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Maybe it’s just me but I feel even vintage TV shows
should get some sort of special treatment. Universal’s release
of Jack Webb’s “Emergency!” alas demonstrates that these
shows are nothing more than product to Universal. Sure the
cover art is nice and the transfers are good but Universal
seems to be living in the VCR age when TV shows were just
dumped on the market in boxed sets and nothing was offered
in the way of extras. While Universal has done an exceptional
job with some TV shows (“Battlestar: Galatica” both the
original series and the first season of the Sci-Fi Channel
remake) they’ve also done exceedingly BAD jobs on others
(“Kolchak: The Night Stalker” which frequently looked as
if it was shot in a coal mine because of the occasionally
dark transfers and damaged prints used to create the teecine
transfer master). I’m just another disappointed DVD fan
who really, really wants to see a better job done in reissuing
these shows. If Universal didn’t own the copyright to this
any fly by night company could have put this set out. ***
Now that I’ve ranted let’s get to the important stuff.
For fans of “Adam 12” “Emergency!” was another great show
from producer Jack Webb. Focusing on real incidents that
occurred to members of the Los Angeles paramedic program,
“Emergency!” mixed over-the-top drama with a dollop of humor
to prevent the show from becoming deadly serious. Like shows
such as “24” the anxiety level is frequently high and something
(in the melodramatic fashion of the show) bad was always
happening and disaster was always just being averted. Randolph
Mantooth and Kevin Tighe (lately of “Lost”) play the paramedics
Johnny Gage and DeSoto. Like all of Webb’s show there was
a sense of reality just under the veneer of Hollywood which
made the shows more credible than most other dramas of the
time. Part of the show focuses on Gage and DeSoto while
the other part focused on the hospital that the two worked
with. The two worlds frequently intersect and we see the
interaction with Dr. Brackett (Robert Fuller), Dr. Early
(“Route 66” songwriter and actor Bobby Troup) and Nurse
Dixie McCall (singer Julie London and the wife of Bobby
Troup). “Emergency!” clearly was the template for later
more sophisticated shows like “E.R.”. We get 21 (count ‘em!)
episodes from the first season of the show. By the way,
“Adam 12” and “Emergency!” was probably one of the first
shows where cross-over characters appeared from one TV show
to another as Kent McCord and Martin Milner occasionally
appeared on the show as well. Luckily for us there’s not
much down time for squad 51 as these shows are energetic,
well paced and well written. ---
Image & Sound:
An above average transfer from
Universal “Emergency!” has some digital artifacts including
some minor issues with edge enhancement and shimmer but
the colors are robust and vibrant. While this might not
be a perfect transfer it looks quite good and is a marked
improvement over some of the newer shows (such as “Kolchak”)
in terms of image clarity and color. The images do occasionally
look a bit soft but that’s not a surprise given the age
of the source film. The mono soundtrack doesn’t offer much
room for improvement so we’re stuck with the format it was
recorded in. The dialogue comes across with sharpness and
clarity. ---
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