The Twilight Zone - 'The 5th Dimension: Limited Ed. Gift Set' Combines '59 and '85 Shows on DVD

that sucks! it seems they can never get things right the first time...like how many times are they going to release this stuff?

 

There's nothing wrong with the complete series on Blu-ray - in fact, it's as good as a series set can get. As discussed, the problem with the combined set on DVD is that they used the 16x9 masters that they used for the great Blu-ray set.

 

guess that makes sense since nobody has a tube TV any more.

 

I'm up to Episode 80 now, and there have been several more episodes that were displayed full-frame.... anyone know the reason for the inconsistency in this set?

 

I didn't spend $200+ on this set at all.

 

and if you did and got enjoyment out of it on any TV it's worth every penny...since when does the TV make the movie or TV show? I've enjoyed many movies on tube TV most of my life...

 

Another minor quibble with this set...

The indexing of the 80's series episodes is inconsistent.... some episodes have the individual segments indexed separately, while others have the entire episode indexed as one long presentation. Kind of annoying.

 

Yet another one...

According to Wikipedia and IMDb, the 4th episode of Season 2 of the 80's series is supposed to contain 3 segments: "The After Hours / Lost and Found / The World Next Door"... followed by episode 5, "The Toys of Caliban".
However, in this set, episode 4 is only comprised of "The After Hours / Lost and Found", while "The World Next Door" has become its own separate episode... effectively becoming episode 5, and causing "The Toys of Caliban" to become episode 6, and so on.... WTF? Anyone know why this was done?

 

What about the sci fi OL with Natasha Henstridge?

 

The second season of THE NEW TWILIGHT ZONE was a jumble of scheduling and formats. As I recall, the second season started as hour-long shows with several stories within the hour. It was quickly removed from the schedule due to falling ratings, and then returned in a half-hour format. It ran that way into the spring, and then was removed again. It came back in the summer as they burned off the remaining episodes.

CBS canceled the show from its network, but put the series into first-run syndication for its third year. This was done to boost the number of episodes for later syndication. The third season was all half-hours, and then for syndication all of the earlier first and second season episodes were re-edited down to half-hours and had the narration redone by Robin Ward instead of Charles Aidman to make the series consistent.

I believe that the fourth episode of the second season once aired as an hour show, but all that remained when the DVD set was put together were the half-hour iterations, which accounts for the fact that the DVD has these separated. (Notice that these episodes are both in mono). I'm of the opinion that that Image did the best it could in putting together the '80s series onto DVD.

By the way, if you attempt to watch the '80s series on DVD (on a Blu-ray player) and notice any jerky motion artifacts, check your players 24p output and set it to "Off". The show will look smoother that way.

Harry

 

Well, I finally made it..... 225 episodes and over 112 hours of total viewing time later, I'm finally finished watching this entire set! And it only took me 5 months!

This was by far the biggest DVD box set I've ever tackled.... (the previous record-holder was the complete Outer Limits box, which was about 42 hours in total).

 

Last week Koch Media here in Germany issued the first box set of the 80s TZ on DVD, after they already released those amazing looking five BD-Sets of the original TZ series before. But this new 80s box set looks really terrible; I would say, it´s the worst looking set I have ever seen put out on DVD. Is the remaining material of this show really so poor, that this is the best you can get from those tapes ?

 

YES, it seems so. I have all the 80's TZ and they all suck...the 90's series with Forrest Whitaker hosting looks better and I enjoyed them as most ppl love to hate them.

 

The '80s TZ were originally filmed, but post-processing was done in the video realm, meaning the best that exists is those old videotape masters. Like anything that was done on old videotape, it cannot be made into anything resembling high definition, unless the studio spends a ton, finds the old film masters or negatives, and then re-composites the special effects, titles, etc., in the high def realm, as was done for STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION.

CBS spent a fortune recompositing that series and couldn't sell enough to justify the expense, so it's unlikely that the less-well-known TWILIGHT ZONE from the '80s will ever see such treatment, unfortunately.

 

Sad. ST:TNG looks just stunning after their HD restoration. Dreadful to know, that the 80s TZ could look anything like that, if the money for the restoration would be spend to get it done right. Shouldn´t the 80s TZ not be much less expensive, because there shouldn´t be as many visual effects in it as in ST:TNG ?