Route 66: The Complete Series

WARNING! These are the same poor-quality episodes from Infinity recycled!
I really wish that I could give this release a glowing five-star review, extolling the virtues of this remarkable series. The fact of the matter is that Route 66's legacy has passed from the hands of one cheap, lazy, unethical company into the hands of another cheap, lazy, unethical company.

When it was announced several months ago that Shout Factory and that the entire series would be released in one big affordable box set, that news seemed promising. "YES! Shout Factory has acquired the rights to Route 66! Now it will finally get the treatment it deserves!" wrote one fan of the series on the Shout discussion forums. The implication we were given, and that SF seemed to encourage, was that Shout Factory was going to redo the series from the beginning, taking the time and care to transfer the highest quality prints available to produce the best possible release for the fans. This optimism turned out to be, to put it mildly, premature.

Now that the set is out, it...

Route 66 detoured...
Having bought the complete series directly from Shout! Factory I've received the full season set and had a chance to sample the seasons.

For those that were hoping for remastering and better quality for the 1st season you will be disappointed. I see little change in the season 1 episodes from the Roxbury set (all episodes are in the correct 1:33 format, however). For those hoping for a complete version of "A Fury Slinging Flame", sorry to say it's still the shortened syndication version, which is noted prior to the episode playing. The only upside is that a film copy was used as master rather than the really poor video dub version Roxbury used. The pilot episode, "Black November" actually looks a little worse, seems darker and muddier than the one on the Roxbury set. That may be because Roxbury brightened their version to offset the darkness of the master they used.

Regardless, if people were hoping for a better quality set than what had been released by Roxbury...

One of the all-time great series
Many of us have been waiting a long time for season 4 of the classic TV series ROUTE 66, which can be described as "two young men in a Corvette convertible traveling across the country in search of America and themselves." Stirling Silliphant's great scripts for the series set me on the road to being a writer (FIRST BLOOD, Rambo). As a teenager, I wrote Stirling a letter about how he inspired me. He encouraged me, and years later he and I worked together on the NBC miniseries of my novel THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE ROSE. The stories are an intriguing combination of action and ideas. LSD, mercy killing, the hunt for Nazi war criminals, miscegenation, right-wing hate groups, the VIetnam War (in 1963!): these and similar topics were almost never dramatized on other series. But ROUTE 66 loved controversy. In fact, for the hate group episode, TO WALK WITH A SERPENT, the sponsors pulled out, but CBS alliowed the show to run without breaks (and with a lot of previews for upcoming ROUTE 66...

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