Classic TV Comes to DVD From Mill Creek: What Holds Up the Best?, Part 1

Recently, Mill Creek Entertainment have been releasing a number of classic TV and movie projects from years past, including comic book favorites like Dilbert: The Complete Series, The Tick: The Complete Series (live action) and the old Batman and Robin theatrical serials that the Rifftrax guys have been having fun with lately.With an eye toward the ones that seem relevant or interesting to our audience, we figured we’d take a look at some of the recent releases and try to figure out which of them still hold up as an entertaining watch outside of just being a relic of cinema/television history. This week, most of the new seasons are pretty tangentially-related to comics and animation, but bear with us…and next week, it’ll be a lot more on the nose.The Cosby Show (Seasons 1 & 2 just released in a single box set)Bill Cosby, best known around these parts as the genius behind the seminal animated series Fat Albert, changed the face of network television when his series debuted in 1984. The fact that there isn’t a feature-rich Blu-ray release for this series is surprising and sad; if you ever take a college course in broadcast television, one of the things you’ll learn is that The Cosby Show and Sesame Street are profoundly influential, and that you can still see the very direct impact of these decades-old show on TV today.The series holds up remarkably well; I’m no great fan of family sitcoms in general, but Cosby’s personality is magnetic and the writing is solid. Despite the occasional groaner (primarily brought on by virtue of the fact that the series is loosely based on Cosby’s oft-repeated stand-up act), the show remains better than nine out of every ten sitcoms on modern TV.