Anyone here see the infomercial for the Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts and order them? They are allegedly available on DVD, but I checked their website and they don't mention it. The infomercial shows some great clips of people I watched as I was growing up. Unfortunately, they seem to be only available on a "subscription" basis. I suppose that is OK, but I prefer to just buy them on demand. Anyway, I know there are a lot of "Classic TV" fans here, including Steve, and wondered if anyone has tried them and what they thought, quality-wise.
The quality of the VHS tapes sucks. The video is awful and the audio goes from objectionable to horrific. Still... they're funny as hell (even if it's canned laughter and there's no audience) and Foster Brooks is always a highlight for me.
Looks like they're doing the same with Dino's old variety show as well. I saw an infomercial for a series of compilation tapes over the weekend. No DVD apparently at this point.
There *was* an audience there, although there's no doubt the audio was sweetened with canned laughter. These are great, though the VHS tapes suck. A great memory from childhood for me!
The infomercial video looks pretty clean. I guess I will order the DVDs and see what happens. I'll let you know.
http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/news/Dean-Martin-Complete-Collection-Limited-Edition/19021 Too rich for my blood, but thought I'd pass it along.
Damn, I was at a flea market years ago and someone had a whole table full of boxes of sealed 3-pack VHS copies of these various roasts. Price? $1 each for a 3 tape set. I grabbed like 10 of them... I'm sure a lot of people of the generation before mine would love to see these shows again but I don't know anybody these days in that age bracket (or my own, frankly) who has $250 to drop on something like this. That's a lot of scratch for something that's admittedly cool but also has a pretty low replay value.
I picked up at Costco today a 15 episode, seven disc set called Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts, which is probably plenty for most people. At $27.99, a great alternative to the $250 version. A nice book accompanies it. Includes roasts of Johnny Carson, Lucille Ball, Don Rickles, Jimmy Stewart, Bob Hope, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jack Benny, Michael Landon, Jackie Gleason, Carroll O Connor and a lot of interesting guests including John Wayne, George Burns, Art Carney, Bette Davis, Audrey Meadows, and lots more. Will watch one tonight!
I'd like to see these but yeah, $250 is waaay too steep. I wish MeTV or a similar channel would air them, that would be ideal.
I watched my first episode on the DVD I mentioned above. Great quality video for how old it is. Fun to see all those actors but the women seemed to only be allowed a couple jokes and then back to their seat. Vivian Vance was there for Lucy and she only said a couple jokes, which were great ("I bet you don't even remember me") she said to Lucy! Appeared Dean got drinker as the show progressed as his speech began to slur as it went on. I think this is definitely worth having, but I wouldn't be able to watch these in any kind of marathon dosage! A little goes a ways, but an episode at a time is about right. I can't imagine buying the $250 set and then sitting through that, but it seems beautifully packaged!
I was watching these the other morning on Decades. The star power is amazing but it’s hard to get by the dubbed in crowd applause ( why all the whistling? ) and the phony reaction shots. I’d love to see these without all that. Impossible I know.
I watched quite a bit of the Decades marathon a few weekends ago. Today I think I was able to record most of the episodes I missed. Much easier getting used to phony applause.
I'm way out of range for WABI, alas, and almost none of the diginets are available OTT. Also, most of the affiliates that carried Decades dropped it for Start TV, a joint venture between CBS and Weigel.
I am old enough to remember watching them back in the day. All those 'stars" at one time for the most part. Rickles was great. And Dean Martin.
Dean's "bio " (alternately loved and hated here) really pulls the curtain back on those. Not surprising.
