Starkville’s House of El Podcast

After a summer hiatus, Tim’s reviews on the site are back in session! With days before the premiere, Tim decided to kick off reviews with the review of the Season 6 DVD.

So what did Tim think of the Smallville Season 6 DVD?

This DVD Set was a really positive one, I thought. I was really excited to get this particular set for a while now, as season six has earned its right as my favorite season of Smallville. This season gave us a lot and was a real high point for the series, I thought, in so many ways. For my thoughts on the season as a whole, please turn to my Complete Season Six review.

But these are my thoughts on the DVD as a whole. So I’d think I’d start off with the highlight of the DVD which is the episodes. It is the reason we all buy the season 6 DVD: To have all of our favorite episodes from the season at our leisurely disposal. I thought the episodes were in a very well-delivered format. Now I myself do not own the BluRay or HD formats, so I do not know how the episode quality is in those various formats. But I am sure the quality is wonderful. But as far as the standard definition goes, it looks pretty good. For example, when Bizarro-Clark shows his true form, it looks even better on the DVD (even though it looked pretty darn awesome). SO the episode quality was really awesome. I myself cannot wait to see what it looks like on the higher definition DVDs.

Something about the DVD itself that I am always very excited to see is the opening menus. The opening menus do a great job of showing an excellent montage set to the opening music of the theme song, (which I never tire of, to be quite honest), and this season did an excellent job of creating an exciting menus showing scenes from episodes such as “Zod” and “Justice.” It is always very fun to watch.

The next thing on the DVDs obviously is the special features. This set was an anomaly in the way that the major special features were on the first disc. The features that are on the first disc are the documentary on the Green Arrow and the Fans Documentary.

First off I would like to talk about the Green Arrow documentary. This was a really good documentary on the Emerald Archer himself and actually narrated by Mark Hamill, famous for the voice of the Joker on Batman:The Animated Series. This was very well-informed, and interviewed everyone who had been involved in Green Arrow comics to even Smallville today. They discussed the main character changes that the character has gone through over the past 30 years. They also go through how much Green Arrow has really affected the comic book industry, particularly with the introduction of the junkie storyline with Green Arrow’s sidekick Speedy. I remember reading this comic and how it affected the comic book genre, because up to that point comics weren’t doing those kind of storylines. They also kind of went through the character’s basic arc over the past 3 decades, even until now in 2007. Now I enjoyed this documentary so much I wanted to go out and buy some Green Arrow comics. I would love to go through by a scene-by-scene review of this documentary, but just watch it yourselves!!

Next is the Smallville: Big Fans documentary. Now here at SHoE, people know we’ve been ranting and raving abut this documentary for the past few months leading up to the DVD. Having said that, I thought this documentary was well-done. It really captured the essence of the Smallville Fanbase and many big things in the Smallville fandom. They showed the history of Smallville as a fandom, their Comic-Con history, and even the many sites devoted to Smallville (KryptonSite.com, Lanarama, Devoted to Smallville, Allison Mack Online, and even House of El Podcast!!!) They also showed the different relationships or ’ships that fans have pursued over the years (including Chlois and Clex). This documentary also displayed the winners of the Ultimate Fans Contest that was going on earlier this year. They were very interesting to say the least. So, Congrats to those who won, and even those who didn’t win, got to see their names in the closing credits of the documentary. So I’m sure that was nice to those who entered. Sadly, I did not enter as things were going on currently in my life at that time, so I was not able to enter. But our very own Derek Russell was featured in those said closing credits. Also, not to mention, that the House of El Podcast was featured on this feature as well. It really captured what I think what we do here at SHoE is all about. It was totally awesome. Loved it a lot! So some of you might be thinking . . . why wasn’t yours truly on the DVD? Sadly, I had not affiliated myself with SHoE at the time this footage was being filmed, so that is the main reason why I was not featured, but it was still an enjoyable feature, as it contained some screenshots of the website itself. So it was a really great documentary, that documented how much the fans have impacted Smallville. So, it’s definitely worth checking out.

The other special features that are of note are the online content that had been available on the CW’s website this past year. One of these is the Oliver Queen Chronicles. These were really good when i watched them on the CW’s website. If you would like to know what I thought of these Chronicles, please turn to my review of them. Also, there was a little behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of these special Chronicles. These were very much in the vein of the Chloe Chronicles and Vengeance Chronicles, and it was very fun to revisit these Chronicles again.

Also in the online Content that has been transferred to the DVD is the Justice and Doom Comics that was online during the last 5 episodes of Smallville. These were also very fun to watch, and it almost acts as a small Smallville Justice League spinoff, crossing over with certain elements that were in those final episodes (Project Ares, The Justice League etc.). I enjoy this kind of crossover thing that they do cos it definitely gives the show more layers, and it definitely gave those final episodes more layers. One thing I would’ve liked to see on this Justice and Doom feature tho, was the final scene in the Justice and Doom online content where we see the Martian Manhunter in his truew form so it would’ve been nice to have that. But all in all, very enjoyable.

Next is the deleted scenes. There were a lot of deleted scenes on this set. It seems there was a deleted scene for almost every episode. Some of them were cut for time and just didn’t fit in with the pacing of the episode. There were some deleted scenes that were cut and some of them had elements that were inserted into aired scnes of later episodes. One of the deleted scenes that I loved was the scene from Labyrinth between Clark and Martian Manhunter. This would;ve been a wonderful scene within the episode and would’ve really added to the episode, while at the same time provide very chilling information about the upcoming season finale. But I can see why they would’ve cut it, but parts of it were inserted into the finale. Another scene that was on this DVD was a scene from Progeny between Clark and Martha where Clark expressed thanks for everything she had done for him all his life. it was just a sweet touching scene. Another scene of note that I kind of enjoyed was the scene from Phantom between Lionel and Lana where they’re discussing the moral ramifications of the spying and digging that they’ve been doing together. But the deleted scenes were and always are and enjoyable part of this DVD.

One thing that was absent from the DVD that I kind of lamented were the commentaries.Those are always one thing I enjoy on any kind of DVD, whether its a TV-show-on-DVD or a movie-on-DVD. I really would’ve liked to hear a commentary on perhaps Justice, Zod, Labyrinth, or Phantom. But this DVD more than made up for the lack of commentaries with all the other jewels of special features it contained.

This was a great DVD set for a very strong season. I have enjoyed it very much thus far. It had lots of solid special features to accompany the solid-awesome episodes that accompanied this set.

RATING:5/5
P.S. Stay tuned later this week for my review of the season 7 premiere, Bizarro. Also, you can read all of my reviews in the Review Section of the Site.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 4:02 pm and is filed under News, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.