Mill Creek Western DVD Wave – Spring 2009 (Gun
Justice with The Lone Ranger/Billy
The Kid/Guns Of The West/John Wayne – The Ultimate Collection/The Way West)
Picture:
C Sound: C Extras: D Films: C+
Making
certain there is a variety of older product in the Western genre on the market,
Mill Creek Entertainment is releasing five such DVD sets at the same time and
are good if you want quantity and some quality.
Gun Justice with The Lone Ranger has 4 DVDs, but only the first
two are Lone Ranger material. This
includes 17 episodes of the series and the 1938 movie serial that are all not
bad. DVD 3 has a few episodes each of Cisco Kid, The Gabby Hayes Show and Adventures
Of Kit Carson, while DVD 4 has episodes of The Roy Rogers Show, Annie
Oakley, Judge Roy Bean and Cowboy G-Men.
Billy The Kid
is a 4 DVD set you can split into two sets of B-movies; those starring Buster
Crabbe and those starring Bob Steele.
The 20 films average about an hour each and are more about the legend
than anything else.
Guns Of The West is a 24 DVD/100 B-movies that
includes Tex Ritter, Clayton Moore, Johnny Mack Brown, Harry Carey, Roy Rogers,
Buster Crabbe and even more lesser-known names in a collection for diehards or
those who want to see a ton of such programmers averaging about an hour
each. The Way West is a 12 DVD set with 50 B-movies that continues in the
same mode.
John Wayne – The Ultimate
Collection is a
presumptuous title considering there are only 4 DVDs, they all have B-movies he
made in black & white from the 1930s for the most part and has 80 minutes
of trailers. In keeping with the
bombastic title, we will not consider the trailers extras. It is still not bad.
All have
1.33 X 1 aspect ratios, most in black and white, some in color as well as some
a few generations down where image is missing on all four sides. Also, many are TV prints with original
credits masked or replaced by other, later credits. Some prints look good, while others are from
video copies, a few generations off and even outright video copies with
aliasing errors. There are no extras in
any set.
- Nicholas Sheffo
