NATHAN RABIN
Wonder Showzen: Season Two (Paramount)
In its jaw-dropping, brain-melting second season, Wonder Showzen seemed less interested in providing entertainment than in engendering nervous breakdowns and simulating what the world looks like to paranoid schizophrenics. The first season pushed the show's format into nightmarish, avant-garde places; later, the show seemed to suffer a complete psychotic break. An incest- and racism-obsessed Hee Haw parody called "Horse Apples" spewed vitriol all over the red states and the blue-collar comics who pander to them. "Cooperation" gets lost inside a sanity-challenging hall of mirrors, while the series-ending "Clarence Special Report" radically usurps conventional ideas of what constitutes compelling television. If Wonder Showzen: Season Two didn't exist on DVD, fans could be forgiven for imagining they'd hallucinated the entire season after ingesting tainted brown acid.
Runner-up: Saturday Night Live: The Best of Saturday TV Funhouse
Lorne Michaels gets a hard time for producing the lazy, complacent warhorse Saturday Night Live, but he was one of the forces behind two of the year's best DVDs: Saturday Night Live: The Best Of Saturday TV Funhouse, and the long-awaited release of SNL's first season. TV Funhouse compiles Robert Smigel's wickedly subversive "TV Funhouse" cartoons in one essential package, and also houses nifty, star-studded commentaries with everyone from Stephen Colbert to James Carville.
TASHA ROBINSON
The Best Of The Electric Company: Volume 1 (Shout Factory)
This set had a mighty wave of nostalgia on its side when it came out in February: The same generation that's still mentally singing Schoolhouse Rock songs learned a lot from this catchy, flashy, hip '70s edutainment series back in the day, and the long-awaited DVDs bring back a lot of memories. The set's selective range makes sure to hit a lot of high notes from throughout the show's seven-year run, and the extras—cast and crew interviews, outtakes, trivia, new intros from cast member Rita Moreno—are aimed squarely and smartly at adult viewers who want to peek behind the scenes of the series that let Morgan Freeman teach them phonics when they were kids. (The second-volume set, which came out in November, addressed the diminishing novelty returns by adding even more features, including a "Play All Songs" option that should be de rigeur for any further series installments.)
Runner-up: The Aristocrats (Thinkfilm)
This DVD came out back in January, so by now, the average viewer should almost have finished working through all the extras: the commentary by director Paul Provenza and producer Penn Jillette, the many extended versions of the "Aristocrats" joke that gives this documentary its title and subject, the footage of the film's hundred comedians goofing around and being themselves. The film was one of 2006's liveliest, but the DVD package makes it into a far more expansive, intimate, relaxed tour of life among America's most famous comedians.
SCOTT TOBIAS
Four Films By Michael Haneke (Kino)
Until this year, Michael Haneke's first three films (The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video, and 71 Fragments Of A Chronology Of Chance), which comprise the so-called "glaciation trilogy," had never been available on video, but the surprise success of Haneke's Cache renewed interest in one of the world's most accomplished, uncompromising directors. The Seventh Continent surely ranks among the most assured debuts in film history; it's a bone-chilling account of an average middle-class family that methodically plots its own demise. The other two entries in the trilogy are solid primers for better movies to come—the seeds of Benny's Video flower in Cache, while 71 Fragments yielded the superior Code Unknown—but Funny Games stands alone as a damning treatise on film violence that doesn't spare the audience for its participation. Each disc includes a new 15 to 20-minute interview with Haneke, who articulates his works with great depth.
Runner-up: Dazed And Confused (Criterion)
At every stage of the film's existence, Universal abused Richard Linklater's rich '70s coming-of-age picture: Producers harangued the unseasoned director during shooting, the studio halfheartedly marketed the film as a stoner comedy, and even when it found a massive cult audience, the special-edition DVDs were pitiful. Fortunately, Dazed And Confused finally found a home at Criterion, whose two-disc DVD covers the painful process of bringing it to life, among other behind-the-scenes ephemera.
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