The Outer Limits: The Original Series - Season One
Resurrecting the seminal B&W TV creepfest in digital form, The Outer Limits season 1 box set is 32 straight hours of golden age SF. The episodes look and sound outstanding in their restored form (which also means the inclusion of the full show, a lot of which gets sliced for commercial time on such venues as the Sci-Fi Channel). My only complaint is with the discs themselves; I applaud MGM Home Video for trying to keep costs down for the consumer by consolidating what easily could have been an 8-disc set into four double-sided discs, but the packaging for the set leaves a lot of room for simple mishandling or accidents to lead to serious disc damage. That’s a great pity, because the packaging and the menus on the discs themselves are a seamless whole, and fit the mood of their contents perfectly.
And as for the shows themselves? I’m not sure if I can say anything that hasn’t already been said. These episodes aren’t just seminal SF or cornerstones of this series, they’re iconic images from the golden era of science fiction and television itself. Whether you realize it or not, you probably have seen the creatures from The Galaxy Being and The Sixth Finger, or the bug-like Zanti from The Zanti Misfits. It’s hard to overestimate the staying power of The Outer Limits’ imagery, or its place in the pantheon of science fiction.
And surprisingly, some of the best shows on here are modern-day political/social/ethical thrillers, not tales of terror from beyond. The Hundred Days Of The Dragon has actually gained potency and relevance over the years with the advent of plastic surgery (and given what we now know of a certain former Iraqi leader’s small army of body doubles). And O.B.I.T. has also become more relevant with time, as has Nightmare’s somewhat fantastical take on psych testing for moral flexibility in the military (featuring an astonishingly young Martin Sheen).
Feature-wise, you get nothing more than the original episodes. But when they hail from the era when a “season” of a television show meant 30 or so hours…it seems like MGM Home Video can be forgiven for the omission. The 32 episodes are each 51-52 minutes long, and are packed four-to-a-side on four double-sided DVDs. It’s the double-sided thing that bugs me most about this set, especially with the way it’s packaged - there’s an unfortunate potential for some playing surface damage there.
Overall, there may be a dearth of extras, but I still wholeheartedly recommend The Outer Limits Season 1 to you - from the goofy to the sublime, these shows had it all, and 40 years later they’re still startlingly effective. Moreso than some of the stuff that costs as much per episode today as this entire season did back in 1963.
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