If you need a little bit of silliness mixed into your weekend, check out these recently released titles:
First up is The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson: Johnny and Friends featuring game-changing comedians Steve Martin, Robin Williams, and Eddie Murphy. This three-disc collection includes nine episodes of The Tonight Show that span across the seventies, eighties, and nineties in the heyday of host Johnny Carson. All nine shows are complete (including the commercials from when they aired— a fun bonus!) and have not been previously released for retail. Disc One includes three episodes (from 1976, 1982, and 1991) with the legendary once-banished guest (and eventual fill in host) Steve Martin, who appears alongside Jimmy Stewart, Karen Black, Sylvester Stallone, Cathy Ladman, Leon Redbone, and others. Disc Two centers on the incomparable Robin Williams, whose three episodes (one from 1984 and two from 1991) show the unpredictable entertainer cracking Johnny up as he appears with Phyllis Newman, Steve Lawrence, Jonathan Winters, and Park Overall. Disc Three belongs to Eddie Murphy, whose three episodes (all from 1982) show how Murphy skyrocketed to stardom in less than a year as he appears with fellow guests McLean Stevenson, Wayne Rogers, Albert Hague, Randal “Tex” Cobb, and Angela Bofill. The DVD set is out now from Time Life but isn’t available on Amazon (except for one third party seller here) or Barnes and Noble as of yet, so keep an eye out for it at other places (suggested retail: $29.95).
Next we have Adventure Time: The Complete Seventh Season, which follows the much-loved citizens of Candy Kingdom as they embark on more adventures. In this season of the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning series, we see Marceline’s quest to throw off vampirism and become human in the eight-part “Stakes” story arc, Jake and Finn being freaked out by the Blank-Eyed Girl, Princess Bubblegum’s attempt to grow a vegetable kingdom while exiled at Lake Butterscotch, BMO’s aspirations to become a cowpoke, and the stop-motion episode Bad Jubies, which won the Best Animated Television/Broadcast Production For Children Annie Award back in April. Out now from Cartoon Network are all twenty-five episodes (at a run time of around eleven minutes each) across a 3-disc DVD set housed in a nice die-cut cover. Bonus material on this one includes animatics, galleries, song demos, the featurette “Good Jubies: the Making of Bad Jubies” a hyperlapse of Bad Jubies, and “Behind the Title Cards” videos. If you’re one of the literally millions of fans of the show (18 million on Facebook alone!), you can grab the DVD set on Amazon for $17.18.
