"When storage units are abandoned in the great state of Texas, the treasures within are put up for auction."

Initially entertaining disposable junk TV...about junk. A&E has released Storage Wars Texas: Season One, a two-disc, 16-episode collection of the breakout A&E reality series' premiere 2011 season. A low-rent, high-concept reality show that would have been inconceivable as a viable series twenty years ago, is now one of (if not the) highest-rated show on the Arts & Entertainment network...so go figure. Mindless television crack. Some bonus footage is included for these sharp transfers.

The set-up is simple...but the draw is elemental. Apparently, the law in Texas states that if a customer fails to pay the rent on his or her storage unit for three months running, the storage facility has the right to auction off the contents for back p...Read the entire review

The TV Series

The multi-disc set Disasters Deconstructed: A History of Architectural Disasters counts as yet another of the History channel's entertaining, somewhat random packagings of various shows from their bursting library (Frozen World, which I reviewed earlier this year, is another one). The contents of these six discs include the full run of a recent, short-lived series that perhaps should have been given a better shot, a grab-bag of documentaries on the Hindenburg and Titanic disasters dating back to the mid-'90s (back when the channel's name actually described what it was), and eight installments of the long-running Modern Marvels dedicated to Engineering Disasters.

While we're kickin' it back really Old School, let's take a look at what consti...Read the entire review

The Movie:

As of this writing, the New York Yankees have the upper hand in the playoffs on the Baltimore Orioles (related: friggin' Raul Ibanez) in their series, while the New York Mets are sitting home yet again, watching from their various televisions. It was hardly the best way to spend the team's 50th year in existence, finishing with a 74-88 record and two dozen games out of the National League East Championship, but at least they have a nice fancy mega DVD set to celebrate it, right?

From a packaging perspective, the set is familiar looking to the Fenway Park Collector's Set that is also on shelves. Both are hefty sets that include more than two dozen pages of trivia, tidbits and reminiscing on key moments and figures in team history, with a bevy of discs cont...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Though the Boston Red Sox are out of the Major League Baseball playoffs again and are looking for looking for a new manager...again, overshadowing the clubhouse drama for the second straight year is that Fenway Park was celebrating its 100th anniversary. The Boston park remains one of baseball's most adored despite its lack of modern conveniences (like wider seats, to name a couple), and as part of the centennial, A&E and Major League Baseball Video has put together a massive multi-disc set to celebrate.

The set is a dozen discs full of memorable moments in the Park's history, and from a packaging perspective reminds me of the Yankeeography set from last year. The set looks like a photo album in 11"x17" landscape, with a sturdy cardboard outer case. When the 'album' is pull...Read the entire review

Review:

As part of a new group of shows that attempt to take the core concept of "Antiques Roadshow" and spin it for a new and wider audience, "American Pickers" is a pleasant change in that it hits the road and ventures across rural America in the search for rare items. That's not, however, to say that the series isn't without its share of flaws (although some of these issues seem to have lessened as the show goes on.)

The series stars the Laurel and Hardy pairing of Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz (who find a Laurel & Hardy promotional piece at one point and make a few jokes about the similarities), who run the antique store Antique Archeology in Le Claire, IA. While they are from the Midwest, they often head across the country in an attempt to dig up antiques from just about anywhere. They often head out and around the (very) back roads of the US in order to find treasures, but c...Read the entire review

Review:

"Cajun Pawn Stars" is a prime example of what's wrong with reality programming. It's nothing against the Southern aspect in the slightest (it could be "Canadian Pawn Stars"...eh?), it's simply the matter of taking an idea that works well and mining everything out of it until the audience tires of it.

It's one thing to make something similar to another popular show, but efforts like "Storage Wars: Texas" and "Cajun Pawn Stars" don't even require slightly new ideas - they're essentially the same show, different location, different people. Even I could come up with a new idea: take Chumlee when "Pawn" isn't filming, and have him drive across the country, visiting with different pawn shops large and small, watching transactions, chatting up customers and seeing some of the shop's coolest items. Still pawn, but more variety and Chumlee as a dopey version of Rick Steves as he dr...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Decade after decade, the Chicago Cubs have either had their season end in July or August due to regular season disappointment, or for the few times they have appeared in the postseason, have had their hearts ripped out from their collective bosom, whether it is due to the actions on field or off. But the Cubs faithful come back, year after year to experience it. Some wear it as a badge of honor, others come back for love of the game and the iconic Wrigley Field which hosts the club. And on the heels of yet another failed season in Chicago, Major League Baseball video (in coordination with A&E) have released their version of the Essential Games of the team (previous sets have included the Philadelphia Phillies and Read the entire review

An obvious and unimaginatively conceived but still entertaining spin-off of Pawn Stars, itself a high-concept reworking of earlier shows like Antiques Roadshow, Cajun Pawn Stars is self-explanatory in the extreme. The program seems to have been spurred both by the ongoing success of the Las Vegas-set Pawn Stars and reality shows set in the Deep South, like the History Channel's Swamp People.

Not much needs to be said. If you enjoy Pawn Stars, as this reviewer does, chances are good you'll like its Cajun-flavored spin-off, too. (However, technically the shop exists outside of Acadiana, i.e., Cajun territory.) The program, at least in the this modest, eight-episode set of first season episodes, extravagantly overdoses on the local color, with more regional stereotypes than you can shake a mint julep at.

(Season One is also relative, considering that it debu...Read the entire review

The Movie:

While Washington's baseball team (the Nationals) appears to be on the verge of their first playoff appearance in their current form, their team is not the first to adorn the Nation's Capital. Previous Washington Senators teams have moved to Minneapolis, where the Twins experienced World Series success. But the second team which moved to Arlington, Texas in 1971 and had not really realized much in the way of notable wins until recently. Regardless of this fact, Major League Baseball video and A&E decided to give Rangers fans an "Essential Games" set similar to other teams, but the pool of games to pick from was fairly shallow.

This is in part because save for the Rangers' back to back World Series appearances in the last two years (which they lost to the Giants and Cardinals, respectively), there was not a lot to cheer about. The team saw some players come and go throug...Read the entire review

Don't worry: I have pictures. But like any good spy...I've hidden them....

A trio of mildly interesting docs centered on the fictional cinematic British spy. History has released James Bond Gadgets, a collection of three documentaries originally aired on A&E in 2002 and 2004. The Gadgets of James Bond and...The Gadgets of James Bond (they didn't even give the second one a new title), both from 2002, appeared as episodes of A&E's Modern Marvels series, while 2004's Ian Fleming was an entry from their Biography series. Hard-core Bond fans won't find anything new here...although it is fun to see one or two of the more famous movie gadgets in action. However, a lack of comprehensiveness and haphazard construction limit these short docs to merely "Intro to..." status. No extras for these only-okay transfers.

The Movie:

The Philadelphia Phillies may be out of the running for a possible postseason berth in 2012, but there is little denying they have had a nice run of playoff and even World Series success in recent years. So the folks at Major League Baseball video and A&E have decided to put together a small compilation of memorable performances by recent and somewhat older Phillies teams that will hopefully make fans forget about what goes on the last 6 weeks of baseball season.

In terms of selection, the set is spread over four discs, one for each game selected by MLB video. One of the games took place at as Astrodome while another was at Veterans Stadium, the Phillies' old haunts for several decades before moving to their current location at Citizens Bank Park. The first game is from the 1980 National League Championship Series, where the Phillies came from behind to defeat the Hous...Read the entire review

Review:

"10 Things You Didn't Know About" sees the History Channel moving back towards focusing on history rather than the mix of history and reality that the channel has tried (and successfully, with shows like "Pawn Stars") to feature in the last few years. "10 Things You Didn't Know About" is also on History 2 (which is likely a channel that many don't know about), but it's a start in the attempt to offer a little more straightforward education versus edutainment.

Slightly jazzed-up in order to catch the audience's attention versus dry historical factoids, the series follows historian David Eisenbach as he narrates a series of historical factoids (although historical factoids presented with non-PBS things like zippy wipes and sound effects), re-enactments and man on the street interviews (where people on the street are surprised in the first episode to find out that Benjamin ...Read the entire review

Although there was about an eight-month stretch between the releases of Pawn Stars - Volume Three and Pawn Stars - Volume Four, Volume Five arrives barely two months after the release of Volume Four.

Very little needs to be said. Where Volume Four included the last ten episodes of season three and the first six of season four, Pawn Stars - Volume Five offers 16 more shows, all from the middle of season four (2011). (The packaging insists they're from seasons three and four, but Wikipedia and other episode guides disagree.) Seasons four and five were expanded considerably, to 54 and 56 episodes, respectively, about double the output of the early seasons, so breaking them into volume rather than season sets makes sense, I suppose.

As before, aesthetically Pawn Stars changes not in the slightest. The program follows the appraising and haggling of rar...Read the entire review

Review:

I've noted recently that reality TV on cable seems to have run out of ideas. "Pawn Stars" is a lot of fun, but - and nothing against the South - do we really need "Cajun Pawn Stars", as well as seemingly several loud "Pawn" rip-offs from generally loud TruTV (whose reality shows, we are reminded on the channel's website, are not reality, but "actuality." Oy.)

A particularly unfortunate sub-genre of reality is the "stage parent" genre, popularized by shows like "Toddlers and Tiaras", a train wreck of a series that had parents "coaching" (if one wants to call it that) through beauty pageants.

"Dance Moms" is just as bad, but it's at least so bizarro-world that I found it rather fascinating. There's so much that's so wrong about this series that it's difficult to know where to begin. I'd say this would make a great "Saturday Night Live" skit, but I'm not sure anything c...Read the entire review

100 years after an iceberg defeated the 882-foot luxury liner on its maiden voyage, scientists and historians are still exploring the Titanic. Armed with modern camera technology, submersibles were sent down to the ship's final resting place with the hope of capturing HD 3D visuals of the wreckage, in order to support or even confirm theories about the damage that took the boat down. Now, History Channel has brought some of that footage home in this 45-minute TV special, presented in 3D so that future generations can see it for themselves.

Like most historical TV specials, "Titanic: 100 Years" doesn't deviate much from the usual style: talking head interviews, some dramatized voice-over taken from letters and journals of the crew of the Titanic, and the 3D footage itself, which has an eerie ghost-town quality to it. The 3D in the title...Read the entire review

The Movie:

When I revisited the 2011 World Series earlier in the year, I really enjoyed how the series' momentum between the Texas Rangers and St. Louis Cardinals swung back and forth many times through the course of the series, and that Game 6 "was the most tension-filled and perhaps one of the best in recent Series memory." And to presumably further the case of this, A&E (in participation with Major League Baseball video) has released the pivotal game as a standalone title on Blu-ray. So is it better the second, third (or more) time around?

With the Rangers taking the last two of three games in Texas to go up three games to two in the best of seven series, things were tense for Cardinals fans, all the more so when Texas scored a run with the first three batters of the game. The Cards rallie...Read the entire review

Mildly entertaining, Storage Wars (2010-present) is produced and narrated by Thom Beers, whose Deadliest Catch and Ice Road Truckers are among the most popular reality shows of recent years. Storage Wars, which seems to have been sold along the lines of Pawn Stars meets Ice Road Truckers, isn't nearly the guilty pleasures those shows often are, partly because so much of it is very obviously staged, scripted, or otherwise manipulated by its producers. The program follows competing buyers prowling storage locker auctions looking for that Big Score.

Reality shows have always been a lot more show than reality; even Robert Flaherty's seminal documentary Nanook of the North (1922) was extensively staged. And even the best documentaries are selective and subjective in their editing choices, camera angles, narration, etc.

On Pawn Stars (not produced...Read the entire review