Viewscreen on!

I love DVDs.   Love ’em.   I love the great resolution and the surround sound.   I love watching all the behind-the-scenes special features and listening to the commentaries (which I often play while drawing Motion Pictures, among other projects).   I love getting to enjoy great TV shows in complete-season sets.   I love how I can re-watch, ad infinitum, the successful movies and shows that I love along with so many great selections that are a lot more obscure (I’m thinking about you, my live action The Tick complete series set…).

Yeah, I love DVDs.

And just as I find that I always have a pretty significant “to read” stack of books on my shelf as well as comics on my desk, I always seem to have a nice large stack of DVDs in my “to watch” pile.   Here are some of the DVDs I’m looking forward to enjoying in the coming weeks/months (if I ever get some free time!!):

Walk Hard: Extended Edition – Not exactly a home run from the Apatow factory, I did nonetheless very much enjoy this flick.   It’s worth it for the Beatles scene alone.   Apatow DVDs (Freaks and Geaks and Undeclared, as well as The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up and Superbad) have a habit of being pretty spectacular, crammed full of alternate takes, deleted scenes, and other fun stuff.   I’m hoping this one is too.

Cloverfield – I loved this in theatres…I’m eager to see if it holds up to a repeat viewing.

Juno – ditto.

Bee Movie – I missed this one in theatres.   Nothing that I saw or read about it made it jump out to me as a “must see,” but I’m an enormous Seinfeld fan so I’m looking forward to giving this a viewing.

John, Paul, Tom & Ringo – A series of lengthy interviews with 3 of the 4 Beatles which Tom Snyder conducted on various episodes of his talk show The Tomorrow Show in the late seventies and early eighties.   This includes John Lennon’s last televised interview, from 4/25/75.   I have never seen any of these episodes, so I’m very eager to check out this DVD collection.

Young Indiana Jones – Lucasfilm has released three enormous collections over the past year that collect the entire run of this show.   I have the first one.   I actually watched about half of it a few months ago.   The episodes I saw were the ones with the young, 10-12 year-old Indy.   They were rather hit-and-miss…I admired the concept of using the Young Indy character to educate the viewer about all sorts of different people and places in history (done via Indy’s Forrest Gump like encounters, in each episode, with all sorts of historical figures)…but I found many of the episodes I saw to be rather boring.   After watching a few of them, I started putting the episodes on in the background while I was drawing.   Its worth noting that the extras on this DVD set are stunning – each episode has lengthy documentaries about all the people and places and historical events mentioned in each episode – and I found these to be endlessly fascinating.   So why is this set still on my list?   Because I just happened to get sidetracked from this set right before the 1st episode with teen-aged Indy, played by Sean Patrick Flannery.   I’m really eager to see if those episodes are any good.   I just haven’t had a chance to get back to watching this set – hopefully sometime soon.

Robot Chicken Season 2 – I bow before the brilliance of this show.   If you’ve never seen it, you must seek it out to behold its glory.

King Kong: The Extended Edition — I liked Peter Jackson’s King Kong and eagerly bought this set when it came out, both to watch the extended version of the film as well as the extensive behind-the-scenes documentaries.   (The documentaries on the extended DVDs of the Lord of the Rings films are some of the best DVD special features I’ve ever seen.)   And yet, this DVD has been sitting unwatched on my shelf for almost 2 years now.   I’m not sure exactly why.   Maybe its just that the thought of sitting down for an even LONGER version of this flick (which was almost 3 hours in its original theatrical form) has been subconsciously daunting.  Well, hopefully I’ll get to it one of these days…

That’s all from me for now.   I have tickets to a late-night showing of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull tonight…I’m pretty jazzed about that!   I’ll be posting my thoughts as soon as I get out of the movie late late tonight (more like early tomorrow morning), so check back soon to see what I thought!