One of Sid and Marty Kroft's less beloved creations, The Bugaloos never the less has a cult following all its own and like the rest of the Kroft creations, the series has found its way on to DVD. While a while ago a single disc was released with a paltry three episodes on it, this new three disc set compiles the entire short lived series into one handy-dandy boxed set complete with a few decent supplements as an added bonus.

So who or what are The Bugaloos? Good question. In short, they're three guys and a girl – I.Q. (John McIndoe), Harmony (Wayne Laryea), Courage (John Philpot) and Joy (Caroline Ellis) – all of whom have wings and antennae and a talent for writing and performing cute little pop songs. When they're not flying around Tranquility Forest, where they live, they're hanging out with their friend, Sparky (Billy Barty), a clumsy firefly. Unfortunately for these five friends, life isn't as simple as just hanging out, flying around and making music together. On the outskirts of the forest lives a cruel woman who wants a music career of her own to rival the one that The Bugaloos have worked so hard to build for themselves, and her name is Benita Bizarre (Martha Raye who was the Boss With in the Pufnstuf movie). Benita lives with her chauffeur and right hand man, Funky Rat, and two twin brothers named Woofer and Tweeter, all three of whom are at her beck and call twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.

Week after week, in half hour episodes, Benita would do her best to ruin things for the Bugaloos and Sparky in order to try to further her own career and somehow manage to break into the big time. Whether it be worming her way into the radio station to appear on Peter Platter's popular radio show or kidnapping someone to force someone else to do her bidding, she was always up to no good but each and every time she got up to something, the friends would stop her.

Here's a brief run down of the seventeen episodes that made up the complete series which ran from 1970 until 1971:

A lot of the Kroft staples are here – human actors in strange costumes, psychedelic lighting and visuals, strange superimposed backgrounds and the like, but the adventure that made shows like Land Of The Lost so great has been watered down a lot this time around. The show isn't vintage Kroft material, but it's worth a look for the music and for some of the set and costume design, which is pretty inventive and plenty weird.

The fullframe 1.33.1 image is merely adequate, and hardly spectacular. The opening credits looks pretty rough showing some serious wear and tear and print damage. Once you get to the actual episodes, things do improve a bit, but still aren't exactly reference quality. The show was shot on tape and it shows, as the image is quite soft and slightly faded and there are a few drop outs noticeable throughout the set. Thankfully the print damage that plagues the opening credits isn't a problem on the actual episodes proper. The colors look like they could have been bumped up a bit in the brightness department and sometimes they look off. Skin tones look just a tad too pale pretty much throughout but part of that could be from the washed out nature of the old master tapes.