Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

As anyone who has been following the release pattern of "Gunsmoke" for years and years, this full-series release has been a very long time coming. The expense of purchasing the seasons (most in two volumes) has prevented most of us from attempting to acquire it. If bought initially upon release, a rough estimate is that you would have spent something like $1500 for all of the seasons. So when the full series was released at something like $335 in May, I plopped it into my cart and waited a little bit. In early June, it suddenly dropped to approximately $240 for one day, and I didn't take the plunge. It jumped back up a day later, then dropped again mid-June (when I did plunge and get it), and then it returned to the higher price. I checked in again (June 19-20) and it was down to $229. I don't know why the price is swinging by $100 pretty consistently, but if it has once again gone back up to a higher price as you're reading this, put it in your cart as I did, and be patient -- check each day, as it's bound to come back down again. That said, I've seen so many of the syndicated edits of the color episodes over the years, but always had trouble finding telecasts of the 5 seasons of black and white hour-long episodes (seasons 7-11). Of the ones I did find, they seemed to always include far more full cast scenes that the later episodes did, and I found them immensely enjoyable. And now to have all 600+ episodes at their original lengths (not seen since first broadcast 1955-75) allows us to fully appreciate the huge achievement that this series represents. Will I look at every episode at some point in my life? Probably not, but damn, it sure feels good to have this handsome set of episodes proudly displayed on my shelves.