I'm very pleased that we will soon be able to purchase a compete collection of all five seasons of Rocky & Bullwinkle. One of the reasons I am pleased is that I didn't buy the first four seasons as individual releases over the last few years.
Some who did are irate. They bought Season One and then they bought Season Two and then they bought Season Three and then they bought Season Four. They were looking forward to purchasing Season Five and completing their sets…but at the moment, they can't. There are apparently no current plans to release Season Five as a standalone item. Instead, it is only included in Rocky & Bullwinkle and Friends: The Complete Series, which is scheduled to ship on January 4th. You can advance order it right now for $66.
This, of course, presents a dilemma for those who love Moose and Squirrel so much that they bought the first four sets. If they bought them when they first came out, they paid around $20 each. If they waited for later discounts, they paid around $12 each. So these people have spent $48-$80 to get Seasons One through Four…and now they have to spring for $66 to get Season Five along with duplicates of what they already own. To make matters more confounding, they can't be certain that the company won't put Season Five out as an individual release later on. What should they do? I dunno and I'm glad I don't have that problem. It might help to keep in mind that most of these "complete" DVD sets are eventually crash-discounted as witness the Larry Sanders set I mentioned recently here.
(And I'd also like to point out that Amazon, for no discount whatsoever, is offering a package deal of Rocky & Bullwinkle and Friends: The Complete Series plus a copy of Season Three, which is included in the complete set. Wonder if anyone is dumb or inattentive enough to spring for that.)
The saving grace, of course, is that this is wonderful material that holds up very well. As I watch them today, I can't believe how sloppy some of the animation is…and how witty most of the scripts are. The voice work is especially brilliant — June Foray, Bill Scott, Paul Frees, William Conrad, Hans Conried, Daws Butler and just a couple of others. I'm definitely going to get a set of the whole thing. I just don't know when yet.