Search - Mission: Impossible: The Complete First Season on DVD

MPAA Rating: NR Movie Release: 2006 DVD Release: 12/05/2006 Format: DVD - Color Edition: Television Audio Tracks: English SwapaDVD Credits: 7 Number of Discs: 7 Run Time: 23 hrs 24 mins Studio: Paramount Members Wishing: 2

Back in the laserdisc era, Bruce Geller's series Mission: Impossible showed up on a very limited basis, six episodes on three discs (if memory serves). Paramount has now released the entire first season of the series, 28 episodes, in a seven-DVD set, packaged in four narrow cases in a slipcase. Each single-sided disc is programmed with four episodes. Each show has been given a half-dozen chapter-markers corresponding with the main sections of the program, plus the opening and closing credits. The programs themselves were among the most interesting in the long run of the series, because they were still working out the basic formula of the series and its variations, and figuring out what would and could work within a television series budget of the period (and yielding amazing results). Additionally, the casting was triply intriguing -- not just for having Steven Hill, a much more interesting actor than Peter Graves, who succeeded him, as the team leader, but also the unusually strong guest stars for the period, working in uncharacteristic roles. The pilot featured Wally Cox (then one of the top actors on television) in an Emmy-caliber performance as a safe-cracker required for the mission at hand, while the episode offers Albert Paulsen -- who most often portrayed villains -- in a sympathetic and totally neurotic role, as a failed performer who gets a chance at redemption through the mission at hand; these characterizations are all somewhat more complex than viewers would find in later seasons of the series, in which it slipped into its formula a little too easily and smoothly for anything too creative on a performing level.
The series itself was extremely important in the history of Desilu Studios, where it was produced. The latter organization had proved itself with half-hour sitcoms and become extremely profitable specializing in that area. But when Desilu went into producing hour-long programs in color, starting with Star Trek and then Mission: Impossible, no one believed they could pull it off, and they did, creating a pair of the most enduring "franchise" series in the history of the medium, although ironically, at the time Mission: Impossible was considered a far more successful and important series. They were successful enough to attract the attention of Paramount, which bought out Desilu midway through the run of both series and ended up reaping hundreds of millions of dollars in rewards -- just from those two series -- from the purchase. The film-to-video transfers are brilliant -- every pore on the characters' faces resolves in the close-ups, and everyone and everything looks razor sharp. The full-screen (1.33-to-1) image is beautifully balanced in terms of color and contrast, and the sound is high in volume and well detailed. It's also a tribute to Barbara Bain's beauty and performing skills that placed under such close visual scrutiny, she is 100 percent convincing in her part (she was feared to be the weak link in the cast when the series was going into production, most notably by Lucille Ball, who owned Desilu Studios, where the series was produced). One heartily wishes that there were some extras to top off the excellence of the presentation here -- Bain, her ex-husband Martin Landau, Steven Hill, and Peter Lupus were all still with us at the time of this release, and were all still active. But just having these episodes -- which, because of the different casting, have been shown far less often in syndication than the later seasons' shows were -- is gift enough. Each disc opens automatically to an easy-to-use multi-layered menu that is surprisingly simple to maneuver through. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide