I just got the set and right away, I agree with other reviewers – the picture is great! I never thought it could look so good. I’m constantly pausing the show to enjoy the image.
The stereo sound is another matter. Right during part 2 of the opening, (“Where am I?” “In the Village.”), I hear that remastered sound “anomaly” that plagues restored movies. When the Rover bubble comes up, there’s a swooshing, swirling, muddy sound like it was played in a revolving cylinder. I noticed it again in “The Chimes Of Big Ben” when Number 6 starts putting the radio speaker into the small fridge. When I went to the mono track, the sound was back to normal. Thank you, A&E, for keeping that option! I’m sticking with mono from now on.
That swirly sound in DVD movies is most often heard during explosions. It bugs the heck out of me. If the sound engineers can’t improve a sound, why don’t they just leave it alone? I’m only running this through a home stereo, so I don’t know if a fancy 3.1 or 5.1 audio setup would correct this.
The only other quibble is why the episode theme is so much louder than the rest of the show. I love the theme music, but why the difference? (I’ve only watched “The Chimes Of Big Ben” so far).
In summary, it’s a great product. Okay, one more quibble. Why did they change the logo? I love the Prisoner typeface, so why remove the eyecatching original? To make it like the remake, I suppose. The same is true of the Mission: Impossible DVDs and the Invaders DVD sets. (I had a hard time finding The Invaders set on the shelf because the title style was so bland).
The prisoner tv series
A New Yorker awakens to find himself in a place called The Village run by a man known as Two. As everyone in The Village is referred to only by a number, everyone in The Village refers to him as Six – despite he himself knowing that he has another name – and seems to know who he is. He is told he lives in The Village and that The Village is the only reality there is. Six’s mission becomes to find out where The Village is, who Two is and why he is seemingly keeping him prisoner in The Village (despite Two stating that Six is a free man), and how he can escape to his life back in New York. Six has to learn who among the Villagers he can trust – who include a doctor named 313, a cab driver named 147, and Two’s own son named 11-12 – in his quest to escape from The Village. Six also has recurring memories of his life in New York, including an encounter with a woman named Lucy, which may be part of the key to discovering why he’s in The Village.
so much care with the way they look. I would be willing to bet that the show has more set ups per minute than any show in the history of TV, including miniseries. There are an astonishing number of shots during the course of each episode. The show is almost profligate in the number of shots. For instance, in a 20 second sequence showing Number Six walking across the village we might get 7 or 8 set ups. This simply is not done on television, where the emphasis is on shooting quickly and economically.
If I have a disappointment, it is that there are not as many special features as I would have liked. For instance, while there are commentaries galore, there are not some things that I would have liked. For instance, how about a two-hour documentary on the making of THE PRISONER. Few TV shows demand a feature like that, but if THE PRISONER doesn’t demand that kind of treatment, what show does?
Another mild disappointment is that Patrick McGoohan did not live to see this edition of his masterpiece. I’m sure he would be enormously delighted to know that new generations of fans of his great series will see it in in ways that no one ever has before (even the big screen version I saw had a scratched print).
The series is, of course, one of the greatest things ever made for television. On the off chance that the reader of this review is unaware of the story, Patrick McGoohan (who not only created and starred in this series, but wrote and directed most of the episodes, frequently using fake names to disguise just how complete his involvement in the show was) had been the star of the highly successful British TV series DANGER MAN, released in the United States as SECRET AGENT MAN, and with the finest theme song in the history of TV, Johnny Rivers’s hit single of the same name (originally Rivers had only a verse and the chorus, but when radio DJs wanted the “complete” song to play on the airwaves, he returned to the studio and added more verses). McGoohan’s show was a huge hit but he bowed out and made this series. It is easy to read into THE PRISONER his experience in leaving DANGER MAN, especially given that Number Six clearly seems to be John Drake from DANGER MAN. Similarly it is easy to tie the show into all kinds of issues of the sixties. Embracing the liberal themes of the sixties, McGoohan clearly wanted to deal with issues of the individual of conscience in a time when governments were pressuring individuals to conform to specific ideologies. Number Six’s resistance is across the board, but is focused on a single thing: his refusal to explain why he resigned from the secret service.
