The Saint - Seasons 3 & 4 is a budget-priced repacking of episodes from the popular Roger Moore series, previously released by A&E way back in 2001. Now licensed to Timeless Media, there's more bang for the buck, though the masters are the same, rather old and not particularly impressive, and one would prefer to see the show's excellent production values shine on Blu-ray instead. (A few Saint episodes, along with other ITC shows, were released to Blu-ray in the UK under the Network label in several volumes, as retro-ACTION!.)

The program was internationally popular, second only to The Avengers among British shows, reportedly earning profits in excess of 350 million British Pounds for ITC. It also cemented Roger Moore's screen persona: suavely handsome, articulate and humorous. He almost certainly modeled that persona after David Niven, a close personal friend whom ...Read the entire review

The Protectors (1969-70) was a short-lived spoke in a "wheel" show of three alternating one-hour dramas, all produced by Universal Television and under the umbrella title The Bold Ones. (The most famous wheel series was undoubtedly The NBC Mystery Movie, another Universal franchise, which featured Columbo, McMillan & Wife, Quincy, M.E. and others.) The most successful Bold Ones was The New Doctors starring E.G. Marshall, David Hartman, and John Saxon, which ran four seasons. The Lawyers, with Burl Ives, Joseph Campanella, and James Farentino had a three-year run, and after The Protectors was cancelled The Senator, starring Hal Holbrook, replaced it. That series was critically lauded but lasted only eight episodes, two more than The Protectors.

All of the Bold Ones were adapted from earlier made-for-televisi...Read the entire review

It's unlikely anyone would rank even the best Gene Autry's singing cowboy movies alongside the genre's greatest works: Stagecoach, Red River, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Wild Bunch, etc. And yet 75 years ago Autry wasn't just the biggest of the B-Western stars, and much more than a mere franchise. Gene Autry was a downright industry. So popular were his modestly produced films for Republic Pictures that during the early 1940s Autry was a top Hollywood star, period. According to Box Office's annual poll, at that time he was bigger than Gary Cooper, James Cagney, Bing Crosby, Bette Davis, and Betty Grable, among others.

The major studios tried to woo Gene away from Republic but, perhaps realizing his strengths and weaknesses, never made anything but B-Westerns his entire career. When that genre petered out he made a fortune starring and producing ...Read the entire review

The Show:

Roger Moore is best known to film fans as the longest-running cinematic incarnation of Ian Fleming's James Bond (he was in 7 Bond flicks, which is one more than Connery -- unless you count Never Say Never Again), but he had already spent several years bringing another adventurous literary creation to life. For six seasons, from 1962 to 1969, Moore appeared on TV as Simon Templar, aka The Saint, a character originated in Leslie Charteris's novels and continued in radio, comics, the movies, and, of course, TV. Timeless Media/Shout! Factory is finally offering a DVD box set of all 118 hour-long episodes of the show, including all 71 black-and-white episod...Read the entire review

Science Fiction Theatre (1955-57) is largely forgotten today. The later, much superior Twilight Zone (1959-64) and The Outer Limits (1962-64) quickly eclipsed it. Compared to those series, Science Fiction Theatre seems awfully conservative and tame in its storytelling. But on its own terms it can be a very enjoyable show. Basically, Science Fiction Theatre had an entirely different approach compared to those later shows, telling stories that tried to incorporate honest-to-goodness science into its fiction. Though pegged as sci-fi, Twilight Zone and, most of the time, Outer Limits were really fantasy series. Filmed science fiction in the strictest sense is very rarely attempted, probably out of a fear that general audiences wouldn't be able to follow or even be interested in drama pivoting around genuinely scientific concepts. George Pal's Destination ...Read the entire review

Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-68) is a disarmingly charming and impressively elaborate puppet series produced by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson in their emblematic "Supermarionation" process. The Andersons did eight Supermarionation shows in all, from 1960-69, and in some respects Captain Scarlet is the best of these.

Lavishly produced for Lew Grade's ITC Entertainment, like all of the Andersons' later shows (and ITC's TV programs generally) Captain Scarlet has the polish of a big-budget feature film. Their shows were justly famous for their incredibly detailed and sometimes almost photo-real miniatures and other visual effects. These were supervised by Derek Meddings, who later worked on the Andersons' feature film Doppelgänger (aka Journey to the Far Side of the Sun, 1969), numerous James Bond films, as well as Superman (1978).

The Andersons starte...Read the entire review

Content:
"Every government has it's secret service branch. America, the CIA; France, Deuxieme Bureau; England, MI5; Even NATO has it's own. A messy job? Well that's when they usually call on me or someone like me. Oh yes, my name is Drake. John Drake." Starring Patrick McGoohan from the fan favorite series, The Prisoner, in the titular role of John Drake, comes Secret Agent AKA Danger Man: The Complete Series, a less edgy, James Bond/Roger Moore-esque take on the spy genre.

For those who don't know much about this series, I will give you a brief backstory. Before Patrick McGoohan assumed his most identified role as Number Six in the groundbreaking series, The Prisoner, a role that many fans assume is a continuation of this series, he starred on a British television as a secret agent named John Drake in Danger Man (also known as Secret Agent, the t...Read the entire review