Ironside: Season 1 [8 Discs] [DVD]

All 28 original episodes as well as the made-for-TV movie that started it all, in an action-packed eight-disc DVD box set.

This reviewer had forgotten how fine a piece of work the movie-length pilot for Ironside was, until he saw it again as part of Shout Factory's 8-DVD set of the complete first season of the series. Indeed, the pilot film is so good that it should be a significant factor in helping one decide to buy it, because director James Goldstone turned in something very special. The film-to-video transfer on it, and also on the series that followed, is first-rate, at least as far as it goes. But that also brings us to the important caveat about this set -- it appears that some of these episodes, including "A Leaf In The Forest" and "An Inside Job" are cut fairly severely -- the running times on the latter are a good two-to-three minutes shorter than the 50 minutes' running time of the shows that surround them (and there are credits for characters in the first of those two shows -- including one played by John Rubinstein -- that we never see); so it appears that Universal never saved unedited negatives of some of these shows; additionally, it is entirely possible that all of the episodes here are missing something, as the standard running time on hour-long series from that era was 51-52 minutes, and nothing here runs longer than slightly under 50 minutes. This appears to be a growing problem with the series that have begun turning up on DVD in the last couple of years, as producers and distributors scramble to find unedited source materials that are long since missing. Each disc opens automatically to a simple, straightforward single-layer menu, and the episodes get a standard six chapters, coinciding with commercial breaks and credits. The sound is excellent, giving great play to Quincy Jones' theme music, and the full-screen (1.33-to-1) images are crisp and detailed, even in the edited episodes. The only annoyance in Shout Factory's work is the prelude to the menu on the first disc, with promotional clips for the company's other offerings, such as That Girl, which can be skipped over with a touch of the "menu" button.