21 Jump Street – The Complete Fifth Season
Picture: C
Sound: C+ Extras: C- Episodes: B-
Though Johnny Depp was leaving 21 Jump Street for
its fifth and what turned out to be its final season, the 1990 – 1991
season. Richard Grieco actually joined
the cast as a sort of fill-in for Depp, only to leave himself before it was all
over. In what is the last show of the
fourth season called Blackout, it looks like producers held onto it for
the beginning of the fifth in some cases and even used Depp’s image on shows he
was no longer appearing in.
Another issue is that by this time, everyone was just too
old to be playing teenagers in school.
Instead of going out of there was to add new talents to continue the
show ala Law & Order, the producers held onto the old formula and
cast in a way that was a prescription for failure and the series ended
here. The Blackout show even
offers a storyline based loosely on an ugly New York City/Central Park attack
of a female jogger from Pittsburgh, PA that continues to make headlines, but it
is not able to address the situation seriously enough, which was another
problem with the show following a formula.
The full frame 1.33 X 1 image is again mixed, especially
from show to show, with image trouble off of tape sources that particularly
have noise and even bleeding color. The
old early TV stereo is available here in Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo when even Pro
Logic surround was still not common, and yet again these shows have no
surrounds to speak of. All the DVDs are
once again in slender cases, while Peter DeLuise does an audio commentary for
the later In The Name Of Love, episode, but that wraps up the release of
an entire series that propelled a TV network (Fox) and future movie star (Depp)
to new heights.
- Nicholas Sheffo
