Welcome to my very first DVD review. I guess the guys wanted to try and break me right away with a whopping 8 disc (9 if you count the CD-rom disc which holds the episode scripts.) Lucky for me, I happened to be the resident Highlander freak so it seemed like a natural choice. I mean, there can be only one, right? Wahh wahhhh... ok, now that the lame joke is out of the way, I can get serious.

Who could forget the classic Highlander film from 1986. Russel Mulcahy was coming off some cutting edge work on Duran Duran videos into his first movie, which I'm sure spawned way more than anyone ever expected. Whereas most fans of the movie would agree that the movies ended with the first film, many fans did end up enjoying the ongoing television series, which we can now enjoy in chronological order on the wonderful format of DVDs.

In a nutshell, the Highlander story is about immortal beings. They look just like everyone else, except that they don't die, from natural causes at least. They can be killed by decapitation, however. How and why would they be killed? Well, there is this thing they call "the gathering" which draws immortals together, and then they battle. They usually fight to the death and the winner inherits the "quickening" of his beaten foe. The quickening is best described as the energy or power of the immortals. It contains their strength, their wisdom, and other neat things like apparently a proximity alarm which lets immortals know when one of their own are around. It may sound a little silly at times, and a lot of the aspects are still up for debate, but I find it to be a fascinating universe to visit.

The television series is basically an alternate universe of the Highlander mythos. Conner is not 'the one' and the 'game' didn't end with him killing the Kurgan. Adrian Paul plays another MacLeod, Duncan, who is younger than Conner, but, as we see throughout the series, seems to be a much more well rounded immortal. (I guess there was something in the water over there in Scotland?) Any way you slice it, the television series really allowed the Highlander universe to be explored. In the movie, we caught a mere glimpse of Conner's hundreds of years of living. Throughout the life of the Highlander television series, not only did we get to see a lot more of Duncan's experiences, but other immortals as well.

Season One of Highlander is where a lot of the fun was had with the series. It is painfully obvious early on that the group was trying to flesh things out and find their creative groove. Adrian Paul was pretty stiff in the earlier episodes but really comes into his own soon enough through the first season, and really gives a lot for people to like. The series was out pretty much when I was starting college, and I remember a lot of people watching the series for various reasons. You had the Highlander junkies like me, the guys who just liked action series and apparently Adrian Paul attracted a lot of female fans as well. Whatever the reasons for people watching, most of them were having fun.

The first episode tries really hard to lure in the fans. They throw in Christopher Lambert as Conner MacLeod, and Richard Moll (Bull from Night Court) as an over the top bad guy immortal. Throwing Lambert into the mix may have been a good idea for the fans, but it hurt Duncan's character early on. His character just wasn't there yet and Adrian Paul obviously wasn't as comfortable with the character. Lambert blew him away in that first episode. Aside from the weak dialog and banter, the action wasn't bad and the groundwork was laid for the series. Some of the rules were explained that the immortals adhere to and we received some story cornerstones such as Duncan and Tessa's relationship.

I will just address this now. Were we really supposed to believe that Ritchie was some street wise badass?! Seriously, come on people! Mostly everyone hated Ritchie from the start and his showings in the first season were mostly agonizing to watch. Sure, I was in the Ritchie fan camp late in the series, but early on was just painful to watch. In the second episode of the series we were forced to endure long scenes with Ritchie and his search for his father, while Duncan shows off some of his martial arts skills against some local wannabe gangsters. The only thing that was good about the episode was the fact that Ritchie Ryan used to think his dad, Jack, worked for the CIA. Ritchie's dad Jack. Jack Ryan? CIA? Get it? Well... it made me chuckle at least.

Another thing that made the Highlander series so much fun were the guest stars. Even early on in the series we saw Vincent Schiavelli, (John O'Conner from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai. Trust me. He's a well known character actor, you would know him if you saw him.) Joan Jett was the first in a string of musicians turned immortals in the series along with Vanity, Roger Daltrey as the always fun Hugh Fitzcairn and Roland Gift, lead singer of the Fine Young Cannibals who played the awesome reoccurring evil immortal, Xavier St. Cloud. Marc Singer showed up in an early episode with a bad accent and even Joe Pantoliano played a character during the first season. There was no shortage of talent on the show, that is for sure. It made for a fun show and there are just so many notables in this first season alone that it's no wonder people loved to watch this show.

The DVDs themselves are fairly light on extra features, but it isn't so bad considering how many episodes are in the set, 22 in all. There are three episodes per disc and before each episode you can choose to watch a featurette about that episode from Bill Panzer who was the executive producer of the series. Although mostly dry, these quick couple minute clips do give some insight on story and production. You can also chose the standard DVD staple of scene selection as well as going straight to the "Quickening" shot of the show if there was an immortal beheading. That is a nice little feature if you want to quickly see the progression throughout the series of their "quickening" effects or experiments. In addition, each episode has at least some "Watcher Files" which you can peruse through for some further character back story. "Watchers" were introduced later in the series formally as people who recorded the lives of immortals. These files can be very informative and give you a nice concise snapshot of the subject whether it's a normal person, immortal or even an event or weapon.

The overall transfer is pretty decent. It's not the best transfer I've seen but I think some of the murkiness of the early few episodes is most likely due to the original production as opposed to the transfer, since later episodes seem better. The video is formatted to your standard television screen, exactly as the source material was and I really didn't notice any artifacting at all. The only part of the collection that falls apart is some of the bonus material, notably the Behind the Scenes feature which looks like it was dubbed from someone's 5th generation copy of the show on VHS that put on a tape which was recorded over 5 times already. It was ugly, but at least it had some interesting content. They even left the original interstitial segments in the show which made me giggle a bit. The Blooper Real had better quality but still less than the regular episodes, but that is understandable since a lot of it was spare footage and the like. The Blooper Real seemed to span the entire series and featured a lot of good moments and practical jokes.

The sound in the series is really crisp and vibrant. They did an excellent job with the sound effects in the series overall and these discs show that. The fights feature a lot of 'whooshing' of blades as well as clanging and electricity crackles. Add to that a lot of Queen music and your speakers are in for a treat. Unless of course you hate Queen music, then I might suggest you not even look at this series since Queen comes along with the Highlander franchise as a package deal.

All in all, there is a lot to like in this Highlander: Season One collection. We get to see how quickly the series evolved and we get to enjoy a lot of capable guest stars. Legendary swords master Bob Anderson provided much of the sword play choreography in the series and it shows. The show would not have had the same impact without him. His expertise turned people who have never picked up a blade into capable on screen swordsmen/women in a matter of days. It was nice to see him in the Behind the Scenes feature, even though it was a little grainy. Even though there isn't a ton of special features, such as full length commentaries and the like, I feel that extras like that may have been overkill for this series. I have heard some boring commentaries and I just don't know if I could sit through 22 hours of Bill Panzer's dry delivery. What is there is there and it's good, but people who are used to overload may be a bit disappointed. Highlander fans most likely won't be let down though.

Another bonus which really isn't mentioned is that these episodes seem to be the European cuts of the shows, which generally featured a couple extra minutes of footage which were cut to add more commercials in the US syndication. I don't think we ever missed anything essential to the story, but it's nice to have everything in there as close to the original as it can be. Overall, this isn't a bad collection at all for the fans. The retail price might be a bit steep compared to other collections, but keep in mind that there are generally a lot more episodes here which are roughly an hour long each. Like I said though, fans won't feel ripped off. This is definitely the best way to check out some of the better aspects of the Highlander mythos and I highly recommend it if you used to plan your Saturdays around this series when it was originally aired.