Family Guy Peter Griffin Vs. The Giant Chicken

I was browsing through FYE back in late January and I ran across what appeared to be a FYE exclusive.  It was a DVD with all three of the Family Guy episodes that featured Peter Griffin fighting the giant chicken.  I have watched Family Guy, but I am not a rabid fan by any stretch.  At the same time, I am not a rabid anti-Family Guy person either.  I think it’s funny, but not as drop dead funny as Robot Chicken or Frisky Dingo.  On average I like South Park better than Family Guy, but there are episodes of Family Guy that I like better than certain episodes of South Park.  That being said, I own all of the Family Guy season sets as well as Blue Harvest and Stewie Griffin. 

Of the three episodes on the chicken trilogy disc, I had only seen one, the middle one.  The first episode on the disc was Da Boom.  Peter is out picking stuff up for a millenium party when he is warned about Y2K and how it would be the end of the world.  Naturally he overreacts and converts his basement into a fallout shelter to protect him and his family from the upcoming apocalypse.  When the clock strikes midnight, all of a sudden Peter is proven right.  Planes fall out of the sky, nuclear missiles launch, the world comes to an end.  Peter and his family now have to deal with the post apocalyptic world and their mutated friends (and eventually family).  The first chicken fight takes place during Peter’s early shopping trip as he explains to a man in a chicken suit why he never accepts coupons from chickens.  Apparently the giant chicken had given Peter an expired coupon and that started their city spanning fight with Peter punching and the chicken pecking until Peter appears triumphant and walks away.  The episode ends with a very special twist ending featuring live action actors from another famous series.

The second episode, Blind Ambition, finds Peter trying to do something that he can be publicly recognized for.  All of his buddies have some sort of award or press accolades, and Peter wants that too.  He ends up deciding to go for a world’s record, but choosing one that causes him to go blind (eating nickels).  This time the chicken ambushes Peter as he is standing on the sidewalk talking to his neighbors.  The fight gets more outlandish, culminating in a Raiders of the Lost Ark spoof with an airplane.

The final episode, No Chris Left Behind, concerns Chris getting kicked out of school in order for the school to improve its standings and receive funds for No Child Left Behind.  Lois talks to her father and he gets Chris accepted at a posh private school for the rich.  Once again the chicken appears out of nowhere and he and Peter are at it again, but this time they end up talking and decide that they don’t really recall why exactly it is that they are fighting.  They shake hands and end up going out to dinner with the wife of the giant chicken at an out-of-the-way restaurant.  The meal goes great, but when it is time to pick up the check, they begin to argue about who gets to pay for the meal.  This leads to another fight and once more Peter walks away the winner.

There aren’t any bonus features as this was done mainly as a promotional item.  All three episodes are enjoyable with Da Boom probably being my favorite.  However if you judge them solely on the chicken fights, No Chris Left Behind probably takes the prize.  Family Guy is a staple of Adult Swim which is about the closest thing we currently have to Night Flight.  So on the Night Flight scale Da Boom gets a 9, Blind Ambition gets an 8 and No Chris Left Behind gets an 8 1/2.  Overall, I would rate the DVD as 3 stars.

Dead Alive

Dead Alive had been recommended to me by several people.  People that knew I liked zombie movies said I would love it.  People that knew I liked gore films said I would love it.  There were two factors that kept me from watching it sooner.  This was an early Peter Jackson film and I had been severely disappointed in both Bad Taste and Meet The Feebles.  I was afraid this might be another let down.  The second reason was that there were so many different versions of the film and two different titles.  I wanted to make sure I saw the best version of the film.  The DVD that I purchased was the unrated 97 minute version from Tri-Mark.  I found it at Wills one time and couldn’t pass it up.  There is also a 104 minute version available on foreign cuts of the disc under the Braindead title.

The thing that struck me while watching the film was the fact that it is also a very funny film.  It reminded me of Sam Raimi in many ways although I actually think Dead Alive is funnier than Raimi’s Evil Dead movies.  It actually may not be that it is funnier, but it goes so dark and over the top with the gore that you have to laugh.  The luncheon scene where Mother eats her ear after it falls into her custard is perfectly sick, twisted and hilarious.  It is also one of many such scenes.

The plot of Dead Alive involves a young man with a controlling mother.  When he sneaks out on a date, she follows and is accidentally bitten by a Sumatran rat monkey.  The rat monkey’s bite apparently causes the person that gets bitten to die and yet remain alive.  Of course they become as evil as the rat monkey and feel the need to bite and chew on other people as well.  Mother starts by killing her nurse and converting her.  Later a gang of young thugs become zombie fodder as does a priest with karate skills that would make Bruce Lee smile in appreciation.  In order to take care of his mother, Lionel, the young man, takes them all home and feeds them food laced with tranquilizer.  Of course as the number of undead keeps growing, Lionel’s job gets harder and harder.  Eventually all hell breaks loose and Lionel, his girlfriend and a few others are forced to do battle with a house full of zombies.  When the humans get outnumbered, that’s when Lionel straps on the lawn mower.

Dead Alive is one of the bloodiest films of all time.  People are bitten, chopped up, cut in half, ripped apart, pureed in blenders, impaled on various items, and ran through a ringer washer, and the blood keeps flowing.  One character is cut in half and as his top half fights with Lionel in a bathtub, its guts pour out onto the floor.  When the head and shoulders get trapped in the toilet, the intestines start snaking around and grabbing at Lionel as well.

I loved this film.  In Jackson’s earlier films I found little bits and pieces that I liked, but I was never satisfied with how they came together.  In this film, the pieces came together and created a bloody fun ride.  It still amazes me that with only these 3 films as well as The Frighteners and Heavenly Creatures under his belt, that New Line chose to offer the Lord of the Rings films to Peter Jackson.  It is also amazing the leap that Jackson made as a director in these films.  I enjoy Raimi’s films, but even his big studio films have the feel of his early independents.  Jackson’s later films seem completely removed from his earlier gonzo horror humor in style and look. 

The Tri-Mark disc offers only the theatrical trailer and an Easter egg of the trailer for Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers as bonus features.  The trailer shows several bits of the final zombie rampage, but not the final rooftop confrontation.  I give it a 7 on the Quarantine scale.

As for the movie itself, I give it 3 1/2 bloody gory stars.  If you watch the movie, keep your eyes peeled for a cameo by Forrest J Ackerman in the zoo scene.

Funny Face

Many years ago I went to the WV Cultural Center for a free screening of An American In Paris.  They were playing a bunch of Oscar winners and as a film lover, I wanted to see them if possible.  I was incredibly disappointed in the film.  It was more of a “dance recital” with limited plotting than what I would call a movie.  I have often thought that I need to re-view the film with nearly 30 years of life experiences added on and see if my opinion has changed.  After watching Funny Face, I’m not sure that it would.

Funny Face was one of the films I decided I needed to see after watching My Fair Lady last month.  I didn’t know the name of it, but I knew it had Audrey Hepburn and she did a dance in a tight black outfit.  The dance had been featured in an ad a couple years back for The Gap and stuck in my mind.  I was in Big Lots on Friday and in the new stick they had received were two different versions of Funny Face.  One was labeled as part of the Fred Astaire or Audrey Hepburn collection, while the other was the 50th Anniversary Edition.  The cover on the 50th Anniversary Edition featured a picture of Audrey in the skinny black pants.  Surprisingly, Fred Astaire is barely mentioned on the DVD cover and only a tiny full body side shot of him as his Dick Avery character is featured on the cover.

The plot to Funny Face is very simple and versions of the same story have been told for decades.  A bookish girl is transformed into a gorgeous model, falls in love, and changes the life of the man who changes her life.  The thread bare plot is wrapped around several Gershwin songs and (as in the case of An American in Paris) several dance numbers.  Obviously Fred Astaire is a marvelous dancer and Hepburn is wonderful as well, but it just made the movie seem like less of a film to me.  I enjoy a good musical, but the musical numbers here seem secondary to the dance sequences.  I did enjoy the number (Clap Yo’ Hands) that Astaire and Kay Thompson perform at the professor’s party and the Bonjour, Paris! number functions as a song and dance number as well as a travelogue of Paris.  Never the less, the songs and dancing didn’t seem as integrated into the movie as the ones in My Fair Lady for example.

Funny Face is also one of those films where the look of the film is incredibly important.  It reminded me of the early Image comic books where the art is gorgeous, but the writing is not on the same level or even Kubrick’s 2001 where the visuals over shadow the story.  The colors are so vivid and the imagery so striking, that there is no mistaking this film with any other, but as I said earlier, the story line is formulaic.

One other issue I had with Funny Face had to do with Fred Astaire as the leading man and love interest.  While he shows a touch of comedic charm in several scenes, I just had a hard time buying him as the romantic leading man.  Astaire looks to me more like the creepy uncle in a lot of his scenes.

The DVD has several bonus featurettes.  One featurette covers the fashions, one covers Paris and one covers Paramount films of the 50s.  All three were decent, but not eye-opening.  There is not a lot of information on the making of the film in any of the featurettes. The DVD also features the trailer, which shows the end of the movie, thus earning a 9 1/2 on the Quarantine scale. 

The movie itself gets a 2 1/2.  The songs were fine.  Audrey Hepburn was gorgeous.  The art direction and cinematography were top-notch.  Kay Thompson was incredibly entertaining.  But there needed to be a better story holding it all together.

The Mummy’s Curse

After several days straight of Happy Tree Friends, I decided on Saturday to catch the fifth Universal Mummy movie.  After Universal released the classic monster movies on DVD, they released a batch of the sequels in themed double feature DVDs.  I rushed to FYE when they came out and purchased all 6 of them.  There were two Mummy double features released.  One contained The Mummy’s Hand and The Mummy’s Tomb.  The other one contained The Mummy’s Ghost and The Mummy’s Curse.  Later they ended up releasing all 5 of the Mummy movies together on the second batch of the 2 disc Legacy Collection DVDs.

I knew I hadn’t seen all of the Mummy movies, but I wasn’t sure which ones I had seen as about all I could remember was how the Mummy got killed.  Although I would have figured that I had seen The Mummy’s Curse, surprisingly I didn’t remember it, and it may have been one of the films I hadn’t seen.

The final Lon Chaney Kharis movie takes place in Cajun country where a swamp drainage project has apparently unearthed the Mummy.  A pair of men from the Scripps Museum show up to claim the mummy and his bride from the swamp, but it appears that Kharis may no longer be confined to the swamp as people start turning up dead.  It turns out that one of the museum men may have an ulterior motive as well since he is a member of the Egyptian sect that has been bringing Kharis back to carry out his revenge and find the princess. 

I was pleased to finally get to see this entry in the Mummy series, and actually enjoyed it slightly more than the previous entry.  I still find it hard to believe that the people have such a difficult time escaping from this mummy considering how slow he is.  I give this one 2 1/2 stars

The disc did contain several static bonus features and the theatrical trailer.  The trailer shows parts of the final struggle earning it an 8 1/2 on the Quarantine scale.

Happy Tree Friends Blood Sample AB

Friday I planned to sit down with a normal movie on DVD, but the wife and I decided to go out and I discovered that Big Lots had gotten in a fresh selection of $3 DVDs from Paramount.  I didn’t find the classics from the 30s that I tended to find in their Warner Bros. overstock sales, but I did find quite a few from the 70s and 80s (and a few from earlier as well).  By the time I got through looking through the DVDs and taking care of a couple of other things around the house, it was 10 PM.  Normally this wouldn’t be a problem on a Friday, but I had promised to take my wife to work and pick up my daughter from her sleep over early on Saturday morning.  It was time to pull out the last of the Happy Tree Friends Blood Samples. 

The final of the 4 volumes has a cover with Giggles on it, a safety pin poking through her eyeball.  The cartoons on the disc include Eyes Cold Lemonade; where Petunia and Giggles open a lemonade stand and both get mutilated by a wooden sign that is not securely nailed in place, You’re Bakin’ Me Crazy has Giggles as a cookie selling scout that catches Lumpy at the wrong time (he’s cooking, ironing and wearing a towel that likes to slide off), Hide And Seek with Flippy flipping out to the sound of a woodpecker and killing the friends that are hiding, Let It Slide which features the gang at a water park, Housewarming; where Handy builds Petunia a tree house that bursts into flames, and Out On A Limb in which lumberjack Lumpy gets his leg trapped under a tree he has felled and must cut the leg off using only a spoon.

The smoochies this time are Giggles and Toothy, while the kringle has the group caroling and getting impaled by a falling icicle.  Like the previous three volumes, the humor you find in these cartoons will depend on your own sense of humor.  I love them and give this volume another 10 on the Night Flight scale.  And for the record, Eyes Cold Lemonade probably takes my vote as the grossest of the videos in the four volumes.  There is just something about a blind squirrel or chipmunk or whatever Giggles is supposed to be, slicing an eyeball in half, running it over a juicer, pouring off a glass of the bloody liquid that she thinks should be lemonade, and then drinking it, that  ranks as pretty darn stomach churning.  The fact that she adds sugar and ice before cutting off a round to hang over the rim of the glass like a lemon wedge just completes the gross out factor.  It makes the injury to the eye scene in Zombie look tame.

Happy Tree Friends Blood Sample O+

This week turned into a Happy Tree Friends week due to numerous time constraint factors.  Thursday night I needed something to fit in between Community and 30 Rock.  I decided on another Blood Sample mini disc and plopped in O+ with the cover featuring Shifty and Lifty the raccoon bandits.  The disc has the same make-up as the other discs; 6 cartoons, 2 smoochies, 1 kringle and 3 bonus features.

The cartoons on this disc include Wheelin’ And Dealin’; where Lifty and Shifty enter a race and steal parts of the other cars causing them to crash and kill their drivers, Milkin’ It; where Lifty and Shifty steal a cow in a hot air balloon and have to milk her down to skin and bones to keep from hitting a power line, Crazy Antics; where Sniffles tries to eat the inhabitants of an ant hill but ends up getting his tongue nailed to the table and torture inflicted upon him, It’s A Snap; where Lumpy has gotten caught in several bear traps trying to get some cheese, Shard At Work; where Handy tries to change a light bulb only to have it shatter in his mouth, and Icy You; where Nutty over indulges on slushee straight from the tap.

The smoochies feature Pop and Petunia, while the kringle has Cub playing with his Christmas toy electric train to catastrophic results.

Not a bad entry in the series and still a 10 on the Night Flight scale, this may have been one of the weaker entries in the Blood Sample collection.

Happy Tree Friends Blood Sample B

My daughter needed me to take her to a sleepover on Wednesday and the DVR was screaming for me to clear some space before Thursday night when Community, Parks & Recreation, The Office, 30 Rock, Archer and Project Runway all go looking for space to get recorded.  I needed something incredibly short, so it was back to the mini disc Happy Tree Friend Blood Samples. 

The second one in the series features Cuddles on the cover with one of his bunny ears chopped off.  As I mentioned in my review of Blood Sample A-, the Happy Tree Friends are like Care Bears or My Little Pony if they were written and directed by Quentin Tarantino and Takashi Miike.  They are extremely graphic and extremely violent.  They are also extremely funny if you have a twisted sense of humor.

The second volume features 6 cartoons, 2 smoochies, a kringle and some other bonuses.  The cartoons on this disc include Spin Fun Knowin’ Ya in which the little critters learn the dangers of asking Lumpy to spin the merry-go-round faster.  Class Act is a Christmas themed episode with the gang putting on a school Christmas play that ends with blood, gore, dismemberment and the school burning down and blowing up.  Chip Off The Ol’ Block has Pop and Cub mowing the grass.  Pop is dozing in the hammock as Cub pushes the mower.  When the little guy gets the blade stuck on a brick he reaches under to remove the obstruction.  Pop wakes up just in time to save his boy and take over the mowing.  Unfortunately Pop decides to run the mower over a pile of broken glass and syringes which get shot out the side of the mower hurling toward little Cub.  It’s a Happy Tree Friends cartoon.  These things never end well for the little animals.

Rounding out the cartoons are the two part Happy Trails featuring Lumpy as the bus driver on a trip that goes from bad to stranded on a deserted island patrolled by a hungry shark.  Keepin It Reel features the Tree Friends enjoying a movie until a strobing effect sends Flippy into a wartime flashback. 

The smoochies feature Cuddles and Sniffles.  Cuddles comes with three options that involve taking care of the little rabbit.  Sniffles allows you to give one of three objects to the brainy little aardvark.  The kringle has Lumpy skiing and impaling two of the tree friends on his skis.  The cheery holiday message: Hope I Run Into You This Season.

Another great collection of the Happy Tree Friends that easily rates a 10 on the Night Flight scale.

The Mummy’s Ghost

As a kid I always enjoyed the Mummy movies.  I think there were several reasons for this.  For one thing Chiller seemed to play the various Mummy sequels with greater frequency than it did the various Dracula and Frankenstein sequels.  I think another reason might have had something to do with the fact that of all the monsters, he seemed the easiest to evade and to destroy.  For this reason he was a less threatening monster than say the Wolfman.  Throw in the fact that there were 4 Mummy sequels and you have another pretty good reason why the Mummy popped up more than the Creature with only 2 sequels to his name, and by popping up more, I saw more of him.

I must confess, I have a difficult time trying to tell the various Mummy movies apart.  The plots seemed to all be fairly similar with the big difference being the method in which the mummy was destroyed in each film.  I remembered one where he burnt up and I remembered one where he walked into the swamp and sank.  I needed a short movie and so I decided to put on the second Mummy Double Feature from the Universal Monsters collection of several years ago.  I had initially planned to watch the original The Mummy, but I couldn’t get to the Universal Monsters box set and didn’t feel like opening up the Mummy Legacy edition yet.  So I popped in the disc and started the first of the two films (the third of the Universal Mummy movies), The Mummy’s Ghost. 

The film opens with a couple of Egyptian priests discussing Kharis and Ananka.  This flows into a professor discussing Kharis with his class and describing the events of the previous film where Kharis was burnt up at the Banning house.  They discuss how he was brought to life and controlled using tana leaves.  The professor reveals that he has the remaining tana leaves from the mummy’s last rampage.  That night he stumbles upon the missing part of his hieroglyphic mystery and begins brewing the potion to summon Kharis.  Despite being burned up at the end of the previous film, Kharis soon walks into the professor’s home looking none the worse for wear.  Also drawn to the professor’s home is a young Egyptian girl named Amina, who just happens to be the love interest of one of the professor’s students, Tom Hervey.  When the professor winds up dead, killed by the mummy, Amina, who blacked out at the edge of the professor’s lawn, becomes a person of interest.

In the meantime Yousef Bey, one of the priests from Egypt, arrives and begins brewing more tana leaves for Kharis.  Kharis in turn begins a murder spree.  The men of the town form watch parties to try to track down the monster.  Amina seems to be more and more intertwined into the plans of Yousef Bey and Kharis, and it soon becomes apparent that she is the reborn version of Princess Ananka.

Yousef Bey is played by a very young looking John Carradine, whom I found almost unrecognizable dressed as the Egyptian priest.  The Mummy is played in this film by Lon Chaney Jr., the king of the monster movie actors.  Chaney played Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman and the Mummy in various films for Universal.  He was probably best known as Larry Talbot, the Wolfman, but I always connected him with Kharis.  This probably goes back to the fact that I mentioned earlier about the Mummy films getting replayed so often.

It turns out that The Mummy’s Ghost was one of the films I had seen as a child.  While I had forgotten much of the movie, the ending with Kharis carrying Ananka/Amina into the swamp remained etched into my mind.  Sadly, my memories of how great the Mummy movies were didn’t hold up as well for me all these years later.  Don’t get me wrong.  I still enjoyed it and I still love the look of Kharis, but as a kid this film would have gotten 5 stars, blowing past the traditional 4 star cap.  This time with nearly 40 years on me, The Mummy’s Ghost is scaled back to 2 1/4 stars.  Maybe it was just a weak link in the series, but I think my tastes may have changed as well.  And maybe I was just too tired to enjoy it or had expectations that were too high.  Maybe I need to do a Mummy marathon some Sunday.

Devo Live

I don’t have a lot of music/concert DVDs in my collection.  I like music, but there aren’t many acts I am willing to pay full price for a DVD of their music.  Some of them are very disappointing like the DVD of Pink Floyd covers I reviewed earlier.  Some of the discs are simply video compilations.  Some of the concerts are so poorly shot that it feels like you’re watching a bootleg video somebody shot by sneaking a camera in to the concert.  However there are two acts that I have purchased every DVD of theirs that I have found whether it was new, used, on sale or full price.  One of those performers is the notorious G.G. Allin.  The other is Devo.

I purchased Devo Live in the Land of the Rising Sun at FYE in their used DVD section back when they were in the Kanawha Mall.  I watched it and loved it.  I found Devo Live later, but I don’t recall where I found it.  I logged it in to the list on the computer and the collection swallowed it up.  I knew it was there, but I kept forgetting to pull it out and watch it.  I decided that I wanted something different tonight and for some reason my mind remembered I still had a Devo DVD that I hadn’t watched.

I remembered seeing clips of Devo on Night Flight, but I wasn’t a big fan at that point.  In fact I really didn’t like Devo much.  I thought Jocko Homo was interesting, but I remember hearing their cover of Satisfaction and I hated it.  I went to Boys State in 1981 and still remember this huge debate we had about which version of Satisfaction was better.  I couldn’t see how anyone could enjoy Devo’s version.  A few years later I bought the Oh No, It’s Devo cassette tape and slowly got converted to Devolution.  One of my favorite pawn shop finds in fact was someone’s Devo CD collection that they had turned loose of.  There were several of the common CDs, but there were also several obscure Devo discs including the Claw Hammer re-recording of the debut Devo album.

Devo Live was recorded during 1996’s Lollapalooza tour at Irvine Meadows, California.  Devo performed 11 songs without any video screens or major props.  The set list opened with Whip It, which was probably the first Devo song I really liked.  Mark Mothersbaugh and the boys launch into it like they had never stopped.  The show continues with Girl U Want, Satisfaction and Uncontrollable Urge.  During Uncontrollable Urge the yellow jumpsuits start to get shredded and after Blockhead, when the group launches into Mongoloid, the suits are fast on their way to becoming audience souvenirs. 

Jocko Homo, Smart Patrol/Mr. DNA, Gut Feeling/Slap Yer Mammy, and Gates of Steel complete the main show.  The band then returns to the stage for an encore performing Come Back Jonee.  I would have loved to see Devo live, but this DVD is probably the closest I will ever get.  The DVD features the spud boys set and a brief interview backstage after the show, but that’s about it.  The sole bonus feature is the ability to watch certain performances with the multi angle function.  Not too many DVDs feature this function, and it is probably one of my least favorite bonuses.

Devo Live is 55 minutes long, but it feels like 15.  For a band I didn’t care for when I first heard them, Devo’s music now has the ability to instantly bring a smile to my face and this DVD had me smiling for the entire 55 minutes.  Due to its length, I will rate Devo Live on the Night Flight scale and give it, not surprisingly a 10.  As for the actual DVD, I give it a 9 only because it was light on bonus features.  Even a static discography would have been nice.

Jeopardy: An Inside Look At America’s Favorite Quiz Show!

There for a while, every time I walked in Big Lots, I walked out with an arm load of DVDs.  Recently the pickings have been slimmer.  The last time I was in the Big Lots at Teays, all I found was the Jeopardy DVD.  I’ve always liked Jeopardy and the DVD sounded interesting.  It featured Alex Trebek’s first Jeopardy, the show where Ken Jennings lost after 74 successful appearances, and the Ultimate Tournament of Champions.  There was also a documentary on the show broken up into little featurettes.

I watched the first episode of the relaunched Jeopardy and didn’t notice any huge differences with the show that still airs to this date.  The set was a little different, Alex looked a little different, mostly it was cosmetic differences.  The one difference and it may have been my perception, was that they used to give the contestants less time to buzz in with the “question”.  The reason for this is that back then you could buzz in at any time.  Now you have to wait until Alex finishes reading the question.   The Ken Jennings episode was interesting to watch.  Even knowing how it would come out (that he would finally lose), I was surprised at just exactly how it came out.  The look of sheer amazement on the other contestant’s face when she realized that she had beaten him was priceless.  The tournament was entertaining as well.  

Of course the real reason to get this disc and watch it if you are a Jeopardy fan is to see the behind the scenes stuff.  The featurettes start off with Merv Griffin explaining how he created the show.  He explains that it was after the big quiz show scandals and no one was doing quiz shows.  His wife at the time said to him, “well why don’t you give them the answers”.  He explained that was what had created the problem in the first place, and she had to explain it to him.  As soon as she did, he realized that they had struck gold and began work on creating the show that would become Jeopardy. 

Further featurettes show how they come up with the questions or answers.  The process by which the questions are chosen is explained as well as Alex’s process of learning the questions and how to pronounce them.  Another section deals with all the parts of the set.  It is explained how the buzzers work and how the contestants know when to buzz in and what the scores are when they need to decide on a wager for Double Jeopardy or Final Jeopardy.

There is also a section dealing with how contestants are chosen.  There is an initial quiz and only the people who pass the quiz get to move on for further consideration.  They want people who seem relaxed and personable.  They judge a lot of this by holding a mock show.  It was fascinating watching all the behind the scenes machinations.

I did notice one thing while watching the various episodes.  My DVR has got me programmed like Pavlov’s dog.  Even though the DVD presents the episodes commercial free, I kept jumping to fast forward through the commercials any time Alex mentioned that they needed to take a commercial break.   Talk about being made to feel dumb by Jeopardy.

The DVD cost me $3 at Big Lots and it was well worth that.  I don’t know that I’ll be popping it back in any time soon, but it was a lot of fun for a one time viewing.  This is yet another disc that I am not sure how to rate.  The documentary was fun, but it plays more like one of those behind the scenes specials that Food Network likes to play rather than a true documentary.  The episodes are enjoyable and fun to play along with, but I don’t know how much replay value they have.  Let’s just say that if you like Jeopardy and can find the disc cheap, you won’t be disappointed in spending $3 on it.