NEWS: 'Star Trek: The Original Series' Collection Launch Event at Egyptian Theater in Hollywood

La-La Land Records will mark its 10th anniversary with the release of the Star Trek: The Original Series Collection at the historic Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, December 3, 2012, at 7:30pm. Admission to this event is free, but requires advanced registration through the label's website (click here).

The event includes a special screening of two classic Trek episodes: "Mirror, Mirror" and "Amok Time", courtesy of CBS. A special discussion will follow with original series composer Gerald Fried and writer David Gerrold, hosted by Star Trek music writer and soundtrack set co-producer Jeff Bond.

The Star Trek: The Original Series Collection will be available for purchase at the event, a day ahead of its official December 4, 2012, release for $225.00 (tax included).

Finally, while a 100-page booklet was originally announced as part of the set, to best present the project's liner notes in the most informative, manageable and appealing manner possible, La-La Land decided to divide the notes into a 24 page overview booklet, supplemented by three individual season-specific 33-page booklets (each of which will be housed within its corresponding clamshell case).

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Film: Movie Review: The Collection

Delivered with the efficiency of a fast-food value meal, The Collection—a sequel to the largely forgotten 2009 horror film The Collector, and like its predecessor, the work of the writing-directing team behind some of the later Saw sequels—doesn’t waste much time. Clocking in at a swift 82 minutes, counting the languorous opening and closing credits, the film almost immediately starts setting up its plot by letting a TV news broadcast recount the horrific efforts of a seemingly unstoppable killer. Then it sends its pixieish heroine (Emma Fitzpatrick) out into the night in search of a party, which she finds in the form of an underground dance club that’s secretly run by the killer himself. An athletic-looking figure wearing a black mask, he’s rigged the place with booby traps, including a thresher that, in the film’s most audacious sequence, mows down the dancers like so many stalks of wheat. Then Fitzpatrick gets kidnapped while Josh Stewart, The Collector’s hard-case hero, escapes, and a paramilitary group hired by Fitzpatrick’s father (Christopher McDonald) springs Stewart from the hospital to find the killer’s secret lair. These events unfold with the reckless momentum of downhill skiing.

The killer’s secret lair is the old, abandoned Hotel Argento, which provides one clue about the influences at play in The Collection. Another comes from the villain’s mask, which resembles that of the Italian pulp anti-hero Diabolik, memorably brought to the screen by Mario Bava. But the nods to classic Italian giallo are largely just that: nods. Mostly The Collection plays like a throwback to a more recent, but fast-fading into memory, horror-film era set into motion by Saw, one in which elaborate contraptions clank into action in ways designed to impale and dismember, no room is complete without unsavory-looking stains on the wall, and no door can be opened or closed without threatening to blow out the low-end of even the most state-of-the-art multiplex sound systems. In the Hotel Argento, every room is a death trap, and there’s always something squishy on the floor.

But even if it’s delivering the last gasp of its particular subgenre, The Collection still finds ways to make itself heard. That thresher sequence isn’t soon forgotten, nor are some of the images scared up by the film’s go-for-it attitude toward its thrift-store-goth production design, which includes everything from terrifying dolls to vats of fluid filled with bones assembled to resemble the skeletons of creatures that never walked the Earth. It also has enough nutty energy and oddball touches—The Wire’s Andre Royo shows up as a gun-toting, faux-hawk-sporting badass—that it’s never boring. Dumb, gross, gratuitous, and overly familiar, sure. But never boring.

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DVD: HomeVideo Review: The Incredible Mel Brooks: An Irresistible Collection Of Unhinged Comedy

From the moment Mel Brooks entered show business in the late ’40s, he became the comedy equivalent of a utility player, working as a writer, director, producer, performer, and all-around personality. Though Brooks will likely be best remembered for his string of hit movie parodies in the ’70s—along with the popular Broadway musical of his movie The Producers—his legacy also includes television sketches, comedy albums, sitcoms, and countless talk-show appearances. The six-disc box set The Incredible Mel Brooks: An Irresistible Collection Of Unhinged Comedy tries to encompass Brooks’ sprawling career, and does so fairly haphazardly. Eschewing chronology, The Incredible Mel Brooks jumps around, from Brooks doing guest shots on TV series in the ’90s, to him cracking up Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show in the ’70s, to sketches from Your Show Of Shows in the ’50s, to a 60 Minutes profile in the ’00s, to the Oscar-winning 1963 short film “The Critic,” and so on, back and forth. Across its five DVDs (and single CD), the set collects all manner of odds and ends, anchored by extensive new interviews with Brooks, in which he reflects on the wide variety of work he’s done over the past 60-plus years.

Brooks is unpretentious, gracious, and insightful in the new material, looking back on his career with a combination of genuine gratitude for his good fortune and confidence that he had the goods all along. Even better are the older televised interviews, for which Brooks knew he’d be expected to be “on.” Talking with Dick Cavett or David Susskind, Brooks mixes anecdotes about New York showbiz in the early ’50s with the kind of off-the-cuff jokes and self-deprecating comments that allowed him to hold his own with the likes of Neil Simon and Larry Gelbart in Sid Caesar’s writers’ rooms. Of particular interest are the snippets of Brooks’ Tonight Show appearances: He does a spot-on spoof of Frank Sinatra singing “America The Beautiful” in one, and then in another answers Carson’s question about the hardest part of making movies by saying, “Putting all the little holes on the side of the celluloid. There’s like a million of ’em!”

As for the scripted Brooks work included in the set, it’s a decidedly mixed bag, leaning heavily on his three main themes: making fun of popular culture, lampooning Adolf Hitler, and taking on the persona of a cranky older Jewish fellow (sometimes way older, as in “The 2000 Year Old Man” routines that Brooks has performed with Carl Reiner since the ’50s). For the most part, the hodgepodge of Mad About You and Tracey Ullman Show guest shots—and the samples of Brooks’ voiceover work on commercials and Electric Company segments—just shows how his distinctive comic style has remained viable and comfortably familiar for so many decades. But the hidden gem of The Incredible Mel Brooks is the 1963 pilot for the sitcom Inside Danny Baker, which didn’t get picked up, even though its William Steig-inspired premise of a city kid with an active imagination comes off as funny, sweet, and original in its one and only episode. Inside Danny Baker is evidence that Brooks could’ve followed his pal Reiner into Dick Van Dyke Show-style family comedy, if the networks had let him. Instead, he helped writer Buck Henry create Get Smart, and his path to Hollywood success became more nutty.

Key features: The entire set is one big special feature, really, but the CD in particular is something special, containing a few of the best-known songs from Brooks’ movies (such as “Springtime For Hitler,” “I’m Tired,” and “The Inquisition”), along with the audio from some talk-show and game-show appearances for which the video has been lost. 

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