Gutbrain Records

Saturday, 26 March 2005

One good thing about the irritating and otherwise pointless new Kojak series — I really like Ving Rhames, but I saw a preview for this show and it looks as inane as I'd feared it would be — is that a DVD set of the first season of the real Kojak, starring Telly Savalas, is now for sale. It would be even better if it included The Marcus-Nelson Murders, the TV movie in which Savalas debuted as Kojak. If you have the right kind of DVD player, one that's okay with PAL and Region 2 Encoding (somebody please make RCE go away), you may want to order Kojak Vol. 1, a DVD from England, which has that plus the first-season episode "Mojo", presumably picked at random to fill out the disk.

I'm glad that TV shows are finding their way to DVD. One of the most valuable releases so far is the box set of the first season of Have Gun, Will Travel. Not only is it a great show, it's of special interest to admirers of Bernard Herrmann, whose "Western" source music is used extensively throughout. He also wrote an original score for the pilot, "Three Bells to Perdido". This includes the theme music, an exciting composition that may remind attentive listeners of Lalo Schifrin's music for Mission: Impossible and Paul Misraki's score for Godard's Alphaville.