Customer Reviews

Felicity - Freshman Year Collection (The Complete First Season)

5 star:		(122)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I love Felicity, and I would love this DVD box set if only Buena did not change nearly ALL of the background popular music. So now when you pop in a disc, watch an episode, you feel completely and utterly lost as the beuatifull music originally aired has been replaced with new "up to date" music. Exactly like the re-runs on thw WE channel, same "new" unfitting music. This is not what I have come to watch and love.

Would you buy the movie Ghost if the classic love scene would have another song playing in the background than Unchained Melody ? I'm sorry but changing the music alltogether is changing the overall feel and I don't get to watch the scene I remember the way they were done.

Poor judgment from Buena Vista to think nobody would notice that.

I'll stick to my VHS set thank you very much.

This is sad. Don't buy this unless you don't care about the memorable scenes with carefully chosen fitting music playing in the background.

Felicity, for me was a show that was based on real situations, with real people and emotions. Every season of the show got a bit better than the previous.
It's a shame the rating's couldn't keep "Felicity" going, as i think it would have been really interesting to see in what direction the storylines and characters went after graduation and in the real world.
"Felicity" will surely be missed by a lot of viewers and fans like myself, but this DVD Edition of the 1st Season will serve as a long awaited window to the past of a great show. I only Hope Buena Vista will release the remaining 3 seasons.
Definetely all of them will be in my collection!

Everyone buy this collection of DVDs so we, the fans of Felicity, can prove to everyone that this show was amazing - and that we deserve all 4 seasons of this drama on DVD. I think this was an absolutely wonderful idea to put together all of the episodes from season 1 - and let's just hope we have a 2nd, 3rd, and 4th season coming soon!

Felicity rocks (and Ben does too)!

Felicity engaged audiences by showing how vulnerable college student Felicity handled life, love and family throughout her college years. The Freshman Year Collection is essential for Felicity fans. The awkwardness between her and Ben, the first sparks between her and Noel and making friends that would last a lifetime. All the tragedies and wonderful events that befell our favorite undergrad are included in this series. Felicity struggled with her destiny - choosing a major that she loved, rather than one her parents' had chosen for her. The first season examined relationships with her roommate Megan, her loves (Ben and Noel), her family and her new friends. Watching these episodes again are a comfort and make me long for my college years.

Felicity poinently reminds me of my own conflicts with youth/adulthood, love/loss, decision/indecision. Keri Russell beautifuly protrays a character writen so smart, so human it's scary. As a twenty something guy, it's also refreshing to see male characters portrayed without chauvinisism and misogynysm prevalent in mainstream media. The writing provides a fresh and honest look at life during formative college years in New York City.

Felicity has great music, progressive storylines, and a consistency of story quality that's really incredible. Felicity is by far my favorite television show of all time.

It was interesting to go back and watch the freshman year of "Felicity" again on DVD, knowing who Felicity (Keri Russell) was going to end up with at the end of not only the first season but the entire series. You have to understand that I was always rooting for Noel (Scott Foley) over Ben (Scott Speedman) and ended up caring for Julie Emrick (Amy Jo Johnson) more than Felicity, even before she made the wrong choice. But then the first season of "Felicity" is all about wrong choices and the human train wreck that is Felicity Porter. Our local cable company lost its WB affiliate all I ever got to see of the second season was the first episode where I was outraged by the revelation of Felicity's decision and took a perverse satisfaction in the infamous hair cut. But then my anxiety was quickly shifted to finding friends or relatives around the country who could tape "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" for me and I quickly forgot about "Felicity." When we got the WB back I caught a few of the finale episodes, including the "time travel" ones, which brought the whole first season back to light again.

Once upon a time a young girl named Felicity finally got the nerve after her high school graduation to finally go up and speak to the good lucky guy she always had a crush on. He signed her yearbook and what he wrote was enough to have her decided not to go to Stanford to study to be a doctor but to head to New York to follow the boy, Ben. The big public comment on the first season was that if you reversed the two roles you would have the story of a stalker. But since it was a girl doing the stalking and because she had wonderful ringlets of curly hair, the behavior was apparently okay. More importantly, Felicity pays for her actions in those first three episodes, where she crashes and burns at just about each and every opportunity, and the show is more about getting away from her parents than it is about pursuing Ben Convington.

Unlike "Twin Peaks," where the hook ended up destroying the series, "Felicity" avoids the mistake and comes up with the most credible job of showing what college is like on television since "The Paper Chase" (which was really on point only if you were in law school). The episode "Cheating" involved the topic of plagiarism while the two-parter on "Drawing the Line" dealt with the issue of date rape, both of which were dealt with in responsible manners. The second time I saw the latter I had the exact same thought when Ben starts beating up on Zach, who yells for him to stop, and Ben does saying: "When you said 'Stop,' I did. That's the difference between us." At the other end where we deal with comedy there is Noel on "smart juice" during "Finally," Felicity putting "sex with Noel" down in her day planner in "Give Me an O," and when Meghan's parents confront Felicity with what they found in "her" box in "Happy Birthday."

I also like the fact that although the show focuses on the love triangle between the three principles and the problems of Felicity's gal pals Julie and Elena (Tanig Miller), that background characters like Sean (Greg Grunberg) and Megan (Amanda Foreman) could emerge so strongly, especially the later, who starts off as a one joke characters as Felicity's absent roommate and ends up stealing every since scene she is in the rest of the season. But replacing Javier (Ian Gomez) with Abby and Danny was a mistake, that was thankfully rectified the next season. Yes, there are bits that will go too far for your tastes, such as Felicity agreeing to marry Javier so he can stay in the country (although I loved it when she brightly announced "I'm marrying a gay guy too" to Noel's gay brother's partner) and a college professor deciding to have an affair with a freshman, but there are enough legitimate track wrecks to keep you attentive.

The extras are sparse on these DVDS, with commentary by the creators on the first and last episodes, and my biggest complaint is that there are no chapter stops for the episodes, so that when I wanted to check and see if Bradley Whitford's name appeared in the end credits of "Birthday" it was a pain to check it out. On to Sophomore year so I can find out what happened to Felicity after she went bald...

1998 saw a surge in the making of teen dramas after the success of Dawson's Creek. Even from this start, Felicity found it's place above the others by being dramatic and strong, and at the same time, very very funny. You can tell that characters and story were created from a place of honesty and care by JJ Abrams and Matt Reeves. I stopped caring about Dawson and Joey after the first season of DC... I continued to care about Felicity and her friends right up until the end, and that was due to writing/acting/directing combination that I often compare to the quality of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer's. The creators of this series had a vision and stuck to it... In the face of being canceled once before, then returning from the dead, the show didn't waver from it's vision as it entered the following season... it stayed just as honest and wonderful as that first episode. I actually have all 4 seasons on tape, but I'm still going to buy the DVD as soon as it comes out.

I have loved the show since it first appeared on the WB. Second only to Buffy in terms of watchability, I was thrilled when the DVDs came out. However, as noted in other reviews, the DVD quality isnt the best nor are there many special features. The thing that bothered me the most was the change in soundtrack. Great songs like Eagle Eye Cherry's Save Tonoght, Kate Bush's Woman's Work (on the soundtrack), Some Sarah and Jewel among others have been edited out and replaced with what I think is Amy Jo Johnson's own music. The sountrack to this series was what made it amazing, all the thought that went into every seen. Amy Jo deserves accolades for her musical career, but not at the expense of what was formerly a flawless TV soundtrack. The rape episode in particular suffered greatly in meaning without the strong voices of many female vocalists now replaced with Johnson. The scene where Julie finally goes to a counselor was amazing with This Woman's Work in the background; the closing seen with Julie reading Zach's letter used to have Jewel's Absense of Fear as the closing notes. Even the sighs in the song had been choreographed to match Julies own intakes of breath. Her own songs just dont have the same power. I wish there was a way I could have the original episodes back. These are good, as the show is amazing, but I feel very dissapointed with the changes.

Felicity is a wonderful show, no question, but what made it so great (aside from one of the best ensembles ever, as well as the wonderfully tender and funny storylines) was the music and how well it fit the scenes, underlined them, and made them more meaningful. I always notice the music in tv shows, and Felicity and Roswell were two of the best in terms of using music really effectively. Shows like Dawson's Creek especially would have songs that were top 20 assembly line popular and many would stick out like a sore thumb, most of the time having nothing really to do with what was going on, but with Felicty that was never the case - there was always a good array of music both in style, genre and age, and they always used songs that were unique in someway that added to the moment being played. However in this dvd for some reason they took out a lot of the songs that made some of these moments so perfect and memorable - I mean it really says something about how deeply the music was a part of the experience if i notice within watching just three episodes that at least two songs were replaced. And what is even more disapointing is that they were replaced for the most part with very uninteresting songs that all basically sound the same. I'm really at a loss as to why they would choose to do this... the show itself I guess doesn't really suffer - if you didn't know what was there you might not miss it, but I can't help but feel like something was lost. The dvd is still definitely worth owning, but I would really have liked some explanation as to why the soundtrack was edited - a song that even appeared on the first soundtrack was taken off... why mess with what worked so well?

Felicity was one of my favorite shows of all time. I became addicted within the first couple of episodes. I really loved the characters and the plot lines. I started out as a Felicity and Noel fan and only came to like Ben in later years. I thought this show had a great combination of humor, drama and fun. I am going to buy the first season on DVD when it's released. I really hope they release all of the other seasons on DVD too so I can see the episodes that I missed. I hope lots of people buy the first season so that they release the others too.