Zorro on DVD

The Disney Treasures - Second Season

The packaging for Season Two is the same as Season One, with another collector's pin, a small booklet, and a reproduced publicity photograph. Here are the discs from Set Two:

Treasures DVD discs season 2

The menus are slightly different for this set.

Season 2 menu

Season 2 menu

Disc One starts with another introduction by Leonard Maltin, who talks about some of the changes for the show's second year. He also shows some of the roles the performers went on to after the series was canceled. The episodes themselves are just as good as Season One, again with the original titles. The titles changed over the course of the season and it's great to see them used rather than a generic set of titles as has been used in some versions.

Disc Six again holds all of the supplemental material for the set. Here's the menu listing the contents:

Season 2 menu

Following the two anthology series episodes is the first of the two new documentaries created for the DVD release:

Behind the Mask

This segment is a brief look at Guy Williams, the man who made Zorro what it is for so many of us. There are some great scenes of Guy in home movies and at Disneyland doing a live show as Zorro. Here's a look at the people interviewed:

Suzanne Lloyd

Buddy Van Horn

Antoinette G. Lane

Guy Williams, Jr.

Ruben Procopio

It's a great look back at Guy, and is well recommended to any of his fans. The disc also includes "A Trip to the Archives," featuring Guy Williams, Jr. and Leonard Maltin examining original costumes from the series and some of the merchandise produced over the years.

A visit to the Archives

A visit to the Archives

Some final thoughts on the DVDs. As visitors to this site can imagine, I'm thrilled that after all these years Disney finally released Zorro in the original black-and-white glory that helped make the series such a hit in the first place. The shows look great, they sound great - and, of course, the stories and acting are great. It will take you a while to watch all of these DVDs but it will be time well spent.

A few fans have written to ask why there isn't more in the way of supplemental materials. For example, why didn't Disney include the original commercials, or copies of public service announcements Guy did as Zorro? Or a collection of still photographs, or copies of press kits, etc? The answer, as you might imagine, is a combination of money and time, or more precisely, the lack of. Some things that seem simple are often complicated. Take the original commercials, for example. Although some of them, such as the 7-Up and AC Delco ads, might have been produced by Disney, they were done under contract for the original advertisers. Who owns the rights, then? Did the original voice-over contracts allow for use on DVDs? Obviously DVDs didn't exist then and all that would need to be sorted out. That would all take time and money, and to be fair to Disney, would it help sell the additional number of DVDs required to break even on the expense? I really doubt it.

It might have been interesting to have a voice-over commentary on some of the episodes, but again, we come down to time and money. There was a very short window from the time the project was approved until it had to be ready to go to the disc duplicators, so some things just couldn't be done in the time available.

I'm fairly confident, though, that anyone buying these sets won't miss what isn't there. All of that would be secondary to the shows themselves. As said, they look great.

The Treasure releases sold out quickly and are now very hard to find. They do turn up on eBay and Amazon, but command very high prices.


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