Though there are a couple of worthwhile items out this week, there’s really nothing to write home about.
First, the DVD picks:
- The Adventures of Black Beauty – Season One
- Baccano Vol. 3
- Bleak House
- Boston Legal – Season Five
- The Charles Dickens Masterworks Collection: A 10 disc set including “Oliver Twist,” “The Old Curiosity Shop,” “Bleak House,” “Little Dorrit” and “Great Expectations.”
- The Charles Dickens Collection Vol. 1: Includes “Oliver Twist,” “Martin Chuzzlewit,” “Bleak House,” “Hard Times,” “Great Expectations” and “Our Mutual Friend.”
- The Charles Dickens Collection Vol. 2: This 5 disc set presumably includes something, but Amazon doesn’t say what.
- Clannad Collection 2
- Creations Creatures: Season 1: That’s the way it’s spelled on the packaging, but I’ve have thought it should have an apostrophe in that first word.
- Crusoe: The Complete Series
- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: This is the single disc Paramount release. Its existence tells me the Criterion Collection edition has a “shelf life” before the rights revert back to Paramount and Criterion can’t release it anymore.
- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Criterion Collection: A two disc edition
- Darker Than Black Vol. 4
- Doctor Who – Battlefield: Featuring, if I recall correctly, the last appearance of The Brigadier (as the Brigadier) from the original run of Doctor Who.
- Doctor Who – The E-Space Trilogy: The series that lead to Romana II’s departure and the arrival of Adric to the Tardis (and ties directly in to the New Beginnings boxed set.)
- Doujin Work – Vol. 3
- Earth: Final Conflict Season One: Yes, some of the later seasons hit DVD earlier than the first season. Different seasons have different rights holders.
- Enchanted April
Flag – Complete Collection: Realistic Mecha anime about a special ops team sent to retrieve a flag that’s a powerful symbol for peace (it’s complicated) from an extremist group that’s attempting to disrupt some peace talks.- Ghost Slayers Ayashi
- Gigantor The Collection – Vol. 1: This is the US version of the anime/ Tetsujin 28-Go!/ from the mid ’50s.
- Heroes of World Class Wrestling: A documentary about the rise and fall of the World Class Championship Wrestling promotion from Texas, which perhaps was best known for it’s rather epic feuds (in terms of its booking and its length) between the Von Erich family and the Freebirds (who even people who don’t know wrestling will recognize as one of the tag teams from the Madison Square Garden sequence at the beginning of Highlander). Also available on Blu-Ray.
- Incendiary
- Jake and the Fatman: Season Two: My memories of this series are fond but vague. Keep in mind, I’d have watched just about any detective show on the air when this came out, and I was only ten.
- Karin The Complete Series: Romantic comedy anime about a girl from a family of vampires whose body produces too much blood instead of needing to replenish her blood supply by feeding off people. I’m not making this up.
- Last Exile Complete: Probably the best animated series to come out of Gonzo (aside from Full Metal Panic)
- Lipstick Jungle – Season Two
- Little Bee
- McLeod’s Daughters – Complete Eighth Season
- Mythbusters: Collection 4
- October Road – The Complete Second Season
- The Rez – Complete Series
- Saddle Club – The Complete Second Season
- Scooby Doo, Where Are You? Season One, Volume 2
- Shooting Star
- The Spectacular Spider-Man Vol. 1: This is a second release of the DVD, with packaging more consistent with the packing used for later releases. I’m still holding out for the “announced in production without release date” complete season set.
- TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: American Musicals: Includes “The Band Wagon,” “Meet Me In St. Louis,” “Singin’ in the Rain,” and “Easter Parade.” I’ve seen three of those four, and would recommend picking up a fancier edition of “Singin’ in the Rain” on its own instead. Musical fans may disagree; the only musicals in my 1700+ title DVD/HD DVD/Blu-Ray collection are “Singin’ in the Rain,” “The Music Man,” “Little Shop of Horrors,” “Earth Girls Are Easy” and Buffy’s “Once More With Feeling.”
- TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Broadway Musicals: Includes “Show Boat,” “Annie Get Your Gun,” “Kiss Me Kate,” and “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.”
- TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: John Wayne Westerns: Includes “The Cowboys,” “Fort Apache,” “Rio Bravo” and “The Searchers.”
- TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: War – Battlefront Asia: Includes “Bataan,” “Back to Bataan,” “The Green Berets” and “Destination: Tokyo.”
- TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Western Adventures: Includes “The Wild Bunch,” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “Jeremiah Johnson,” and “The Train Robbers.”
- TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: World War II – Battlefront Europe: Includes “Kelly’s Heroes,” “Where Eagles Dare,” “The Dirty Dozen,” and “Battleground.”
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann Vol. 3 is available with or without soundtrack CD. Re-release, because the show is selling like hotcakes. It’s in my Netflix queue, and I’ll review it as soon as I watch it and I’ll get the review up – after I get all the other reviews I’ve written up.
- That Girl: Season Five
- The Wedding Weekend
- Will and Grace: Best of Friends and Foes
- Will and Grace: Best of Love and Marriage
- Wolf’s Rain – Anime Legends Complete
- Yarawa – A fashionable Judo Girl – Episode 1-40
Zegapain – Complete Collection: Giant Robot show.
Now, the Blu-Ray picks:
- Bleak House
- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Criterion Collection: Because most of the cost of a Criterion release is in bonus feature production and not in disc manufacture, Criterion Blu-Ray releases have the same MSRP as their DVD releases.
- Dexter: The Complete Second Season
- Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
- Full Monty
- Grease
- Heroes of World Class Wrestling
- It Could Happen To You
- Roxanne
- Saturday Night Fever
- Trailer Park Boys: The Movie
- Twilight
- Twilight (Ultimate Collector’s Set): This is an Amazon.com exclusive. It’s also a heck of a lot of kitch about a movie that, frankly, just wasn’t very good.
- Yip Man: The Blu-Ray release of the docudrama about the Chinese martial artist of the same name – judging by the price, I suspect it might be an import, but I can’t confirm it).
Finally, the picks of the week. AceCaseOR’s My Pick of the Week: Going by stuff I’ve seen, either Last Exile or Battlefield, depending on what you can afford. Fiziko has seen very few of this week’s releases. “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” is the best of those he’s seen, but the Criterion Blu-Ray release of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is the most tempting purchase. You may want to seriously consider holding out for some of next week’s releases, including the first six Star Trek movies.
Wolf’s Rain would be my pick, purely for the music (although the story was good too).
Just as a correction, AnimeVice is reporting that the release of Flag and Zegapain has been canceled by Bandai Entertainment.