Sliders: The First & Second Seasons (1995-6)
Film:
DVD:

Created by Tracy Tormé & Robert Weiss
Starring Jerry O'Connell, John Rhys-Davies, Sabrina Lloyd, Cleavant Derricks

Features:

• All ten first season episodes
  
• All thirteen second season episodes
  
• Running audio commentary by Tormé & Weiss on the pilot episode
  
• Making-of featurette
  
• Stills gallery
  

Released by: Universal
Rating: NR
Region: 1
Anamorphic: N/A; appears in its original 1.33:1 format.

My Advice: Fans should own.

Quinn Mallory is a college student who's a bit of a freaking genius. In trying to great an anti-gravity device, he screwed up and found a way to open a wormhole into an alternate dimension instead. After going to a place in which red means go and green means stop (and his mom is married to the gardener), he convinces his friend Wade (Lloyd) and his professor Arturo (Rhys-Davies) to accompany him for a true test of the device. However, he screws up and throws too much power at the thing, sucking in a musician, Rembrandt (Derricks), who happened to be driving by. They're going to screw up again, though, and get stuck sliding from dimension to dimension trying to find where they started.

I think I've referred to this elsewhere as Team Quantum Leap, but yes, there are differences. Instead of one guy "leaping" into somebody else's body at some point in time, you've got four characters "sliding" into some other reality at the same time. The series has its moments and some cool ideas to carry it along, though as it went into the second season they began to make mistakes, such as the Kromaggs, which are basically Voyager-level villains. Imagine the Horde from Strikeforce: Morituri but much less interesting. As a result, you start to put together some kind of metaplot and that starts to get more and more whacked as time goes on.

Acting-wise, O'Connell plays the grown-up kid genius well and Rhys-Davies is...well, Rhys-Davies. He seems nice but he'll call down the thunder on your ass in a heartbeat--gotta love that. Derrick is there to play the everyman character, the guy who doesn't have a prayer of affecting the circumstances of his situation, but trying to soldier on regardless. Lloyd does well in her role, and gratefully she's an example of the modern sci-fi heroine...she's not bashful about walking up to the enemy and kicking them in the family jewels. So the cast is strong enough to support the material.

Universal deserves some credit for releasing both first seasons (which were both short) as a single set, as opposed to stretching it out and playing with fan's minds. However, the box itself makes much of the fact that the six discs are "floating" seated in foam. While this is neat for the first three seconds or so, I would have been grateful for an honest to God tray to reseat the discs in. Granted, I tried to jar the discs loose "by accident" and couldn't do so, but hell, it just makes me nervous.

The primary bonus bit on this set is the audio commentary with the creators Tormé and Weiss. They goof off a bunch--and point out when the effect suck--but there's still some nice tidbits on here, like pointing out the other folks that auditioned for Arturo, and pointing out the scene in which Rhys-Davies insisted on doing his own stunt and cracked his head open. They also talk about what went into conceiving of the show and getting it made. So there's some goodness to be had.

The retrospective featurette talks with both Weiss and Tormé (a bit of overlap with the commentary comes in) along with O'Connell and Derricks. There's some smoke-blowing to be sure, but there's also some honest talk about the show: namely, how lame the Kromaggs were and also how Rhys-Davies eventually leaving was the beginning of the end, at least in Derricks' opinion. The only other feature is a stills gallery, which is regrettably short and also regrettably set against the wormhole effect, so it's hard on the eyes.

Basically, this is a set for the fans. Non-believers might want to rent it to see what the fuss is about, and sci-fi completists who haven't caught it yet will want to, but the fans are going to want to own this thing to get as much of their series as they can.