The Lost DVD Reviews: Previously Unpublished Thoughts on Mad About You, Class Act, and Pirate Radio

The Lost DVD Reviews:
Previously Unpublished Thoughts on "Mad About You", Class Act, and Pirate Radio

The Lost DVD Reviews

Featured Studio Ineptitude: Shout! Factory, Warner Home Video, Universal Studios Home Entertainment / Would-Be Publication Dates: April to June 2010 / Time Wasted: Indeterminate / Estimated Studio Savings: $6.00 / Uninformed Readers: Approximately 1 Million and Counting

Special Thanks: These fragments could not have gone unfinished without the courageous stubbornness of the following folks: Michelle Slavich (NBC Universal), Gabriel Vicuna (Warner Home Video), and Tom Chen (Shout! Factory).

Having been reviewing DVDs for the better part of a decade and having built a readership of hundreds of thousands of unique monthly visitors, you might reasonably assume that when there's a new or upcoming release we want to review, we ask for it and we get it along with a polite letter thanking us for out interest. Not so. Product requests rarely elicit responses, so much of the time, you're left to just wait, hope, and see. Also, a stunning amount of incompetence and disregard exists in this industry. Sometimes, that's bothersome, but then you remember that you're getting to watch and write about movies for a living and that makes the pain go away.

While it makes sense then not to start reviewing something until it's in your hands, the pressures of timeliness and unpredictability of introduction inspiration don't always make that the case.

There are times when ideas come to mind, beg to be put into Notepad or Wordpad and the prospect of us not getting our requested title seems far-fetched. And sometimes in these cases, our hope in a studio representative or public relations person proves to be misplaced. What happens to these thoughts? Nothing. They sit there on my computer's overcrowded desktop as a reminder of wasted time, anticipation turned disappointment, and incompetent PR types.

So, I thought, why not give these unpublished and barely-started reviews a real home on the Internet? Let you see what might have been had an assortment of parties not blown it. Keep in mind that this is not meant to embarrass the people who opted to send a review copy to someone else (perhaps a blog with a few dozen readers and no search engine presence) instead of us, but to give these thoughts a permanent home. We've even added spontaneous conclusions. Enjoy.

Mad About You: The Complete Fourth Season (June 2010)

Something about New York sitcoms really seemed to appeal to Sony's television department in the 1990s. Off the top of my head I can think of six half-hour Sony-distributed comedies set in the Big Apple that had part of their long runs in the 1990s. The best-known one, "Seinfeld", was produced by a separate company. But beyond that famous show about nothing, there was "Just Shoot Me!", "The Nanny", "The King of Queens", and the delightful "NewsRadio."
The sixth would be "Mad About You", a show I became pretty mad about a few years back while religiously catching nightly 12:30 AM reruns.

Like "Seinfeld" and many of the other hit sitcoms launched in the 1990s ("Home Improvement", "Everybody Loves Raymond", etc.), "Mad About You" was born out of a stand-up comedian. In this case, the comedian was Paul Reiser, Aliens sleazebag and one of "My Two Dads." With seasoned writer Danny Jacobson ("Soap", "Roseanne"), Reiser created this sitcom about a newly-married Manhattan couple. "Mad" debuted in 1992 and would run for seven seasons on NBC. Beginning its sophomore year, it joined original lead-in "Seinfeld" on Thursday nights as part of the peacock network's new "Must See TV" lineup. "Mad" would open the night for two seasons, cracking the Nielsen Top 20 as the lead-in to instant hit "Friends." Then NBC demoted it, shuffling it around and making part of "Must See TV Tuesday" with "NewsRadio", "Frasier", and "Just Shoot Me."

Although it was never one of TV's most talked about shows, "Mad About You" clearly held onto an audience. It wasn't just popular with viewers, but with award panels as well. Reiser and his on-screen wife Helen Hunt would become fixtures in the actor and actress categories of the Golden Globes and Emmys. Hunt was especially celebrated, winning the Outstanding Lead Comedy Actress Emmy in each of the show's final four seasons. It wasn't only the lead actors who gained notice; "Mad" drew attention for guest stars, sound mixing, directing, and overall comedy program.

"Mad About You" was one of the first sitcoms that Sony or any major studio put out on DVD. The Complete First Season was released in October 2002. So new was the concept that the studio squeezed 22 episodes on just two discs (to some picture quality complaints). The Second Season followed the next spring. Then, as is so often the case for so many popular retired sitcoms, there was a break. In 2005, Sony mixed things up with Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt Present The Mad About You Collection, a 4-disc set with bonus features including introductions and discussions by the two stars, who had hand-picked 21 of their favorite episodes. It was a solid set, but fans have often vocally shunned "Best of" DVDs, even when it seems to make sense, on shows that many may like but not love.

Two more years passed when Sony resumed chronological treatment with February 2007's The Complete Third Season DVD. More waiting followed and now, "Mad About You" has found a new distribution home in Shout! Factory. Shout! has earned a reputation for being able to do what larger studios seemingly cannot: turn a profit on shows that are popular but not exactly must-owns. Shout! has acquired many a TV title and succeeded with evident love and care. On "Mad", Shout! picks up where Sony left off, issuing The Complete Fourth Season set whose artwork and design is delectably consistent with the other studio's three prior sets.

Shout!'s love and care for its acquisitions evidently doesn't extend to its publicity department, who outright disregarded our request and another one we made a year ago.

Class Act (Warner Archive Collection) (May 2010)

You never really think of an act like Kid 'n Play getting old, so it boggles my mind to learn that the two men are in their late 40s today. It seems not so long ago that they were young and cool.

Kid 'n Play began their career as a rap duo in the mid-1980s. I couldn't tell you the names of any of their songs or even hum you one of their new jack swing beats. But I was certainly aware of the group by the early 1990s when they had become all-purpose youth icons. Kid, birth name Christopher Reid, was the light-skinned one with the tall flattop hairdo. (He had already abandoned that signature look when I met him at a Mets game and excitedly got an autograph some sixteen years ago this month.) Play, a.k.a. Christopher Martin, was the dark-skinned one with a short fade that at some point sprouted dreadlocks.

By 1992, the colorful hip-hop pair had released three albums (the first two of which were successful) and had received their own eponymous NBC Saturday morning cartoon and a Marvel comic book spin-off. I knew them best from their brief appearance in the musical finale to the delightful 1990 narrative-with-highlights video Michael Jordan's Playground (which apparently marked the debut of future 300 and Watchmen director Zack Snyder).

Kid 'n Play had also made the now-standard leap from rap to film acting, headlining a couple of R-rated comedies for growing franchise-friendly studio New Line Cinema. While no blockbusters, House Party and House Party 2 easily grossed enough to earn back their small budgets several times over.

Kid 'n Play's third film was the subject of this review, Class Act. This would be the duo's only PG-13 film and their only film outside the House Party franchise as star attractions. Although they reportedly signed a 3-picture deal at Warner Bros., this would appear to be the only thing that came to fruition there.

Class Act marks the feature debut of director Randall Miller, whose next film would be the criminally underrated Sinbad-Phil Hartman comedy classic Houseguest. By the end of the century, Miller had been relegated to helming TV movies and episodes, but he recently made something of a comeback in directing the well-regarded art house flicks Bottle Shock and Nobel Son, released back to back in 2008.

One of the few theatrically-released modern films that's remained missing on DVD, Class Act finally makes its debut in Warner Home Video's Archive Collection. Introduced last year, this made-on-demand program has earned mixed reviews from customers, but it has also enabled hundreds of otherwise-unavailable catalog titles to come to disc. Alas, they have done so with higher prices and lower standards than retail counterparts, generally as barebones DVD-Rs.

They're just DVD-Rs. Who cares?

Pirate Radio (April 2010)

Universal clearly had doubts about the commercial prospects of Pirate Radio. In the spring of 2009, the British comedy performed fairly modestly in its homeland considering its pedigree and local talent. For American release, the film was retitled, from The Boat That Rocked. It was re-edited, trimmed from 135 minutes to 116. And it was delayed, pushed back from late August to make a mid-November debut. It's impossible to know if the changes had any effect, positive or negative, on the film's stateside reception. But, its barely $8 million North American gross illustrated that the studio's concerns were warranted.

Pirate Radio is the second film directed by Richard Curtis, a writer whose television and big screen work is as familiar to American audiences as any British comedy of the past 25 years. Among Curtis' creations are Blackadder, Mr. Bean, and the Hugh Grant hits Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill.
No other recent British screenwriter has had anywhere near as much success as Curtis at penning films that play to the sensibilities of local and foreign audiences alike.

In his second directorial effort, Curtis opts for a canvas about as big as the one used on his much-lauded debut, Love Actually. Although delivering just two main narrative threads in its period setting of 1966, Pirate Radio nonetheless enlists a huge cast full of internationally recognized actors. Our main focus is on Carl (Tom Sturridge), a teenager expelled from his prep school who is sent to stay with his godfather Quentin (Bill Nighy). Perhaps that's not the wisest display of parenting, because Quentin is the captain of Radio Rock, the seabound vessel which illicitly provides the United Kingdom with the rock 'n roll music that British government has banned from the airwaves.

Inhabiting the ship and filling the pirate radio station's air is a colorful collection of personalities. Among them are an American DJ (Philip Seymour Hoffman)...

...further displays Curtis' evident appreciation for American culture (a big key to his global accessibility)

...most of the sampled songs postdate the chosen year setting

Reflecting the same kind of savvy decision-making that dismissed the most coveted audience of TV viewers, Universal opted not to send us the Pirate Radio DVD.