Twin Peaks: Classic or Dud?

Very glad I held off on picking up any previous sets/discs (aside from the movie). Xmas ahoy...

guess I gotta sell those Season 1 and 2 sets arrrghhh

Yeah, I held off on the boxed sets too and just borrowed them from a friend of mine who is now completely pissed off that he's going to have to shell out for this new boxed set. Oh well, I'm a leech. I'm super pumped about the deleted scenes. Perhaps the pilot will be the actual pilot and not the bizarre standalone pilot that was available forever on VHS with the nonsensical tacked-on ending.

it has both versions of the pilot

"standalone pilot with the bizarre ending" = European version

I don't know if I've ever mentioned it -- I don't think I have on here -- but the woman who played Dr. Jacoby's wife Eolani in the one scene where he's visited in the hospital by Cooper and Truman was a classmate of mine at UCLA, Jennifer Aquino; she was on the same dorm floor I was in our freshman year there, which was a couple of years before the show. Very cool and friendly person! As you can see from the link, that appearance was her first 'major' part as such (there's a piece in the Daily Bruin from that year where she was interviewed and admitted that while she loved doing it, she was a bit frustrated with the role being essentially a stereotypical eye-candy part with no lines -- can't find it online, their archives only go back to 1994) and she's been plugging away ever since.

I think gygax! RIP said it best:

You guys are misjudging that Twin Peaks was all Lynch's ideas... Mark Frost (Hill Street Blues, $6 Million Man) had a huge hand in overseeing the writing and production of the series.
-- gygax! (gygax!), Friday, October 8, 2004 10:16 AM (2 years ago)

Such good news.

About fucking time.

happy hannukah, me!

roxy otm.

between this, blade runner and the kubrick dvds i am going to be one busy nerd

not to mention a broke one, ha

so, how much?

USD 65 @ Amazon.com, out next week!

http://www.amazon.com/Twin-Peaks-Definitive-Gold-Complete/dp/B000UX6THK

(no sign of a region 2 yet, not on amazon.co.uk, at least)

Can someone tell me when the fuck the UK version of season 2 is going to be released?

I have the Dutch edition. No Dutch subtitles is kinda English too, according to the commenters on the second hand/import reviewers here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Twin-Peaks-Complete-Season-Boxset/dp/B000S2I8X6

Are you ordering it, Stan? I mean, what with the weak dollah and all... :-)

very excited.

I don't think I've seen the American version of the pilot since it was broadcast.

xpost: No, I've only bought that second season a couple of months ago and I don't think my player does R1 discs. At the very least, I'll wait a while to see if this gold edition isn't going to be released over here as well.

Did you google for info on how to unlock your DVD player? Most of'em do, you only need to find the required info on the net or... something.

Yes, and it doesn't have one. I could send it to some shoddy guy in England who will put a modchip in it and charge me half the price of a new one, so I don't think I'll bother. I can watch R1 discs on my PC (I did before I bought the TV), but I'm holding off on the gold thing mainly because I only just got that Season 2 box.

my "Gold Edition" arrived today hurrrah

This guy thinks the new set blows

no commentries?

I watch this video at least once a day
http://www.amazon.com/gp/mpd/permalink/m21O4TZUJYAQGI:m2KPIR84304F95/104-3755093-3823932

The result is a R1 season 1 boxset with some extras, a not great print, the commentaries, DTS sound but no pilot. A R2 boxset with the pilot included, but no DTS. A definitive edition that adds a bunch of new extras, restored prints, but loses DTS sound, loses the commentaries and loses some other extras that were on the individual season boxsets.

I have no idea what this guy is talking about. The box set I have is R1 and has the pilot, remastered 5.1 audio and a remastered picture from the original negative ("personally approved by David Lynch"), lots of extras but no commentaries. The commentaries were crap anyway and weren't by Lynch, who really cares about those...?

I think the first two sentences in that quote are referring to the original season one releases. And the third sentence is talking about the new box set. He doesn't explain himself very clearly I admit.

I have a hard time thinking that a) DTS is somehow demonstrably superior to a 5.1 audio remaster approved by Lynch himself (esp. considering that this was a fucking TV SHOW that was originally intended for broadcast across shitty TV speakers) and b) that ditching the commentaries (which were not that interesting to begin with) is somehow a horrible loss. I mean, these are his major complaints, this nitpicking bullshit?

Besides, isn't Lynch a notorious commentary hater?

I watch this video at least once a day

And to think that five years later was Showgirls.

I'm not a big fan of commentaries unless the commentator is REALLY funny and/or a natural storyteller filled with fascinating anecdotes - I gave a cursory check through the commentaries on the original season 1 box (mostly by the directors, cinematographers, script writers, etc.) and they were totally fucking boring, just blathering about set design minutiae and lighting rigs and things like that. Largely pointless.

(Jodorowsky and Anger both give good commentaries, for ex.)

BTW, when I saw Lynch speak last week someone asked him about the deleted scenes from Twin Peaks: Walk With Me and, in perhaps his most straightforeward reply of the evening, he said that he was going to be working on the transfer (in Paris, I think) and that they would indeed be coming out.

got the R2 in the shop today (already have the season 1 & 2 box sets, couldn't help myself, shouldn't be allowed near shops I guess - sigh) :-)

The debut episode of Twin Peaks is one of my weirder memories...I was...12?...(yes, you shall all feel aged now)...and I was in the hospital. Earlier that day I had been in surgery and had slept for 17 hours straight; they thought I wasn't going to wake up. When I did, the first thing I did, inexplicably, was demand that I watch Twin Peaks and ate four sandwiches. I've never been right since.
― jess, Wednesday, September 5, 2001 8:00 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^this is great

just watched the pilot (for the zillionth time) of this last night. still my all-time favorite television show despite its descent into shit partway through the second season.

still my all-time favorite television show despite its descent into shit partway through the second season.

OTM, but: I recently re-watched the second season for the first time in many years and, though the mid-season sag is justly maligned by many, I think it is great for campy fun (particularly the sub-Cinemax Noir 101 plotline with James and the femme fatale) and mostly a pleasant diversion between the murder mystery & Windom Earle/ Black Lodge main themes. This was also the first time I had watched the second season on DVD, as opposed to my VHS dubs from the shows original prime time run (complete with Desert Storm newsbreaks and even a random episode of Cop Rock!). One might imagine how those VHS tapes have held up after (gulp) almost 20 years of near-perpetual abuse (I had a serious TP jones as a teenager & the tapes have been loaned out to countless interested parties over the years, usually at my insistence). Anyway, what I'm taking the long route to getting at is that I was blown away by how red-saturated the DVD transfer was. I had thought that the oversaturation was due to my third-hand dubs, but I realized that Lynch really did push the red that hard, and it totally worked! The perpetual exaggeration of warm tones is just as key to the aesthetic as the music or coffee/cherry pie/logtrucks.

Just got the last set of DVDs from the library. I started watching ages ago and got bogged down in the aforementioned descent into shit. Now I've just got the last episode to go, which I've never seen!

Everyone's hands inexplicably shaking in the third-to-last ep = awesome

Clotpoll, you're in for a big treat. TP last episode = best. shit. ever.

the bf and i holed up in my new "multimedia room" for 2 days, baked a cherry pie, drank coffee and just watched all of these. he'd never seen them before, this was my 6th or 7th time watching the series all the way through including its original airing -- i was 9. someday, my log will have something to say about this.

I might be too hard on the second season drop-off there, it's been a while since I've watched those episodes. It seemed basically like a lot of less talented people trying to emulate Lynch's weirdness and coming up with lame, self-conscious quirk that completely misses what made the show special in the first place. The storylines aren't particularly interesting. The Windham Earle plot, which had the potential to be great, was completely wasted. Too much time is spent with James, my least favorite character. I think this has more to do with the actor, James Marshall, who possesses some kind of magical anti-charisma. The Black Lodge stuff kept me interested though.

I spent a night drinking with a friend of mine who is also a big TP fan. We nerdily went through the boxed sent and picked out favorite scenes. There's a great moment in Season 2 where Major Briggs calls Bobby over in the diner and tells him about a dream he had about Bobby's future. Totally oddball, touching father-son moment that seems just kind of tossed in there. We, being fairly smashed and sentimental at that point, watched the scene about 10 times and talked about our dads. The next day said friend found Don S. Davis, AKA Maj. Briggs, on MySpace (!?) and sent him a message about how fantastic his work on the series was and mentioned that scene in particular. He responded fairly quickly with a super-nice message about what a great actor Dana Ashbrook was to work with and how he treasures the time he had on the show. Two weeks later, the guy passed away. That really bummed us out. Made us realize how emotionally invested we were in the show. I can't really say I've ever had anything remotely like that with any other television show. Or film or novel for that matter.

Aw, poor Pete.

Wish I hadn't been spoiled for a lot of the actual plot developments but it's not like that matters with the Black Lodge stuff. Yeah, fantastic.

David Lynch in general, sucks ass. This is after having watched only 2 films: Blue Velvet and Mulholland drive Drive. I'm never going to give him points for innovation and great pathos/art direction in some scenes (or whatever it is that people like best about his films)... because the movies (Blue Velvet and Mulholland drive Drive)as a whole suck ass.

That was the same problem with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
And I refuse to like uhh whats it called. umm Garden State for different reasons. As a whole, it sucked balls (but not as bad as the other two). Juno is OK with me and Little Miss Sunshine is better than OK. Thanks for reading my rant.

but I never saw twin peaks either.. just so you fanboys/girls won't cry because someone is hating your favorite tv series or whatnot.

Thanks, CaptainLorax.

Twin Peaks has dated horribly. I tried showing 'er indoors recently and neither of us could sit through it. At the time it was the best thing ever, though.

Anyone who hates Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks is DEAD TO ME.

Juno and Little Miss Sunshine can go fuck each other.

also, don't understand connection to TP.

I like your opinions CaptainLorax I would like to hear more.

I don't think anyone had made that undeniable ass-sucking connection between Eternal Sunshine and Blue Velvet before.