Cheap Rod Serling's Night Gallery - The Complete First Season (DVD) (Joan Crawford) Price

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Customer Reviews of Rod Serling's Night Gallery - The Complete First Season

Some good news and some bad news
I am the coauthor, with Jim Benson, of the companion guide to "Rod Serling's Night Gallery." We've been tracking this release pretty closely and are privy to as much information as we can squeeze out of Universal Studios. We're grateful the series has been tapped for a DVD release, and the set has been struck from original, uncut prints--the same ones Columbia House used for its mail-order volumes--and not the butchered half-hour syndication version that played on the SciFi Channel for years. That said, the master for the pilot is 20 years old, and those for the series are 15 years old--acceptable, but a bit long-in-the-tooth compared to the up-to-date treatment other television series have received. Imbedded in a few of the episodes are some errors, mostly in the sound and music tracks, and it would have been preferable had Universal seen fit to correct these. We also fail to see why a series which featured the involvement of both Rod Serling and Steven Spielberg did not rate a budget that allowed special features. If Warner Brothers can load extras into DVD releases of such non-classics as "Wonder Woman" and "The Dukes of Hazzard," then Universal is out of touch with current standards in the DVD business when they fail to properly document their own classic TV shows (such as "Rod Serling's Night Gallery" and "Columbo"). However, Universal is new to the TV side of their property library and may need to get their feet wet before they finally catch up to their more forward-looking competitors.
As a caveat emptor, the first season is relatively free of errors compared to the second season. The most critical error is the crackling that runs through the soundtrack of Serling's segment "The House" (found in Episode #3). Any further critique will have to wait until the release.
And who knows, if sales for Season One are impressive enough, maybe the studio will do right by Season Two and give "RSNG" a budget that more accurately reflects its classic status.

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Entertain the imagination.....
I remember watching Night Gallery as a pre-teen...it scared me, made me laugh, scream and and kept me totally mesmerized. I devoured every episode. I still watch it on the mystery channel and have been dying for it to become available. I wish Rod Serling were still around, he was ahead of his time. I am so glad they've finally decided to put it on DVD. Some of the cinematography is less than stellar, their budget was MINIMAL, but open your mind and go with the flow. It's entertainment at it's best! You won't believe how many actors you'll recognize.

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To Be Fair to Universal...
To be fair to Universal Studios, all of the remastering versus "15-year-old copy" information's originating, as best I can tell, from a NIGHT GALLERY website, www.nightgallery.net. The authors for this site claim to have a "mole" within the studio who provided them with information about the DVD set and also that celebrated Mexican horror/science fiction director Guillermo del Toro (THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE, HELLBOY) had volunteered his services for producing the first season set but had been rebuffed. The website's the premiere NIGHT GALLERY source on the net and no less a person than Carol Serling (Rod Serling's widow) has weighed in on the controversy on the site with personal correspondence (although, at the time I write this, she doesn't appear to have any definite knowledge about whether remastering's taken place or not, either), but, as no one authoring the reviews below has yet seen a copy of the 1st season DVD set from Universal, I'm not sure that this controversy's genuine or not.

As for the show, well, it's a very hazy memory of my young childhood. I was only 5 or 6 years of age when it left the air, but it's honestly the first thing I can recall watching as a young boy. My mother was a huge fan of Serling, and she would watch anything he was associated with--TWILIGHT ZONE, NIGHT GALLERY, even those cheesy "Bermuda Triangle" documentaries he narrated in the 1970's near the end of his life. I did catch a very few of the syndicated shows during the 1970's and 1980's but it never seemed popular or had wide coverage in any of the places I was then living. I understand it's now in reruns on the "Mystery Channel," but I don't have access to that station in my area on standard cable, either. I do recall the syndicated version of the show was awful: apparently, the shows had been cut up or extended to fit a 30-minute format, and you often had non sequitur "creepy" footage cut in from other shows or footage from the original show had been repeated in loops to fill time.

However, the original shows, unaltered, made a high emotional impact on me as a youngster. I still recall the adaption of H.P. Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model," the episode called "Green Fingers" with the little old lady who could grow just about *anything*, the one about the drunken randy sea captain and his mermaid he found, "Logoda's Heads" about the strange fortune telling shrunken heads owned by an African witch doctor, and the really weird one set in the Old West about the gunfighters sitting around an eerie saloon waiting for something to happen...

So, while this may not have been the best project Rod Serling was ever associated with, it did make a huge impression on me at the time and must have had something to it more than just being a typical supernatural television anthology. I'm hoping Universal actually has made some effort with this DVD set and the rumors aren't true. I still haven't decided whether I'm ordering it yet or not and may wait until it's released and see what actual purchasers have to say. I'd really like to see NIGHT GALLERY again in its entirety before I am eligible as an AARP member.