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STUDIO: Touchstone
MSRP: $39.99
RATED: TV-PG
RUNNING TIME: 625 Minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES: "Thank You For Being A Friend" featurette
The Pitch
"Picture
this: You’re eight years old. You get up in the middle of the night because you
need a drink of water. As you pass the guest bedroom where your grandparents
are staying for the weekend, you hear the unmistakable sound of bedsprings being
rigorously tested. You return to your blankie, filled with a new sense of
surety about how much your grandparents love each other."
The Humans
Bea
Arthur, Betty White, Rue McClanahan, Estelle Getty.
The Nutshell
The four,
lovable sixtysomethings ring out their final season with a fanfare of
innuendo, sibling rivalry, jealousy, friendship, and murder.
The Lowdown
We’ve
missed a couple seasons’ worth of coverage of The Golden Girls here at
CHUD. Lovable Jason Thompson covered the first three seasons, and Adam DiMuzio
handled number four. The magic of a good sitcom is that you can miss any number
of episodes, and still have a fine twenty-two minutes of mild entertainment.
With that principle in mind, this seventh season of the 80s/90s show delivers exactly
what it needs to: a minimum of one laugh per page, lovable characters, and a
thin, almost superfluous continuity. Miss two years of Full House and bam! all of the sudden, Olsen twins. The
only thing you lose out on here is the elderly getting more elderlyish.
The Golden Horn must be obeyed.
I
appreciate The Golden Girls for one major reason: the situational comedy
is often cleverly disguised — and occasionally replaced with — character
humor. Each of the four leads is invested with distinct personality, shifting
the focus from the wacky situations they land in to the predictable (or maybe
"reliable") ways the girls extricate themselves. The humor is
primarily situational, when you bother to deconstruct it, but each script gives
ample time for character reaction, and the faux-development that sitcoms have
necessarily evolved.
Being
such a show, it’s worth mentioning that the characters are the biggest draw. They
are at once charming and mildly insane, just on the edge of reality. They’re
the sort of characters that you occasionally meet and real life, while thinking
to yourself, "I thought these people only existed on TV." Whether
it’s deliberate exaggeration or born out of experience, the engaging combination
of age’s wisdom and the irreverence of youth gives the girls a cross-generational
appeal.
These
arguments could be successfully made for any of the seasons of the show,
unfortunately. The writers nod here and there to dramatic influences, especially
the episodes placing Arthur’s character at odds with her wayward sister and
setting those segments with very few overt jokes; but while consistency can be
a laudable choice, it should also be mentioned as a potential negative.
The Golden Skank must be given attention.
The
season does build nicely toward the end of the run with a number of two-parters,
culminating in the sweetly sentimental finale. Throughout its run, the show
managed to capture everything positive about the sitcom format, and though the
negatives, such as a gluttony for throwaway gags, appear in respectable force, The
Golden Girls ought to be remembered as being aware of its own pulse, as
well of that of its audience.
I didn’t
mean to end with a medical joke.
The Package
The audio
and picture are in television standard 4:3 and Dolby stereo. Don’t expect much.
Actually, don’t expect much from the package in general. The only bonus is a
funny, but short, retrospective with the actresses, called "Thank You For
Being A Friend." It’s a summation of the sharp-tongued relationships the
girls shared with one another, and it’s kind of unnecessary.
6.8 out of 10