California Dreams – Seasons One & Two (Shout! Factory DVD)
Picture:
C Sound: C+ Extras: C- Episodes: D
When
Pop/Rock music entered pop culture, it also did in various ways on TV. There was the authentic career of Ricky
Nelson off of Ozzie & Harriett,
then came The Partridge Family, Josie & the Pussycats, The Archies and The Monkees that were fun even when they were manufactured. At least the music at its worst was still
fun. By the early 1990s, NBC decided to
try the idea of a band on TV as a sitcom and the result was the nadir of it
all, California Dreams.
The
combination of bad videotaping, bad acting, bad, writing, bad singing, bad
ideas and phoniness and insincerity that makes “Sugar Sugar” seem like a highlight on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon, the show arrives
on DVD for no good reason except nostalgia from hell and to say it has not aged
well is an understatement. It is one of
the reasons you’ll be glad analog TV is dead.
The five
DVDs here have all 31 unexciting episodes from 1992 – 1994, all rather the same
and all really, really, really bad. You
can see why Clinton became president. It
is most similar to Partridge Family
down to a manager being around, but boy is he annoying. If anything, this make the animated Partridge Family spin-off seem like Akira!
Needless
to say the show is highly unlikable. How
this ever got greenlit is only because at this point, all the TV companies
would shove anything through the vacuum that was and still is syndicated TV and
cable. Most of the actors had dead end
careers, though Kelly Packard did Baywatch,
which is an improvement of sorts. All I
could do was hope they’d get hit by an earthquake, but this kind of phoniness
is impervious to such things, we guess.
The 1.33
X 1 image is soft, harsh, has aliasing all over the place and are all likely
old digital backup copies. The Dolby
Digital 2.0 Mono is slightly better, meaning it is not as degraded, meaning the
bad music sounds better than you’ll want it to.
Extras include a jukebox feature so you can hear the songs (yahoo?)
separately from the show, though we still consider that a waste of your life
and a making of on the show ironically titled Let’s Do It! We say let’s
not.
- Nicholas Sheffo
