Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I really wish that I could give this release a glowing five-star review, extolling the virtues of this remarkable series. The fact of the matter is that Route 66's legacy has passed from the hands of one cheap, lazy, unethical company into the hands of another cheap, lazy, unethical company. When it was announced several months ago that Shout Factory and that the entire series would be released in one big affordable box set, that news seemed promising. "YES! Shout Factory has acquired the rights to Route 66! Now it will finally get the treatment it deserves!" wrote one fan of the series on the Shout discussion forums. The implication we were given, and that SF seemed to encourage, was that Shout Factory was going to redo the series from the beginning, taking the time and care to transfer the highest quality prints available to produce the best possible release for the fans. This optimism turned out to be, to put it mildly, premature. Now that the set is out, it is clear that absolutely NOTHING was done in terms of improving on the quality of Infinity's product, and that the first three seasons appears to be EXACTLY the same prints used in the original Infinity release of the show, which include the sub-bootleg quality of the early first season that company put out on the market. In regard to this earlier release, Infinity spokesman Kirk Hallum later admitted that the company issued a substandard product in an effort to meet a street date in depraved indifference to the desire and best interest of the show's fans. So fans had every reason to expect an improvement with Shout's, acquisition of the series, and that was bolstered by regular posts to the forum by the set producer, a man named Brian Ward. Ward regularly posted glowing updates of how he and his staff were working with loving care on the release, using "the best sources availible" from "multiple sources" and that "the footage looks good." A few posters to the forum directly addressed the issue of the poor quality of the Infinity releases, specifically the case of the episode "A Fury Slinging Flame" for which a poor-quality print edited for syndication was used. These posters made clear to Mr. Ward that this was a major point of contention with them, and that they did not want a syndicated print used in this new version. Ward assured the forum that "we are doing everything we can to make sure we have the complete episodes," and then vanished from the forum. Several weeks later, the first editions of this set arrived in the hands of consumers. Eager hands popped discs into DVD players and were horrified to find the exact same shoddy Infinity episodes, including the chopped-up "Flame". The Shout Factory forums exploded with outrage. When the news broke on the Route 66 discussion boards, fans began cancelling their pre-orders left and right. This re-release is particularly egregious when one considers that the episodes for the first three seasons are the same ones that fans who faithfully bought the Infinity sets already own. This means that Shout is now asking consumers to fork over 100 clams for a product that many of them already own three-quarters of, just to get a set of the fourth and final season's episodes. This after strongly giving the impression since acquiring ownership of the show that their box set was going to be a new and improved product. It turns out that Brian Ward has an EXTENSIVE history of lying to Shout's consumers. concerning various TV show releases, telling them anything they want to hear before a set is released; upon which it is discovered that what he said just ain't so. On the positive side, the packaging is simply gorgeous, with magnificent artwork and nifty individual color-coded case boxes for each of the four individual seasons. Unfortunately, the product within is uneven, making this just essentially just another bootleg in a pretty box. Of course I must reiterate that this series, one of the greatest of the 1960s, is a five-star classic and my one-star rating for this fiasco should not be confused with that.