SUPERMAN!! MARS!! HOMICIDE!! SHIELD!! EXPOSURE!! TUNES!! Herc's Season-Box DVD Vault!!

Bayliss: You never say "please." You never say "thank you." Pembleton: Please don't be an idiot. Thank you.
I am – Hercules!!

A big day for fans of Frank Pembleton, Tim Bayliss, Stan Bolander, Beau Felton, Steve Crosetti, John Munch, Meldrick Lewis, Kay Howard, Mike Kellerman, Paul Falsone, Laura Ballard, Stu Gharty, Terri Stivers, Megan Russert, Rene Sheppard, J.H. Brodie, Julianna Cox, George Barnfather, Ed Danvers and Mike & Al Giardello. Here’s what “Homicide: Life of the Street” costs you when you purchase each season separately: $50.99 The Complete First and Second Seasons $64.99 The Complete Third Season $89.99 The Complete Fourth Season $89.99 The Complete Fifth Season $81.72 The Complete Sixth Season $81.72 The Complete Seventh Season That adds up to $459.40 for seven seasons. But with Homicide: Life on the Street: The Complete Series, on sale today, you can get every minute of Pembleton yelling at criminals in “The Box” for just $191.61. That’s $27.38 per season. Which is way less.

Friends: The Complete Series Collection is a little bit cheaper than the “Friends” complete-series set that arrived a year ago, and it comes with a new 60-page book. If you buy the 10 season sets separately, they add up to $266.25 for every episode with of Courtney Cox, Jennifer Aniston and Paget Brewster cavorting in their tight city-girl outfits. This new 10-season collection is only $184.87, which works out to $18.49 per season. Plus Matthew Perry’s in it. He’s funny!

Six Feet Under is a stellar HBO show, masterminded by “American Beauty” screenwriter Alan Ball, about a very sexually active family running a Los Angeles funeral home. Buy its five seasons separately and you pay $285 and you don’t get the pretty new box. Buy Six Feet Under: The Complete Series and all 63 hour-long installments only run you $195.99.

Between 1930 and 1969, Warner Bros. released slightly more than 1,000 cartoon shorts to cinemas, and now Warner Bros. Home Entertainment keeps skimming the best of them into collections of 60. With the release of Looney Tunes: Golden Collection 4, Warners has released less than one quarter of those 1,000 shorts to DVD, so you know they’re not yet dipping into the crap. As usual, there are four themed discs containing 15 shorts each. The most exciting to my eyes is the third disc, devoted entirely to the amazing Frank Tashlin, whose work rivals even that of Bob Clampett and the latter-day Chuck Jones. The quantity of Tashlin’s Looney Tunes work is abbreviated due to his subsequent success as a prolific writer and director of live-action comedies, but whoever put his disc (Disc 2) together did a stellar job with the inclusion of: The Case of the Stuttering Pig Little Pancho Vanilla Little Beau Porky Now That Summer is Gone Porky in the North Woods You’re An Education Porky’s Railroad Plane Daffy Porky the Fireman Cracked Ice Puss N Booty I Got Plenty of Mutton Booby Hatched Porky’s Poultry Plant, and The Stupid Cupid Disc one is all Bugs Bunny: Roman Legion-Hare The Grey Hounded Hare Rabbit Hood Operation: Rabbit Knight-mare Hare Southern Fried Rabbit Mississippi Hare Hurdy-Gurdy Hare Forward March Hare Sahara Hare Barbary Coast Bunny To Hare is Human 8 Ball Bunny Knighty Knight Bugs, and Rabbit Romeo. Disc three contains 15 of Speedy Gonzales’ 43 shorts: Cat-tails For Two Tobasco Road Tortilla Flaps Mexicali Shmoes Here Today, Gone Tamale West of the Pesos Cannery Woe Pied Piper of Guadalupe Mexican Boarders Chili Weather A Message to Gracias Nuts and Volts Pancho’s Hideaway The Wild Chase, and A-Haunting We Will Go. The fourth and final disc is cat-centric: The Night Watchman Conrad the Sailor The Sour Puss The Aristo-Cat Dough Ray Me-ow Pissicato Pussycat Kiss Me Cat Cat Feud The Unexpected Pest Go Fly A Kit Kiddin’ the Kitten A Peck of Trouble Mouse and Garden Porky’s Poor Fish, and Swallow the Leader. There are also loads and load of extras, all of which are well-documented at this Amazon link. $45.49 and worth every penny. (As are the previous three Golden collections.)

“Lois & Clark,” candidly, was a show that took a long time to figure out what to do with itself, and I consider its fourth and final season the series’ most entertaining. This may be attributable in part to the fact that the show hired somebody funny, the great Tim Minear (“The X-Files,” “Angel,” “Firefly,” “Wonderfalls”), who is credited with scripting five of the final 22 episodes. Clark starts the season offworld, having been recruited by surviving Kryptonians to rule their new planet - only to discover that the evil and very miffed evil Kryptonian Nor is bent on taking over Earth. Then the title characters finally marry each other. Then H.G. Wells takes them back through time, 1950s “Adventures of Superman” vet Jack Larson plays an aged Jimmy Olsen (!), Lois is sentenced to death for murdering an informant, Antonio Sabato Jr. plays the assassin Deathstroke, Lois gets possessed by a ghost, Lois gets Perry’s job, Howie Mandel plays Mr. Mxyzptlk, Perry’s son comes to Metropolis carrying red Kryptonite, Lois is caught cheating on Clark with Superman, Fred Willard plays he U.S. president and the evil time-traveler Tempus beats him in an election, Clark swaps bodies with a villain, Kristanna Loken (“Terminator 3”) plays Jimmy’s girlfriend, the paper comes under new management, and Lex Luthor Jr. and The Toyman turn up. The season and the series end on a cliffhanger, with the title couple trying to figure out if they can produce viable offspring.

Speaking of Jack Larson’s Jimmy Olsen? The Adventures of Superman: The Complete Fifth and Sixth Seasons brings home the hit syndicated series’ last 26 episodes, all filmed in color in 1957 and 1958. No Brainiac, no Luthor, no Toyman, no Mxyzptlk. There are a great many gangsters. Lois and Jimmy get caught in a “disappearing town,” Lois and Jimmy are transported to Alaska via a phone line, criminals exploit a Martian who can “freeze” people, Jimmy invents an anti-gravity fluid, criminals get hold of an anti-memory vapor, a professor invents a Kryptonite ray, and a Kryptonite-powered robot menaces Metropolis. In the final episode, a dream sequence turns Lois and Jimmy into superpeople.

Only three mystery movies were produced for the sixth season of “Columbo,” so Universal Home Entertainment has wisely packaged it with the series’ 5-episode seventh season. The new 2-season set features William Shatner and Walter Koenig together in the sixth-season premiere, a 19-year-old Jamie Lee Curtis a full year before she would star in “Halloween,” a pre-“Porky’s” Kim Cattrall, Kenneth Mars, Celeste Holm, Ruth Gordon, G.D. Spradlin, Louis Jourdan and Trish Van Devere. “Columbo: The Conspirators,” directed by Leo Penn (father of Sean, Chris and Michael), aired May 13, 1978, as part of the “NBC Mystery Movie” wheel, and would mark the last time Peter Falk donned the raincoat for more than a decade. On Feb. 6, 1989, ABC revived the character by airing “Columbo Goes To The Guillotine.” Falk would play Columbo five times in 1989, six times in 1990, and three times in 1991. Since 1991 he has appeared in 10 more “Columbo” TV-movies, the most recent being 2003’s “Columbo Likes The Nightlife.” There’s no word yet as to whether Universal intends to package the lieutenant’s ABC years onto DVDs.

Northern Exposure: The Complete Fifth Season was not the last season for the show, but it was the last to end with New York physician Joel Fleishman still tending to the health of the Cicely citizenry. So it’s safe to buy it. Actually, fans will want to buy the sixth and final season as well, since it contains Fleishman’s strange exit, and a mere eight episodes were made subsequent to his departure.
Herc’s Popular Pricing Pantry!! CW?? It’s a done deal!!! Cheapest “Mars” Ever!! Both seasons!! $29.99 Each!!