DVD Tuesday: The Patty Duke Show, Various Fan Favorites

Out today is Shout! Factory’s The Patty Duke Show: Season One, featuring all 36 black-and-white episodes from the 1963-1964 season. Bonus features include new interviews with Patty Duke, William Schallert and others (they may be part of a featurette, I’m not quite sure). The ABC sitcom ran for three seasons and 104 episodes, plus an unaired pilot episode with a somewhat different cast. That unaired pilot isn’t included in the Season One release. It was, however, edited into the season finale as a flashback.

Also being released today are a dozen “fan favorite” single-disc sets from Sony Pictures, each of which contains six or seven episodes apparently taken from one season. Shows getting the “fan favorite” treatment include All in the Family, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Good Times, Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons, Diff’rent Strokes and Barney Miller (plus some more recent shows). Exactly why these are being released is a mystery. Does Sony think people who don’t have any of the season sets of these shows are going to purchase a “fan favorite” disc and then suddenly want to buy all those season sets?

Finally, Alpha Video has three new releases today: The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, Volume 15, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Volume 20 along with a six-DVD set collecting The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, Volumes 6-11 (5-DVD).


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One Reply to “DVD Tuesday: The Patty Duke Show, Various Fan Favorites”

  1. These SONY “fan favorite” discs are really “samplers”, intended for people to go out and purchase “complete box sets” of the shows, IF the viewers like what they see on each disc. Very clever marketing tool- now let’s see if it works!

    I’ve seen the original unaired pilot of “THE PATTY DUKE SHOW” (it’s been floating around in “collectors’ circles” for years, and has turned up on YouTube). It IS a bit different from the series that followed it; for one thing, it was filmed in Hollywood, and the setting took place in San Francisco. Sonny Burke wrote the original theme and music score for the pilot, and there was a different “Martin Lane” [Mark Miller] and “Ross” [Charles Herbert]. What happened was, after the pilot was sold to ABC, there were certain child labor laws in Tinseltown that restricted the amount of hours Patty could film the series each day. So, production shifted from L.A. to New York (where the laws were more relaxed), and Miller and Herbert’s parts were recast with William Schallert and Paul O’Keefe- and the setting became “Brooklyn Heights”. Sidney Sheldon (who co-created and primarily wrote the series) and William Asher (“co-creator” and producer, until he moved on to “BEWITCHED” in the fall of ’64) wanted to use the pilot film in SOME form. So Sidney fashioned a “flashback” story utilizing most of the original footage [carefully eliminating all references to “San Francisco”], with new sequences added, and that became the final episode of season one, “The Cousins”. Simple. A pity Shout! Factory didn’t bother to use even a “worn” 16mm print of the original pilot as an “extra”…they probably aren’t even AWARE it exists!

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