Dollar DVDs are at least worth a buck

While shopping recently in one of the local "dollar stores" — you know, where everything in the store is $1 or less — I noticed on the checkout counter a batch of DVDs of old TV series.

And I mean old — black-and-white Westerns and detective shows and sitcoms from the 1950s. The kind of shows that pop up on a variety of DVD labels because they are floating around in the public domain. And it always seems to be the same episodes, no matter who is releasing them.

"Are these just $1?" I asked with some surprise in my voice. The young girl at the counter looked up at me with a look that said, "Duh, it's a DOLLAR STORE!"

So I picked one up: "Burns & Allen: 3 Half-hour Episodes."

The disc's package — a thin slip cover with two black-and-white photos of George & Gracie — claims the episodes have been "digitally remastered."

Well, maybe.

But "digitally remastered" has become a relative term.

When you buy a DVD, you'd like to think that two-word phrase means "the film and soundtrack have been improved and cleaned up." But to some of these companies, it apparently means nothing more than "transferred from VHS tape to digital disc."

Under a brief Burns & Allen bio on the back of the slip cover, the three episodes' titles and original air dates are listed, but the onscreen menu is more sparse: a bare screen with the episodes' titles, which you click; no chapter stops.

And two of the episode titles are wrong! And one is for a show that's not even on this disc!

As for the picture and sound quality, the picture looks pretty good on two of the episodes; not so good on one. And the sound is muddied with bit of a hiss on all three. (These are kinescopes of live episodes from the earliest years of "The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show," before the show was filmed.)

Still, they are not unwatchable. (In my book, any Gracie Allen is better than no Gracie Allen.)

And this disc may be better than some more expensive versions of the same episodes that are out there on various Burns & Allen DVD collections.

Of course, "expensive" is a relative term, too. Some of the others are only $3 or $5.

So, for a buck, who can complain?

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Every once in a while . . . OK, daily . . . I find that I've erred, and then I wonder if anyone will notice.

Often they do, and I hear about it. (See last week's column.)

Sometimes, however, a mistake gets in the paper that no one seems to notice or care about, and it seems so unimportant that I wonder if I should bother to mention it down the road.

Then I get ready to go on vacation and I need to come up with a column for the week I'll be gone . . . suddenly it seems more important.

So here it is.