The Monkees: Season 1

OK, Let's be realistic about this!
What do you actually get for shelling out this much money?

Here are the good things to say about this set, and Rhino's work on it:
1. They actually released it, and it has all the episodes of the first season included in order, with the original songs, and in vibrant color. This earns it most of the points, and is the only real reason to buy this.

2. It includes commercials, and the pilot episode with Boyce & Hart singing the soundtrack, and text trivia screens about each episode.

Here is what I see wrong with this set in no particular order:
The commercials and Boyce & Hart pilot are pretty bad quality copies. The box set video, while mostly vibrant throughout, still includes dust and hairs sometimes. The audio quality never gets above mediocre, and sometimes is either tinny and harsh, or muddy and mushy. The Rhino Monkee audio CDs sound terrific, as do most Rhino CDs. I have not been at all impressed with any Rhino audio on other DVDs so far, and these DVD 5.1...

How not to make a DVD box set
I picked up this set with great anticipation. I loved these shows as a kid, stayed up for the marathon in the 80's to video tape them off MTV, and eventually got both seasons from Columbia House Home Video.

With all the recent technical advances these should have blown me away, like the Beatles Anthology set did. However, it appears Rhino didn't do any restoration at all to these shows, and used the exact tapes they did with the Columbia House videos. While DVD technology does make the pictures clearer, they still have many spots and flaws throughout like copies of films shown on old movie projectors. Even the ending credits on the first episode skip several seconds, like a bad 45. Couldn't they find better copies out there somewhere?

Yes, the special features are interesting. But why is the 16mm pilot black and purple? Same thing can be said about the commercials. I've seen better copies of these at the Monkees conventions BEFORE DVD's even existed.

Restoration can...

The 2003 Rhino release repackaged at half the price - and easier to store.
The 2003 Rhino release repackaged at half the price - and easier to store.

It seems that I've been prefacing my Amazon reviews a lot lately by stating that Amazon has a dumb policy of grouping reviews of ALL releases of any video. If I film was released on VHS and later on DVD and then on Blu-ray, ALL the reviews appear on all products. So readers should always click on "Newest First" and look at date review is posted.

This is the case of this Complete Monkees Season One. The set was released on DVD yesterday by Eagle Rock Entertainment, and yet there are 63 reviews of it going back to 2003, when Rhino first released the six-disc set - in a package that looked like a record play and had a list price of about $89.95. The new set from Eagle Rock comes in a much more conservative foldout digipak and lists for $39.95. After watching much of this new set - and reading details of the prior Rhino release, it most definitely appears that this is just a re-packaging of...

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