seen it? It’s really fun, isn’t it? It brings back great memories.

M: A cornerstone of my childhood. Speaking of memories, I’m curious if there’s one particular stunt there that really captures the spiritual and philosophical essence—

SDO: King of the Road. I say King of the Road. Because the idea is that I want to stop highway profanity by singing across the highway for 500 miles, which doesn’t make an awful lot of sense. Then there’s the fact that a quarter of a mile into the 500-mile trip, I am completely mutilated. Seems to me it’s got the total package.

M: Recently, we had the Jackass phenomenon—

SDO: He gave me 100 per cent credit, Johnny Knoxville.

M: They could be regarded as, metaphorically speaking, having sprung from your loins.

SDO: That’s exactly what he said. I mean, I don’t know if he knew to speak so well, but he said something like that. The difference is, those—I don’t even know what to call them—they really got mutilated! The difference is, also, I didn’t want kids emulating what I did. So the stuff I did was impossible to emulate—unless your father bought you a bus with a piano on top and drove you under an overpass. But what Johnny did was pretty rough.

M: But it’s a process that I think young men need to go through. We’re getting to the essence of the matter here, Super Dave—you’re a beacon of authentic masculinity in a society increasingly obsessed with safety, with the prevention of injury and even discomfort. At a certain point, Super Dave, is modern Western society losing its balls?

SDO: I think so. I think they’re losing the will to really try something. You know what I mean? You only live once and you have to live every day—so why not spend it in the hospital?