Room 222 - Season One Review

"Room 222" was a great show for its time and rarely seen in syndication the last 30 years.  So when I heard that Shout Factory was releasing Season One I immediately puchased it from Amazon.com as a pre-release purchase.

When I got the set and began watching episode Number One I was shocked.  There was no restoration done for these 40 year old prints.  The color was washed out and worst, the picture was grainy and fuzzy, which became a distraction to follow the episode's storyline.  I thought maybe this was the pilot episode and that was the reason for the poor quality.  But no. The remaining episodes were all in the same shoddy condition.

I am a big collector of TV shows on DVD and have many 40+ year old television series in my collection like "Good Morning World" (1967) and "Gidget" (1965) which were shot on film (not videotape).  "Room 222" was shot on film and therefore a negative of each episode must exist somewhere.  But no new prints were made which makes me wonder why Shout Factory even bothered to release it.

Of course, if you're a superfan of "Room 222" I guess washed out prints, audio drops out and faded colors won't matter.  But if you are not, you might consider spending thirty bucks on another TV series and avoid my mistake.  Other reviews on other sites have complained about the same bad prints.

A real disappointment from Shout Factory.  Hopefully the first volume of "Peyton Place" (1964) due to be released in May 2009 will have remastered film prints.