Rating: 
Summary: A must for fans of subtle 70's Horror
Review: Thank you Universal for releasing this wonderful DVD. The Night Gallery has haunted my memory ever since I first viewed the series as a child, and from beginning to end this DVD does not disappoint.
I am very pleased with the audio/visual quality of this release. I viewed the DVD on a 52" wide-screen projection TV, and the image quality was crisply cinematic.
The included episodes are uneven in terms of content/quality, but I suppose that is the charm of the original series. Some of the episodes have a cheesy "Twilight Zone" style punch-line conclusion, such as "Make Me Laugh," which I don't care for. However, even the clunkers feature fine performances from long forgotten performers such as Godfrey Cambridge (from the above example).
I particularly enjoyed the more open-ended and ambiguous episodes such as "The House," which I found to be a fine representation of stylish and subtle 70's horror, ala the classic movies "Let's Scare Jessica To Death" and "Burnt Offerings."
The goal here is to create a spooky mood of dread and apprehension rather than shock the viewer with gross-out tricks.
An additional Kudos to the wonderful theme music of this show - pretty cool for the early 70's!
Rating: 
Summary: OK.. nobody has mentioned this.. so here goes...SPOILER
Review: The DVD is adequate, the navigation confusing, no behind the scenes stuff, no printed material, adequate is a good word to descibe this DVD.
But there's a little gem in "Eyes" (the now famous and somewhat cliche first bat for budding director Steven Speilberg in the pilot on disc ONE) that so far nobody has noticed or cared to mention.
If you listen carefully to the music box playing early in the "goodbye" scene between Claudia Menlo (Joan Crawford) and Dr. Hetherton (Barry Sullivan)after the surgery where the good doctor warns her not to remove the bandages too soon, you will hear something ASTOUNDING. The JAWS theme plays on the music box , then dissapears. I have a great memory for music and dialogue in films and this theme WAS NOT in any of the versions of the movie I have, BETA, VHS and LD.
OK.. the pilot "Night Gallery" was released in 1969. Question? When was JAWS released? Answer..1975.. so where did the music come from? Did Steven "borrow" the theme for the later film, or was it cleverly inserted into the older move as a reverse homage? The music for Night Gallery was done by Billy Goldenberg, no mention of John Williams.
I think Speilberg pulled a "Lucas" and inserted the theme into the movie for this DVD Season 1 release of the Night Gallery TV series. Good job SS!!
Rating: 
Summary: To Be Fair to Universal...
Review: To be fair to Universal Studios, all of the remastering versus "15-year-old copy" information's originating, as best I can tell, from a NIGHT GALLERY website, www.nightgallery.net. The authors for this site claim to have a "mole" within the studio who provided them with information about the DVD set and also that celebrated Mexican horror/science fiction director Guillermo del Toro (THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE, HELLBOY) had volunteered his services for producing the first season set but had been rebuffed. The website's the premiere NIGHT GALLERY source on the net and no less a person than Carol Serling (Rod Serling's widow) has weighed in on the controversy on the site with personal correspondence (although, at the time I write this, she doesn't appear to have any definite knowledge about whether remastering's taken place or not, either), but, as no one authoring the reviews below has yet seen a copy of the 1st season DVD set from Universal, I'm not sure that this controversy's genuine or not. As for the show, well, it's a very hazy memory of my young childhood. I was only 5 or 6 years of age when it left the air, but it's honestly the first thing I can recall watching as a young boy. My mother was a huge fan of Serling, and she would watch anything he was associated with--TWILIGHT ZONE, NIGHT GALLERY, even those cheesy "Bermuda Triangle" documentaries he narrated in the 1970's near the end of his life. I did catch a very few of the syndicated shows during the 1970's and 1980's but it never seemed popular or had wide coverage in any of the places I was then living. I understand it's now in reruns on the "Mystery Channel," but I don't have access to that station in my area on standard cable, either. I do recall the syndicated version of the show was awful: apparently, the shows had been cut up or extended to fit a 30-minute format, and you often had non sequitur "creepy" footage cut in from other shows or footage from the original show had been repeated in loops to fill time. However, the original shows, unaltered, made a high emotional impact on me as a youngster. I still recall the adaption of H.P. Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model," the episode called "Green Fingers" with the little old lady who could grow just about *anything*, the one about the drunken randy sea captain and his mermaid he found, "Logoda's Heads" about the strange fortune telling shrunken heads owned by an African witch doctor, and the really weird one set in the Old West about the gunfighters sitting around an eerie saloon waiting for something to happen... So, while this may not have been the best project Rod Serling was ever associated with, it did make a huge impression on me at the time and must have had something to it more than just being a typical supernatural television anthology. I'm hoping Universal actually has made some effort with this DVD set and the rumors aren't true. I still haven't decided whether I'm ordering it yet or not and may wait until it's released and see what actual purchasers have to say. I'd really like to see NIGHT GALLERY again in its entirety before I am eligible as an AARP member.
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