Dallas – The Complete First to Eighth Seasons (Warner DVD)
Picture:
C Sound: C Extras: B- Episodes: B-
Sometimes
shameless in ripping off George Stevens’ classic version of Giant (1956, a Warner Bros. film) in
the most soap opera ways, Lorimar was a quality TV and feature film production
company who really hit paydirt with the success of Dallas. The show responsible
for bringing about the permanent advent of nighttimes soap operas, it may have
not been the best, but it was often close and often imitated, and though it did
not stay number one by the time Dynasty
(reviewed elsewhere on this site) overtook it, it was written well enough to
endure for fourteen seasons and be a big hit for CBS.
Warner
Bros. has now issued the first eight seasons on DVD and long after the hype has
died down, the well-cast show and some other bad moves (like the infamous
return of Patrick Duffy’s Bobby Ewing after missing a seasons, taking a shower
and making the whole previous season a dream sequence!!!) is the kind of dumb
thing Dynasty would never do. However, the “Who Shot J.R.?” episode remains
a classic and it is one of the few nighttime soaps not by Aaron Spelling anyone
remembers.
Better
than many of the drama we get now, it was ridiculed for the decline of TV, but
I also have to say that Larry Hagman carried the show overall as the lead
villain at a time when that was considered unthinkable and his acting as the
bad guy (which he roughly revived in Oliver Stone’s JFK as a real variant of J.R.) is more remarkable than anyone was
giving him credit for at the time. He is
very unlikable, manipulative and is so bad here that today’s infantile
atmosphere of political incorrectness would never allow a male (especially
white) be this bad, which explains why most of the baddie in nighttime soaps
since were women.
After the
“dream season” the show never got its act back together and though it added new
characters here and there, kept most of the original cast together to its
credit and ended while it was ahead.
Some reunion shows followed (not included in any of these sets) but the
way the show ended was just and as you may have heard, there were plans to make
this into a feature film with big names.
That fell through. Why?
Simple. The show is a product of the late-1970s and
the current commercial mentality in Hollywood could not gloss overt that so
easily and making it an outright comedy as so many TV redos have been made out
as to their detriment would be much harder with a show that was a soap opera to
begin with. Of course, remaking it as Giant-lite would be a bigger disaster
and anyone in this cast could be recast with some ease, but not Hagman. That would be a big sticking point and John
Travolta eventually and wisely left.
The show
is now corny kitsch and will always be that.
It has also not aged as well as Dynasty,
though they started to put more money in the show in its last seasons, but it
was too much, too little, too late and the show ended. It is still a trash TV landmark and still
popular enough that Warner is able to continuing the DVD rollout of the whole
series.
The 1.33
X 1 image throughout the full color, filmed series has come from older
transfers for all eight sets, not unlike the overly grainy prints and transfer
used for another series Warner owns through being the keepers of the Lorimar
catalog: The Waltons. Too bad, because if filmed TV from the 1960s
can look exceptional on HD channels and even on HD-DVD, there is no excuse for
these to look so lame. Even when the
sets looked cheap, the show had a consistent look thanks to its various
cinematographers. The Dolby Digital 1.0
mono across all sets also sounds second generation or worse depending on the
print. Extras vary from set to set,
usually including featurettes, but also some audio commentaries.
We look
forward to seeing how Warner will handle the show whenever they get around to
reissuing it on Blu-ray. We’ll see if
the later boxes look or sound any better.
- Nicholas Sheffo
