Thriller: The Complete Series Arrives on DVD!

Wow today is like awesome "Golden Age of Genre TV Day". First, the unearthing of this classic interview footage of the brilliant and super-classy Rod Serling.  Now, I learn that Thriller: The Complete Series was released on DVD today!

From heatvision.hollywoodreporter.com:

There was an age in television where spine-tingling and spell-binding anthology shows ruled the air. "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and "The Twilight Zone" scared the little boys who would grow up to become the Stephen Kings and Steven Spielbergs.

One of those shows was "Thriller," an anthology show hosted by Boris Karloff that lasted only two seasons and split its episodes into themes of crime and terror.

Some of the episodes were eventually made available as individual episodes on VHS, and there were bootleg DVDs, but never was the series comprehensively all together. Today, Image Entertainment releases the complete series, comprising 67 episodes on 14 DVDs. The collection also includes 24 hours of audio commentaries and 31 hours of isolated music and effects tracks. 

The episodes tackled stories by such notables as Edgar Allan Poe, "Psyhco" writer Robert Bloch and Robert E. Howard and featured future stars William Shatner, Leslie Nielsen, Ursula Andress and Richard Chamberlain. And each episode featured an intro by Karloff, who gave the proceedings a stage-like, one-night only performance feel (and the soundstage sets didn't hurt either!). Karloff even acted in some of them, which gave audiences who were accustomed to him playing Frankenstein's monster something else to remember. 

... Image is also releasing several seasons worth of "The Twilight Zone" this fall, and that series, combined with "Thriller," were made at a time when creepiness was invited into our homes on a weekly basis. Occasionally, some show will try to capture that spirit, or put a modern spin on it by giving it some character arc throughline in "X-Files"-"Supernatural"-"Fringe" fashion. But one thing these collections do is slap a big "Schooled!" sticker on us and show us how it's really done.

Zombie-dance jokes aside, Thriller is so going on my Amazon Wish List! As is the Twilight Zone, assuming the new releases include anything I don't already have in my beloved Complete Definitive Collection set.