Great news for everyone who missed the quickly sold out first set (and bad news for the guys who have been selling sets for a hundred bucks or more since), but Universal has brought out the combo pack The Classic Sci-Fi Ultimate Collection: Volumes 1 & 2. A slim $41 bucks, with free shipping, buys you ten uniformly fun classic sci-fi films, including several hard to get classics: Tarantula, The Mole People, The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Monolith Monsters, Monster on the Campus, Dr. Cyclops, Cult of the Cobra, The Land Unknown, The Deadly Mantis and The Leech Woman. Not bad for about $4 a flick.
Moreover, the fact that they didn’t release this around Halloween makes me hope that perhaps they have a third volume planned for later this year.
Meanwhile, member of the geezer crowd (like myself) will be glad to hear that the kiddie robot flick Tobor the Great is out. This played yearly on Family Classics on Channel 9 when I was a kid, so I have very fond memories of it. In case you were wondering, Tobor is robot spelled backwards. Meanwhile, and I never knew this, but the producers tried to squeeze a bit more juice out of their investment in the robot suite with a TV pilot. This is packaged by Alpha with some other ’50s TV obscurities under the title Here Comes Tobor And Other Lost Action Shows Of The 1950’s (Sea Divers / Captain Fathom / Counterspy).
TV shows offered this week include Drawn Together: Season #3; Lovejoy: Season #3; The Magnificent Seven: Complete Series; Mission Impossible: Season #4; and Two And A Half Men: Season #3.
However, the big TV set is the third season of Saturday Night Live.
On the film front:
Duck You Sucker! is a Sergio Leone western starring James Coburn.
The Magnificent Seven Collection offers all four films in the MS series at a bargain price. The first movie is an outright classic, of course, and the rest offer at least the opportunity to see Yul Brynner transform into George Kennedy.
The Secret Invasion is a well-regarded Roger Corman war drama starring Stewart Granger, Henry Silva, Mickey Rooney and Edd Byrnes. This is the sort of movie that’s been almost impossible to see over that years that you love to see hitting disc.
