Customer Reviews

Sliders: The Third Season / Sliders: The Fourth Season Value Pack

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I used to love watching sliders years ago but for some reason stopped watching it after the 2nd season. Possibly because I didnt have cable at the time it moved to sci fi. Once in a while I would catch reruns when I could years later but I never knew what actually happened since I stopped. Then the show stopped showing reruns and I was missing Sliders again. Until I saw that season 1 & 2 was for $20 (which I got) and then found out 3 & 4 were in a dual pack for 1 price. I couldnt resist.

If you have never heard of the show. Its about a college student named Quinn Mallory (Jerry O'Connel) his friend who is a girl named Wade Wells (Sabrina Loyd), former 60s-70s singer Rambrant brown (forgor his name) and Prof. Autaro (forgot his name but played Glimii in Lord of the Rings) discover there are altnerate universes where its the same place, time (with one exception) with the same people (sometimes not) but a different road was taken. (Russia won the cold war, england won the American Revolution, etc). They travel to these worlds but cant find their way home, now they must travel to each world until they find theirs without getting killed or trapped in the world.

Now I do agree with the dvd case for season 3, it is cheap looking and at first is hard to master. Season 4's is a lot better as it is like a book with each dvd on a page. Season 3 has 4 discs but in realiaty it has 8. Each disc is double sided which I personally dont like. They should have just had 8 discs. Or try to fit everything onto 4 discs. The special features are very limited. Season 3 has a gag real and episodes of "Earh 2" and another show I never even heard of. While season 4 has an amazing grand total of.....Drum role please..............0 special features.

Now the reason why I gave this dvd dual pack a perfect score is because regardless or the dvd cases, the lack of special features and the the 4x2 discs, this show is great. Each episode is exciting (though some arent as good as others) and intriguing with the what might have been theory.

If you loved the show, if you love sci fi, or tv in general get this before they stop doing the dual pack (after you get seasons 1 & 2), if you miss out still get it

I had not seen this series when it was on television...never heard of it actually. When I came across it in the store, a friend told me that if I enjoyed Quantum Leap, I'd enjoy Sliders...she wasn't far off.
Sliders explores theories of parallel earths. Basically the episodes take on the view of "what would life be like if THIS happened, instead of what really happened historically". Such as Russia winning the cold war, dinosaurs NOT dying off, penicilin never being invented/discovered, etc.
The first couple of seasons pretty much stick to a general goal for the four sliders: Quinn Mallory, Wade Wells, Professor Arturo, and Rembrandt Brown, finding their way home after Quinn's anti-gravitational invention takes a weird turn and opens up a vortex between worlds and sucks them in (voluntarily or not).
Around season 3 the writers explore the idea of "how might the world be effected if the evolutionary path from primates to human, was slightly altered" and they came up with Kromaggs (a twist on Cro-Magnon man, I'm assuming). The Kromaggs become the enemy in the maority of the rest of the series.
Also in season 3, a major shift in characters takes place with the death of Professor Arturo, and the total anhialation of a parallel earth, resulting in Maggie joining the sliding crew. In my humble opinion, this change in characters was a blow to the series. The loss of Professor Arturo's English antics and the addition of another female, with the mandatory "cat fights" and "jealousy" between Maggie and Wade didn't really improve the series, it just made watching it uncomfortable.
At the beginning of Season 4, we've lost Wade now, to a Kromagg breeding camp. But eventually, a couple episodes in, we pick up Quinn's long lost brother, Colin (Quinn and Colin are brothers in real life...Jerry and Charlie O'Connell). The addition of Colin, at first, is difficult to stomach. Casting Charlie as a country bumpkin, didn't seem to serve him very well. The episodes where his intellect matches Quinn's was much more fluid and acceptable, despite his "country bumpkin" up-bringing.
The end of season four plays with the notion that the brothers have finally found their home planet.
Although, I've not seen season 5, from what I understand, Season 5 doesn't have the O'Connell brothers. Instead Quinn meets up with his "double" on a parallel earth and somehow "fuses (?)" with him ending up in Jerry O'Connell being written out of the series. I'm not sure there'd be much left to watch without either of the O'Connell brothers (Jerry specifically, who essentially WAS sliders).
Even though season 4 left me in suspense "will they ever find Wade? Will the Mallory brothers ever find their real home planet? Will Rembrandt ever get back?", with only one member of the original cast of Sliders left, I'm not sure I want to even sit through season 5.

***** review has mild spoilers if you haven't watched the show *****

If you don't know - Sliders is a show where a group of people travel to parallel dimensions in LA and San Francisco. Adventure and hijinks ensue. It's very reminiscent of a lot of comic book and pulp sci-fi - action-heavy, frequently derivative of contemporary genre movies, and on the whole mostly good-humored sci-fi fun for the entire family - with an extra dash of satire and social commentary thrown in for good measure.

Sliders Seasons 3 and 4 are a mixed bag. Season 3 is really, really quite good until about halfway through the season, when they kill off a major cast member. While the replacement is certainly easy on the eyes, she's underwritten and fairly boring. The middle of the 3rd season is basically where the show starts its downward spiral. Season 4 is still fun but with 2 cast members written out (they write off another cast member early on in the 4th season as well), something of the magic seems lacking.

Anywho, there is a problem with the set. The packaging is atrocious. It really almost looks like a bootleg. The 3rd season is a plastic insert with no labels and a cardboard thing that covers the plastic disc holder halfway. All the discs are flippers. It's all very cheap and there's no episode listing. Season 4 has slightly better packaging. The discs aren't flippers and there is an episode listing. Bonus features include episodes of another show, "Earth 2" and Cleopatra 2525 or something like that. That's it, as far as I can tell. Needless to say, nothing to write home about.

In short despite the cheap packaging, the price is right ($10/season for classic sci-fi!). If you like Sliders or just science fiction in general, be sure to buy this and the season 1 & 2 set. Extremely fun stuff.

This is a special combo pack of seasons 3 and 4 of Sliders. Both seasons are the same ones currently available on Amazon. Purchased separately, seasons 3 and 4 will cost you a total of $54.98 (as of this review, 2/27/2010). But now you can spend less than half that amount and get them both for under $25!

I didn't know this 2-pack deal existed, and you can probably find it in your local Target or Walmart anyway. This is an exceptional deal, mostly because neither season is a good enough stand alone and SHOULD be included together to defray your costs, as you don't need to buy either separately. I adored this series and S1 and 2 are great, especially the first season. By the time we got to Season 3, cast members were jumping ship, budgets were slashed and writing and directing suffered greatly. Stories are comical, forced and pathetic and the once great idea of visiting alternate worlds 'where anything is possible' was washed down the drain.

The fourth season actually was not bad, even if we had lone Rembrandt fending for himself, there were a few goodies in there. If I saw this pack for at least $20 I'd buy it just to have the entire series because I was (and am) a fan of the show. The packaging is still horrendous, I think the worse DVD packaging I have ever seen--without a episode booklet or any writing on the DVD's whatsoever. Talk about cheap! I still love my first season and am thrilled its on DVD in the first place.

This was an innovated and original and very well written show when it aired. I will always remember it fondly. Big fan.

4 stars for the double pack and a half decent season 3

I knew I wanted this because I used to watch this when it first came out. I love it because I can watch it with my 12 year old son and not have to worry about what is going to be shown. If there is any thing that I don't know might not be good for him to watch and we come across anything we can always fast forward. Great.