The old Karl Kolchak: The Nightstalker: DVD on 10/4/05

[Blarg]

Woohoo! The great old Carl Kolchak: The Nightstalker t.v. show is being released as a 3-disk set from Universal this October 4!

This horror of the week show was equally witty and silly, but what really shone was the character and acting of Darren McGavin as the rumpled reporter with the porkpie hat and his interplay with his exasperated and ever-on-the-boil editor, Simon Oakland. These guys had a lot of fun with the parts and really made the show a joy to watch.

McGavin's reactions in some of the episodes were priceless, including a "closet escape scene" in one of the dual pilots that still stands out for me as a horror, comedy, and just general t.v. high. He had a thankless job, being a crusading reporter trying to reveal to the imperiled, unwitting public some truly assinine theories about local crimes being committed by monsters, while trying not to get killed by them, fired by his editor too many times, and remain relatively un-punched out by the local police. Clumsy, deceitful, ingratiating, sarcastic, yet improbably earnest, McGavin created a character everyone fell in love with and which is still very fondly remembered some three decades later.

The episodes toward the end of the season weakened, and for some time after the series was cancelled, episodes were arbitrarily cut together to try to expand them into single movies which alternated the story between the two episodes at a time as they ran -- a bizarre butchery revealing network thinking at its finest. DVD's were released with the ending chopped off of one of the pilots, an absolutely brilliant and terribly sad ending with Carol Lynley, gutting the episode of some of its surprising power and pathos -- after all, this was a lighthearted series. This series has, in short, been handled badly, mangled really, after its demise by people who should have known better.

Nevertheless, The Nightstalker still retained tremendous goodwill among its fans, many of whom paid ridiculous prices for even the worst of the few DVD's made from the butchered pilots. I'd watch Darren McGavin do anything, because of how great he was in this series.

Welcome back Kolchak! I strongly recommend this series, and hope Universal, which tends to do things on the cheap, doesn't screw it up.

Here's the link at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...d&n=507846

Here's the link for Overstock.com, where it's a couple bucks more expensive:
http://www.overstock.com/cgi-bin/d2....rod_id=1626944

BY THE WAY -- Please do not get your idea of this classic series from the pilot remake of it airing tonight on network t.v. This is being done by the creator of the X-Files and from a review I've read, sounds very similar in tone and emphasis to the X-Files rather than the original show. From the looks of the pretty boy they got to play rumpled old Carl, I'd tend to agree.