About this product: Americas #1 dad returns for another season of family adventures! Robert Young is Jim Anderson, patriarch extraordinaire to his loving but sometimes misguided family. With Bud (Billy Gray) taking up the practice of mind-reading, Kathy (Lauren Chapin) rebelling at summer camp, Betty (Elinor Donahue) discovering that Mother Margaret (Jane Wyatt) has been placed in her English class as a student: it is certain that the father who knows best is going to have his hands full! By the fourth season, Father Knows Best was a prime-time fixture for NBC, although the program would soon return to the CBS lineup for its last two seasons. Get ready for a trip back in time to 1950s suburbia with the Andersons in Father Knows Best Season Four!
Bonus Features
* WINDOW ON MAIN STREET: The Boy Who Got It Made and The Haunted House Episodes from Robert Youngs very next TV series
About this product: The unlikeliest cult hit of 2004 was What the (Bleep) Do We Know?, a lecture on mysticism and science mixed into a sort-of narrative. Marlee Matlin stars in the dramatic thread, about a sourpuss photographer who begins to question her perceptions. Interviews with quantum physics experts and New Age authors are cut into this story, offering a vaguely convincing (and certainly mind-provoking) theory about... well, actually, it sounds a lot like the Power of Positive Thinking, when you get down to it. Talking heads (not identified until film's end) include JZ Knight, who appears in the movie channeling Ramtha, the ancient sage she claims communicates through her (other speakers are also associated with Knight's organization). What she says actually makes pretty good common sense--Ramtha's wiggier notions are not included--and would be easy to accept were it not being credited to a 35,000-year-old mystic from Atlantis. --Robert Horton
About this product: The most credible UFO witnesses from around the world tell stories that challenge reality in I KNOW WHAT I SAW, a documentary guaranteed to change the way we see the universe. Director James Fox brings together the testimony of Air Force generals, astronauts, military and commercial pilots, government and FAA officials from seven countries; their accounts reveal the reasons those involved at the highest levels have chosen government secrecy over public disclosure in I KNOW WHAT I SAW on HISTORY.
About this product: 10 hilarious episodes uncut & uncensored. The hysterical second season continues to showcase the raucous and peculiar talents of Trevor, Zach, Sam, Darren and Timmy - as they take on politics, gender, race and sex and push sketch comedy to a whole new level of depraved genius.
About this product: Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is an exceptionally dark story about a crime gone wrong and the complicated reasons behind it. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke are outstanding as brothers whose mutual love-hate relationship subtly colors their agreement to rob their own parents’ jewelry store, and more explicitly affects the anxious aftermath of their villainy when their mother (Rosemary Harris) ends up shot. Hoffman’s steely, emotionally locked-up Andy, despite pulling down six figures as a corporate executive, is supporting an expensive drug habit while trying to leave the country with his depressed wife, Gina (Marisa Tomei). Hank (Hawke), a whipped dog of low intelligence, owes back alimony and child support to his ex-spouse. Both men need money and agree to rip off their parents' business, a decision that goes awry and puts both men in various kinds of jeopardy while their mother remains comatose and their father (Albert Finney) lurches along trying to make sense of anything. Writer Kelly Masterson's screenplay employs a perhaps now-overly-familiar time-shifting tactic, jumping around the chronology of the story's events and replaying scenes from different vantage points. The effect is a little tedious but successfully deconstructs the film's drama in a way that shows how such terrible events are directly linked to family dysfunction, old wounds between parent and child, between siblings, that fester into full-blown tragedy. Eighty-three-year-old director Lumet (Serpico) employs bleached colors and scenes of blunt sexuality and violence, adding to the moral rudderlessness and banality of this airless world. If Devil feels a little reductive and insistently grim, it is also a generally persuasive work by an old master. --Tom Keogh
About this product: If a war movie can be lovely, this is it. John Huston directed this touching World War II story about a Marine (Robert Mitchum) stranded with a nun (Deborah Kerr) on a Pacific island overrun by Japanese. After initial antagonism, the resulting kinship between the two characters is human and civil, even after Mitchum's grunt understandably falls in love with his unlikely companion. The action scenes, in which the pair works together to stay ahead of the enemy, are first-rate. The actors have never been better, and Huston's perennial theme about destiny's denial of our dreams is achingly clear in this essentially two-person drama. --Tom Keogh
About this product: Sketch Comedy Show with Cult following! Brilliant comedy masters Trevor Moore and Zach Kregger lead their sketch comedy troupe from New York City into hilarious skits, parodies, and satires. From the irony of everyday life to gut-busting jabs at history, The Whitest Kids You Know poke fun at every stereotype, leaving no subject to delicate for a good laugh!
About this product: Robert Young returns to the head of the dinner table to play the patriarch of America s most beloved family in Season Two of Father Knows Best.
During Season Two a growing number of families were tuning in to see what kind of trouble Bud (Billy Gray) was going to get into next, how Kathy (Lauren Chapin) was handling growing up, whether Betty (Elinor Donahue) and her boyfriend would breakup and how Margaret (Jane Wyatt) would inevitably hold the family together. A day in the life of the Andersons was a 1950s suburban dream come true.
Bonus Features:
The Teacher From Robert Young s very next TV series, Window On Main Street
Robert Young Pilot: Stagecoach To Yuma (12/7/1955)
Extended FKB Flashback Episode: First Disillusionment (11/16/1959)
About this product: It's telling that this family favorite began on radio as Father Knows Best? When the show came to CBS in 1954, the question mark disappeared. Contrary to popular opinion, however, Springfield, Ohio, insurance agent Jim Anderson (Emmy winner Robert Young) doesn't have all the answers. He and his wife, Margaret (fellow Emmy winner Jane Wyatt), come close, though. Were the show in production now, Anderson wouldn't smoke, but Father Knows Best reflects the standards of its time--separate beds and all. The sweet-natured pilot sets the tone when 14-year-old Bud (Billy Gray) frets about the school dance until Jim arranges for his 17-year-old sister, Betty (Elinor Donahue), to show him some steps. Other storylines revolve around community service and feeling needed, while "Thanksgiving Day" offers a glimpse of Jim's imperfect side when he dismisses a poem written by nine-year-old Kathy (Laurin Chapin), who overhears him; he realizes he was holding Kitten to impossible standards. As Chapin notes in the bonus interview (in which Donahue also features), the primary themes were cooperation and forgiveness. Naysayers can knock Father Knows Best for being square, but it espouses timeless values. And who's to say the lingo wasn't hip for the 1950s? Colorful examples include "goobers," "criminy," "creepers," "knot-head," and "simply utterly."
On the downside, these 26 episodes appear in unrestored, syndicated condition. Fortunately, the show doesn't look too bad for its age and abundant extras compensate, like special 1959 savings bond episode 24 Hours in Tyrantland and Young's home movies and behind-the-scenes footage, both with low-key narration by grandson Bill Proffitt. After Young put Father Knows Best to rest, he segued to 1960's Window on Main Street (this set includes the pilot) before scoring another hit with Marcus Welby, M.D.. Donahue followed suit with The Andy Griffith Show and Wyatt with Star Trek. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
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