I do so love a nice ripe grassy-knoll theory.
Once Cinetrix catches a whiff of her smelling salts, she’ll be pleased to hear the latest DVD release info, courtesy of DVD Journal. Out today, as regular readers of this blog already know, is The Rules of the Game, the greatest movie ever made, on DVD at last. I’ll be writing about it as soon as my copy arrives.
In the nonce, here’s a snippet of news guaranteed to give Our Girl fits de joie:
Finally, the cult favorite TV series Freaks and Geeks is about to go digital, thanks to new DVD vendor Shout! Factory and DreamWorks Television. The six-disc set of the first (and only) season will include all 18 episodes, including three that never aired, and we are assured that some complicated music-licensing issues have been smoothed out (congrats to fans, by the way, who compiled nearly 40,000 online signatures to make this release a reality). Expect a “director’s cut” of the pilot episode, deleted scenes, outtakes, and — get this — 28 commentary tracks from practically everybody ever associated with the series. Geek out on April 6.
As it happens, I wrote about Freaks and Geeks for the New York Times a few years ago. Here’s the piece.
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Old sitcoms never die–they just move to cable, where they surface at odd intervals forevermore. The nice thing about this two-tiered system of programming is that it occasionally allows those of us who don’t live on the cutting edge of popular culture to catch up with how the hipper half lives. So I paid attention when my friend Laura, a graduate student who specializes in Victorian literature but also keeps close tabs on the doings of people like P.J. Harvey and Conan O’Brian, called to tell me that the Fox Family Channel was rerunning two episodes of “Freaks and Geeks” back to back every Tuesday night at eight and nine, and that I absolutely had to tune in.
“Freaks and Geeks” is an hour-long comedy about life among the less popular students of a Michigan high school circa 1980. Created by Paul Feig and produced by Judd Apatow, it debuted on NBC in the fall of 1999. The critics loved it, the public ignored it, and the show was scuttled midway through its first season, with three episodes still waiting to be broadcast (they have since aired on Fox, and Feig and Apatow have gone on to create “Undeclared,” a new college comedy scheduled to debut on the main Fox network this fall). I never saw it, but Laura assured me that not only was it a great show, it was also eerily true to life. “That was exactly what it was like for me back then,” she said.
I tuned in, fell in love, told all my other friends how good it was, and promptly discovered that just about everyone I know who was going to high school in 1980 loved “Freaks and Geeks,” too, and that their lives had also been exactly like that. Fortunately, you don’t have to be under 40 to appreciate the show’s sharp-eyed social humor. Most of the character types will be perfectly recognizable to viewers who, like me, attended high school in the