They say that all good things must come to an
end. Last week, Paramount Home Media announced
that Criminal Minds
would be saying farewell on Apr. 14 with the DVD release of Criminal
Minds: The Final Season (a mega-set collection
of the entire series would also be available on Apr. 14).
This week we say goodbye to the 20-year run of the
venerable Western TV series, Gunsmoke (September
of 1955 through March of 1975), starring James Arness as Marshal Matt Dillon of
Dodge City … Gunsmoke: The Final Season on DVD
— all 24 episodes — on May 5.
The series was shot on 35mm film and all of the
episodes from this sign-off season have been fully restored from the original
film elements.
Miss Kitty (Amanda Blake) had left the series the
previous year, so perhaps it was perhaps time for the traditional frontier
Western to say its goodbyea. Director
Sam Peckinpah’s summer of 1969 film, The Wild
Bunch, seems to have been the turning point — the
transition from the “Old West” to the modern era. You can only stay in Dodge City of 1870s and
1880s so long before the moving finger of time says … move on.
Of note, Sam Peckinpah wrote 11 of the Gunsmoke
episodes between 1955 and 1958 … how’s that for irony.
Indeed, filmmaker Don Siegel’s The
Shootist, starring John Wayne, would
arrive in theatres in 1976, one year after the departure of Gunsmoke, and
its theme of the final days of a veteran gunman seemed to echo the dying of the
“Old West” and the frontier. Gunsmoke, as
a television series, marked that passage of time quite well, and that is
perhaps why some 35 years after its sign-off it is still remembered and
celebrated.
Also available from Paramount Home Media on May 5
will be the mega-set of Gunsmoke: The Entire Series (all
635 episodes).
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