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All good things come to an end and by the 14th and
final season of "Dallas" the good things were long gone
and buried like one of J.R. Ewing's secrets in the past.
With the forthcoming sequel TV series we can expect renewed
interest in the original series because I doubt we'll see
this coming out on Blu-ray or reissued with any special
features, now would be the time to pick this up on DVD to
prepare for the sequel series. By the time you finish watching
the final season, we'll probably have the premiere episode
on our hands. ***
By the final season the long standing conflicts between
J.R. and his brother Bobby had already reached a head after
simmering for a number of seasons. I'm going to skip the
summary of the final season because if you've already bought
the previous 13 (and if you haven't you should prior to
buying this one and watching it or renting it depending
on your preference), you know how the various story arcs
played out over the previous ones and how this one ties
into it. I'm going to focus, instead, on the quality of
the set. I will point out that that J.R. (Larry Hagman)
tries to figure out how to escape from the asylum where
he is being confined at the beginning of season 14 which
will give you an idea as to how badly the show had fallen.
Could we trace it back to the season where we found out
the entire season was a dream? I don't think so because
the show did briefly recover from that fiasco. Regardless,
each season after that did become a rollercoaster with some
seasons being quite good while others were just this side
of Ed Wood style silliness from the plotting to the acting.
Regardless, by season 14 the show had overstayed it's welcome
and even though it wasn't a ratings powerhouse like it had
once been, CBS NEEDED the show in its line up at the time
as they lost ground to the other two networks with their
audience. Even when "Dallas" was bad though (and sometimes
especially IF it was bad), it was always a joy to see Larry
Hagman and Patrick Duffy chew scenery. ---
Image & Sound:
For a vintage show "Dallas" looks decent with image
quality varying from extremely soft to a good, solid clear
presentation. Sometimes there is variability within a single
episode. Part of that has to do with the aging of the prints
and part of that has to do with how the show was originally
shot. Could they have cleaned this up a bit more and sharpened
the image quality? Yes. On the other hand the presentation
could have been much, much worse depending on the source
used for the prints (the syndicated vs. the original broadcast
prints prepared). The blacks are murky looking and murky
seems to be the word of the day for most of the transfer.
It appears though that Warner has done the best they could
with this transfer given the 1)age of the show 2) condition
of the prints and 3) budget they had for this release. Could
they have done better? Sure but this series isn't going
to get the attention of, say, "E.R." in terms of efforts
to restore the show. The skin tones look decent throughout
and true to the original broadcast of the series as near
as I can tell. Colors while they don't pop look quite decent.
***
Audio sounds good although it isn't outstanding. Warner
has applied some compression to push dialogue up front and
to make it a bit clearer although little effort to do much
more with the mono soundtrack has been done. ---
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