Remote Control

Although the '60s saw the loosening of movie production codes and a steady stream of revelatory films from the scattered European new waves, the decade was still fairly dry as far as American cinema goes. Until the film school brats and genre mavericks started flooding into the studios at the dawn of the '70s, Hollywood had become a factory for bloated epics and oppressively zany comedies. Television, meanwhile, stayed locked in a golden age that extended from the end of the '50s to, arguably, the mid-'70s. Notwithstanding a mid-'60s rush of lowbrow escapist fare like Gilligan's Island, television had a two-decade run of smart talk shows like The Jack Paar Program, humane comedies like The Andy Griffith Show, and stylish action-dramas like Mannix.

A lot of the best-known TV shows have been rolling out on DVD in complete season sets, but there's almost more to be gleaned from the DVD sets of lesser-known cult series—like Combat!, a morally complex World War II adventure that Image has released in two 4-disc sets (collecting the 1962-63 season). The incomparable Vic Morrow stars as a gruff sergeant who leads a squad through occupied France, all the while hardening himself against the mayhem and the inevitable fallen comrades. Combat! is best remembered for the first-season involvement of Robert Altman, who directed 10 episodes and established the show's dynamic camera moves and realistic, smoke-filled location shooting. Altman pops up on the DVD too, in two commentary tracks where he insists that his best episodes of Combat! are as good as any of his feature films.

Along with Altman's farmative work, some of the early TV efforts of Steven Spielberg are now on disc. The TV movie Duel (see "The Disc Jockey") has gotten most of the ink (and rightly so), but Universal has also quietly put out the first seasons of Night Gallery and Columbo, both of which include Spielberg-directed installments. Columbo's first official episode (following two pilot films) is Spielberg and writer Steven Bochco's "Murder By The Book," a slickly nasty anti-mystery with Jack Cassidy which demonstrates the director's command of purposefully cluttered framing and his early attraction to stories about "perfect plans" gone awry.

Of course stylishness and hubris weren't unique to Spielberg's Columbo. Anyone who thinks CSI invented visual dazzle should check out the 1971 episode "Death Lends A Hand," in which a murder and its clean-up play out as reflections in the polarized lenses of Robert Culp's glasses. And there aren't many classic detective films that can stand up to the average Columbo's wry battle of wits between star Peter Falk as the rumpled and

humble LAPD detective and the mansion-dwellers he upends.

Because Columbo relied heavily on real locations, it's a vibrant picture of the Los Angeles social landscape, from poolside cabanas to the DMV. Similarly, the three or four macabre short stories that made up each hour-long episode of Night Gallery were shot in a variety of styles and locales, making even the weakest segments (and there were plenty of candidates for that honor, including the two Spielberg shot) worth watching as a tour of the times. At its best, Rod Serling's Twilight Zone follow-up used its creator's punchy language and love of irony to clear a path to his patented spine-tingling endings. Night Gallerywas like EC Comics with a mod overlay; and like EC Comics, the show trafficked in the idea that a simple shift in the social fabric could reveal what's really going on in the world.

That's the sci-fi/fantasy/horror tradition: to tantalize and subvert. Image has just compiled a handful of memorable episodes from the 1951-52 season of the anthology series Tales Of Tomorrow, which dramatized pulpy stories of ordinary men undone by the uncanny. The show isn't as slick or effective as Night Gallery, but it starts a line that threads all the way through The X-Files. (And the sweat of live TV, combined with adaptations of stories by the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, still gives the show a special funk.)

The X-Files also draws directly from Kolchak: The Night Stalker, a short-lived 1974 show that starred Darren McGavin as a wisecracking reporter who keeps stumbling into the supernatural. The series began as two high-rated TV movies, The Night Stalkerand The Night Strangler, both of which are available on a single DVD from MGM. The first film is taut and legitimately scary, while the second is longer and more of a spoof, but both are crackling entertainments, charged up by McGavin's loose-cannon performance and the smart use of Las Vegas and Seattle locations, respectively.

For those who'd rather mock B-movie conventions than try to get them right, Mystery Science Theater 3000 persists, in DVD form anyway. The four-movie box sets come out like clockwork, but for those who want a cheaper dose, a two-discer called The Essentials is new from Rhino. Two of the funniest, most inexplicable episodes of the series—Santa Claus Conquers The Martians and Manos: The Hands Of Fate—come on one low-priced set, and those who order direct from www.mst3000dvd.com get an added disc of industrial shorts, given the full cocked-eyebrow treatment by Joel Hodgson, Mike Nelson and the sarcastic robots. The shorts are hilarious, but The Essentials is worth it just for Manos, which makes the occult look ridiculously mundane.