… but that’s an argument for another time.
Buy,Download, Or Stream Dallas – The Complete Fourth Season! Click Here
Season 4 of ‘Dallas’ continues apace, and, to directly contradict the spotlight review above, is most certainly the equal of, and in many places, surpasses the very high standards area down in Season 3.
Okay, so we all know who shot J.R. I won’t spoil it for the two-and-a-half people left on the planet who do not know, but with the first four episodes done and dusted, there’s a wealth of original situations and characters and mishaps waiting to be introduced to the unhappiest family in Texas.
Buy,Download, Or Stream Dallas – The Complete Fourth Season! Click Here
New sons, fresh mothers and recent (and ragged!) wives are honest for starters: Season 4 also brings us resurrections, infidelities, engineered foreign revolutions, oil terrorism, murders and more high-octane drama than you can shake an oily stick at. The more standout recurring characters approach in the shape of Susan Howard as Donna Culver and Leigh McCloskey as Mitch Cooper (the whiniest chauvanist since… …ever!), and the resident cast is every bit as watchable and lovable as before.
While Season 4 of ‘Dallas’ does own noteworthy of the previous high standards of writing and acting, there’s a decidedly more ‘soapy’ air on indicate – although nowhere as irregular as ‘Dynasty’, there are distinct situations, such as the hasty deterioration of Bobby and Pam’s marriage, or the reintroduction of one of Sue Ellen’s dilapidated flames, that hint at the beginnings of that gloriously escapist behemoth known as 80′s Prime Time. Peaceful, it’s a very subtle shift, and this isn’t a complaint; rather, the Ewings are changing for the better.
All in all, Season 4 of Dallas is truly apt. In addition, audio/visual quality is, as ever, capable, and the extra ‘Return to Southfork’ documentary, though obviously and painfully scripted, is a nice touch – particularly to behold honest how extraordinarily well Miss Linda Grey has obsolete!
Highly recommended, now PLEASE won’t y’all release the rest of the note??
Season Four of the sinfully-good CBS-TV nighttime, prime-time soap opera “Dallas” came out on DVD on January 24th, 2006, in a nice-looking 4-Disc position, which contains all 23 full-length, fourth-year episodes (running about 49 minutes each) .
This region, as most Dallas fans surely realize, has within it the episode that resolves the “Who Shot J.R.? ” memoir arc. It’s episode #4 of this season (“Who Done It? “), which first aired on Friday night, November 21st, 1980. And it looks objective tremendous on this DVD (as do all the other episodes as well) . The video quality here, like the earlier DVD sets of “Dallas” save out by Warner Home Video, looks A-OK to me.
Prior to the much-anticipated airing of “Who Done It? ” in leisurely November of 1980 (which was delayed in getting aired by about two months due to an actors’ strike in Hollywood that shut down production of all TV series), it had been exactly eight months since TV viewers had seen the season-ending cliffhanger where we study J.R. Ewing being filled with hot lead from the gun of an unseen and unknown would-be murderer.
That meant eight long months of guesswork engaged in by fans of the series, trying to figure out who plugged John Ross Ewing II. I can vividly remove the media build-up to the “Who Done It? ” episode in 1980. It was something else. Everyone was talking “Dallas” and speculating as to who might have been the gunman (or gunwoman) . And there wasn’t a shortage of “suspects” either, moral on up to Miss Ellie Ewing, J.R.’s gain mother! Several people opinion Ellie had had enough of her eldest son’s backstabbing shenanigans and had decided to consume matters (and a cancel weapon) into her enjoy hands.
Anyway, those months leading up to the gigantic cliffhanger-resolution 4th present of the year were truly something to study. So it’s no wonder that the “Who Done It? ” episode managed to atomize all kinds of television records. 41,470,000 homes (“households”) were tuned to “Dallas” that Friday night in 1980 to observe who it was that tried to raze Mr. Ewing, shattering the previous television ratings’ narrate (held at that time by the last episode of “The Fugitive” in 1967) for the highest-rated and most-watched single TV program in history.*
* = Total number of trusty “viewers” watching “Dallas” on 11/21/1980, however, was distinguished higher than the 41-Million-plus figure previously mentioned. From data I’ve gathered on the Internet, there were approximately 83,000,000 people watching “Dallas” that night in the United States. (Although some sources list this “Total Number Of People Watching” stat as greater than 90-Million.)
Another enthralling statistic that surrounds the airing of the “Who Done It? ” episode is the fact that commercial advertisements that were seen on CBS-TV that night cost those sponsors $500,000 per cramped. And, remember, that was many, many years ago, in 1980. Whew! J.R. would no doubt be very proud of those monetary stats!
Of course, that half-a-million-dollars-per-minute TV ad cost, circa 1980, is dwarfed by some similar 21st-century stats….e.g., the average cost for a 30-second TV situation during the annual Elegant Bowl telecast reached a staggering $2.4-Million (as of 2005) .
This fourth year of “Dallas”, which is considered by many accurate “Dallas” fans to really be objective the third (bulky) season of the indicate, in addition to containing some of the most-memorable episodes from the whole series, also marks the dusky departure of Jim Davis (who played “Jock Ewing”, the always-gruff and no-nonsense head of the Ewing family and Ewing Oil empire) .
Jim Davis died at the age of 71 on April 26, 1981, which was unprejudiced days before this fourth-season’s cliffhanging finale (“Ewing-Gate”) was aired on CBS. Jim’s/Jock’s presence was indeed missed by this writer during the subsequent seasons of “Dallas”. And while the character of “Clayton Farlow” (played by the slack Howard Keel) was a fair wonderful character in his acquire moral, there was unprejudiced no replacing Jock Ewing. Couldn’t be done.
As fate would have it, Keel passed away on the steady day that the “Dallas Reunion” special originally aired on network TV in early November 2004. He was 85 years ancient. That very Reunion special is also included in its entirety in this DVD space.
This DVD aggregation contains four double-sided discs, which are held in two overlapping disc trays within a smaller and more-compact Digipak case than was feeble for the two earlier DVD collections. The footprint (spine width) of this 4th-season pack is a mere 3/4 of an flow.
When all four discs are removed from the two DVD-holding compartments, an impressive-looking underlying image emerges beneath the plastic trays — a portray of a “smoking gun”. A nice packaging touch.
There is no booklet included here in the Season-Four location. And the slimmer packaging reduces the amount of room for episode info…so there are no detailed (or even non-detailed) episode descriptions to be found on the innards of the box. The episode titles and airdates are listed however.
The outer slipcase box features photos of three of the main cast members (J.R., Pam, and Bobby), with the Dallas city skyline in the background. And while these three pics on the front mask are cut-and-paste jobs, I reflect the veil looks very nice.
And I impartial adore the droll blurb on the abet of the outer box here too. A part of it reads — “Who shot J.R.? One of the men he cheated in business? One of the women he cheated in admire? Or is the culprit closer to home: a member of the huge, dejected Ewing family who figured to sever the weasel population of Texas by one? ”
Excellent! That packaging verbiage deserves a gargantuan ol’ “LOL” too! 
Bonus Feature:
There are no Audio Commentaries included here, but the folks at Warner Home Video have included a really nice extra bonus item on Side B of Disc #4 of this situation — “Dallas Reunion: The Return To Southfork”.
First seen on CBS on November 7th, 2004, this 2-hour Reunion special (87 minutes on the DVD, without the new commercials) was watched by more than 9-Million people during its initial airing. It ranked an impressive #20 in the Nielsen ratings for that week.
The Reunion Special is a very fun program to inspect, with many unique “Dallas” cast members (including Larry Hagman, Patrick Duffy, Linda Gray, and Victoria Indispensable) getting together at the staunch “Southfork” Ranch in Texas to piece their individual and collective remembrances of the TV series (which ended its powerful 357-episode network hasten in 1991) .
The “Reunion” is filled with cast-member anecdotes, bloopers, behind-the-scenes footage, and more honorable stuff too. A nifty itsy-bitsy fragment of the Reunion program centers its attention on the “Best Dallas Cliffhangers”. And there’s some involving unaired footage that was filmed during the “Who Shot J.R.? ” frenzy, which includes scenes of various “suspects” firing the noted shot heard ’round the TV world.
Some of the outtake/blooper footage is hilarious. I especially like the outtake which has a frustrated Barbara Bel Geddes (“Miss Ellie”) unleashing an unmentionable invective as she blows a line of dialogue. The curse word has been “bleeped out” by the CBS censors, but it’s unruffled laughable anyhow, because you know Barbara uttered something playful.
All-in-all, this Dallas Reunion is a very respectable and scrumptious examine abet at one of TV’s pioneering “nighttime soaps”, a present that entered American living rooms for 14 consecutive years, spanning parts of three separate decades.
Some Season-Four DVD Specs:
VIDEO — These 23 episodes are displayed in their native Full-Frame ratio (1.33:1), as first aired in 1980-1981. The 2004 Reunion special is also presented in 1.33:1 Full-Frame, as originally seen.
AUDIO — Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono for all episodes (English only) . The Retrospective Documentary includes a DD 2.0 Stereo soundtrack.
SUBTITLES — In English, French, and Spanish. No subtitles are provided for the Reunion special though.
CHAPTERS? — Yes. Each episode is divided into 6 chapters, and the originally-aired “previews” are intact prior to the main titles on all episodes. The “Next Week On Dallas” trailers at the raze of each point to are not included, however. (Note: The Reunion special is not broken up into individual chapters.)
MENUS — The S.4 Menus are unbiased like those from the earlier “Dallas” sets, featuring the main-title theme music playing on a continuous loop while the Main Menu is on hide. Sub-Menus can be accessed for “Episodes”, “Languages”, and “Special Features”. Plus, there’s a “Play” option on the Main Menu too. Selecting that item will “Play All” of the three episodes on that side of the disc without interruption. (There are unbiased two episodes on the “B” side of the last disc, however — plus the lengthy Reunion documentary.)
The Main Menu on each disc and side features a report of the Ewing family….although Jock isn’t in the report. I can’t figure out the reason for this blatant omission, because Jock was unexcited in the cast during this season. Donna, Ray, and Cliff are shown on the Main Menu, but not Jock. That’s a shame, too, because Jock should certainly be included in a “family” type portrait (circa Season 4; ’80-’81) .
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This Season-Four DVD collection of “Dallas” is an important catch for those who already have Season #3. I cannot imagine having one without the other. Those two “Dallas” seasons go together like hand-and-glove.
To be able to beget the forever-popular “Who Done It? ” episode (and the eps. that lead up to it) in a resplendent, digitally-preserved format, as we watch here, for a very reasonable trace stamp, is something that virtually all “Dallas” fans should be elated about.
And, on top of that, with a feature-length documentary program tacked on to this DVD situation as a bonus, it makes “Dallas: The Complete Fourth Season” an even better ‘steal of a deal’. I’m not too definite that even the scheming J.R. Ewing himself could have wangled a better deal for this DVD package. 
Master Cleanse
