5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Better than anything on today, May 17, 1999
It is a pleasure to relive these great episodes and to appreciate again how intelligent they assumed their audience to be. After all, any line like "Lady Bracknell, your handbag" is not designed for the high school dropout. Shot at a lower budget, these black and whites use exterior shots a lot more than do the more studio-bound color series. Some episodes ("The Hour That Never Was" for example) are a little slow-moving compared with gems like "The Return of the Cybernauts" and "Death at Bargain Prices." My only negative comment is Death to Whoever tried to glamorize Rigg with all that horrible lip rouge about half way into the series. And while we are at it, since A&E nicely fit three episodes onto a single reel in Vol. 6, why do all the others have only two? But at any price, these tapes are unbeatable for sophisticated wit and tongue-in-cheek adventure. Er, A&E, what about the Tara King series?
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Steed Takes A New Partner - Emma Crosses the Atlantic, May 7, 2002
The Avengers was one of the hippest shows of its day, and manages to stand the test of time pretty well. It achieved its maximum popularity in 1965-66, when streamlined for exportation to America, which was when Diana Rigg was hired to replace the departing Honor Blackman. Prior, The Avengers was essentially a weekly live crime melodrama a la Agatha Christie, interspersed with some occasional spy hijinks. Once Rigg was brought aboard, the show's budget increased, it was transferred to film with more location shooting, the music got jazzier and the approach sexier (Emma Peel's name was contracted from "M"an-Appeal), and the stories grew to be more laced with science-fiction. It proved at least as popular in the States as it was in its parent Britain, and a legend was born.
The show was never better than in Rigg's first year, the '65-'66 season, the first six episodes of which comprise this set. "The Cybernauts" - first episode aired in the States (third, in England) - set the tone extremely well for what was to follow in episodes to come. Our hero and heroine, Steed and Mrs. Peel, foil a mad industrialist's plan to create a cybernetic police state, by deactivating his earliest experiment: a killer robot. The English debut episode - first on this set of tapes - is "The Town Of No Return," a fifth-column invasion story of typically (for this series) bizarre means. "Death At Bargain Prices" finds the British supersleuths investigating the disappearance of an atomic scientist in a lavish department store. "The Gravediggers" is about a radar-jamming outfit connected to a local cemetery (and an eccentric's life-size model train collection). "Castle De'ath" is where a foreign power utilizes a secret submarine base to disturb the local ecology, and thus its economy. "The Master Minds" are a MENSA-esque high-I.Q. club who recruit the best brains in Britain to devise top-secret sabotages and burglaries.
The Avengers is long overdue for a renaissance, and thanks to these tapes, its comeback time is here. Whether your tastes run to noir melodrama, spy stories, unusual crime, sci-fi, or even just light comedy, you'll find what you're looking for in The Avengers.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Diana Rigg is always fascinating., August 26, 1999
By A Customer
Diana Rigg makes "The Avengers," a campily scripted and shot television series from the sixties, a fascination to behold. In practically every scene she adds some extra bit of business that compels today's viewer to helplessly hit the rewind button again and again with something approaching awe, especially since television is always shot so quickly that embroidering one's characterization is unfortunately quite rare.
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