Route 66

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 is clear that absolutely NOTHING was done in terms of improving on the quality of Infinity's product, and that the first three seasons appears to be EXACTLY the same prints used in the original Infinity release of the show, which include the sub-bootleg quality of the early first season that company put out on the market. In regard to this earlier release, Infinity spokesman Kirk Hallum later admitted that the company issued a substandard product in an effort to meet a street date in depraved indifference to the desire and best interest of the show's fans.

So fans had every reason to expect an improvement with Shout's, acquisition of the series, and that was bolstered by regular posts to the forum by the set producer, a man named Brian Ward. Ward regularly posted glowing updates of how he and his staff were working with loving care on the release, using "the best sources availible" from "multiple sources" and that "the footage looks good." A few posters to the forum directly addressed the issue of the poor quality of the Infinity releases, specifically the case of the episode "A Fury Slinging Flame" for which a poor-quality print edited for syndication was used. These posters made clear to Mr. Ward that this was a major point of contention with them, and that they did not want a syndicated print used in this new version. Ward assured the forum that "we are doing everything we can to make sure we have the complete episodes," and then vanished from the forum.

Several weeks later, the first editions of this set arrived in the hands of consumers. Eager hands popped discs into DVD players and were horrified to find the exact same shoddy Infinity episodes, including the chopped-up "Flame". The Shout Factory forums exploded with outrage. When the news broke on the Route 66 discussion boards, fans began cancelling their pre-orders left and right.

This re-release is particularly egregious when one considers that the episodes for the first three seasons are the same ones that fans who faithfully bought the Infinity sets already own. This means that Shout is now asking consumers to fork over 100 clams for a product that many of them already own three-quarters of, just to get a set of the fourth and final season's episodes. This after strongly giving the impression since acquiring ownership of the show that their box set was going to be a new and improved product.

It turns out that Brian Ward has an EXTENSIVE history of lying to Shout's consumers. concerning various TV show releases, telling them anything they want to hear before a set is released; upon which it is discovered that what he said just ain't so.

On the positive side, the packaging is simply gorgeous, with magnificent artwork and nifty individual color-coded case boxes for each of the four individual seasons. Unfortunately, the product within is uneven, making this just essentially just another bootleg in a pretty box.

Of course I must reiterate that this series, one of the greatest of the 1960s, is a five-star classic and my one-star rating for this fiasco should not be confused with that.

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 it didn't happen. So, buying this set to get the 4th season is going to likely be seen as a waste of money for those that have previously purchased the 3 seasons from Roxbury. I quit buying the Roxbury sets after season one because it was such a disaster. So, for me it wasn't as much of a disappoint as it could have been. But I'm not impressed especially in light of the fact that better copies of many of the 1st season episodes do exist.

I gave the set 2 stars simply for the fact that it's unlikely Route 66 will be done any better any time soon.

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 episodes). Another episode GOOD NIGHT, SWEET BLUES featured Black actors, except for the two stars. The great jazz singer Ethel Waters received an Emmy nomination (at a time when no series had a continuing Black actor). Each episode was filmed entirely on location across the country (no studio shots). Nelson Riddle composed an original score for almost every episode. Well known directors such as Arthur Hiller, Sam Peckinpah, and Robert Altman worked on the series. The who's who list of guest stars includes Robert Redford, Suzanne Pleshette, Anne Francis, Joan Crawford, Buster Keaton, Lee Marvin, Michael Rennie, Dorothy Malone, and Robert Duvall. I'm not as enthusiastic about the Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, and Lon Chaney Jr. comedy Halloween episode LIZARD'S LEG AND OWLET'S WING as another reviewer expressed, but it is definitely a conversation piece, and its feminist sub theme is typical of the topics that Stirling Silliphant found interesting. I was glad to have Infinity's earlier release of the first 3 seasons, even with the problems of season one (the first attempt to release those episodes cropped the 4:3 image into 1.79) Some of those transfers were dark, also. For later seasons, there wasn't a list of which episodes were on which discs. But the episodes themselves are such treasures (a Smiithsonian-like depiction of the American landscape from 1960-64) that I forgave those problems. Let's hope that the Shout Factory gets it right, and no matter what, finally having season 4 with TWO STRANGERS AND AN OLD ENEMY, THE STONE GUEST (Silliphant's favorite script for the series), and LIKE THIS IT MEANS FATHER, is cause for celebration.