What do you look for in a DVD set? Are you the type of person who expects to see a lot of extras (commentaries, behind-the-scenes footage, interviews, bloopers, deleted scenes, documentaries, etc) because DVDs allow us to have all of those things and it would be a ripoff for the consumer if we didn't get them? Or are you the type of person who is just happy to have the actual episodes to watch over and over again whenever you want and you don't really care about the extras?

You're in the middle? What a politician.

I lean towards the former for newer shows and towards the latter for older shows. Though I would love to have commentaries and features for older shows, I realize that's not always possible. I ask this because the DVD set for the third season of AMC's 'Mad Men' has cast and crew commentaries for every single episode. Let's take a look at that feature and everything else in the set.

If you're old enough to remember before the merger between the NFL and the AFL, or if you're a Philly football fan, the name Tom Brookshier is a familiar one for you. Philly fans will remember Tom as a hard-hitting defensive back and part of the 1960 Philadelphia Eagle championship team.

But for the mainstream NFL fan, Tom Brookshier was the sideman to Pat Summerall before John Madden. That was when the NFC was on CBS, and Summerall and Brookshier were the top broadcasting team.

On Friday night, January 29, Tom Brookshier succumbed to cancer at the age of 78. At his hospital bedside when he died were his wife, Barbara, and his partner for so many years, Pat Summerall.

The assassination of JFK on Sunday's episode of Mad Men may have been the catalyst for Betty Draper's "awakening," but it's been a long time coming.

Here comes my rant: I, for one, am sick and tired of seeing the women in this show get walked all over! I know it's the way things were back then, but the times they are a changin', so I'm hoping we'll get to see more women stand up and take charge of their lives.

I was cheering when Betty stood up to her lying, cheating, skank of a husband Don and told him she didn't love him anymore. Bonus points for driving off to meet your lover, Betty. Hopefully, he won't cheat on you.

Now if Joan would leave her loser fiance who raped her at the office and then went about his business like nothing happened -- that'd be the icing on this women's movement cake. I'd say that she and Roger Sterling belong together, but she's too good for him.

One question I've had with the Disney acquisition of Marvel is how the House of the Mouse is going to deal with certain un-P.C. franchises. The one which came to mind was the comic series Marvel Zombies, which deals with an alternate Earth in which all superheroes were turned into flesh-eating undead and consumed the rest of the world's populace.

While I don't think I"ll be getting my answer anytime soon (perhaps the zombies will simply get locked in the Disney vault), some animator decided to redo the introductions to the 1960's Marvel Comics television cartoons in the zombie style. The original cartoons were essentially stop-motion comics of the original Lee/Kirby works. It's rather impressive how accurately the animator duplicates and parodies the original intros.

These videos can either be taken with humor or disgust as Zombie Captain America decapitates several soldiers and the heads of Norse Gods are thrown around. I leave it to you to judge for yourself. The videos are after the jump.

[via Topless Robot]

Hey, did you hear Mad Men's third season debuts tonight at 10 on AMC? Actually, when the show is this good, I don't mind the hype.

To prepare for the third season, here are some more web goodies for you (in addition to avatars, sneak peeks and recaps). The New York Times has an article on the cocktails of the Mad Men era, and if you want to make some of your own AMC has the drink recipes. AMC also has a Which Mad Man Are You? quiz. Or how about buying some of the era's items for your house?

There are also several interviews to read before the premiere, including Jon Hamm (here too), Christina Hendricks, Elisabeth Moss, and Vincent Kartheiser.

Oh, something from the other night, after the jump...

First of all, I have to say that I'm terribly distracted at the moment, because my daughter is watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Even though I just watched it a few months ago, I wouldn't mind watching the entire series again from start to finish. But, alas, there are other things in my stack o' DVDs, so I'll have to be content with hearing it in the background while I work. She just watched the first two eps, and I had totally forgotten that Darla showed up in the very first episode. Interesting. Anyways...

I'll get back to The Wire -- I still have season five to watch -- but this week's Jane After Dark is all about Mad Men. Sometimes I fall deeply and madly in love with a TV show, and that's how it is with AMC's love letter to the 1960s. I raced through season one right after it was released on DVD, but stupidly waited for season two on DVD. I bought it last week and watched the entire season, devouring it like a hearty tenderloin that's perfectly cooked, so I'd be caught up for the season three premiere on August 16. If you haven't watched season two yet, spoilers follow after the jump...

I was reading a story over at Entertainment Weekly about whether or not 1984 was the greatest year for movies ever (answer: no). It got me thinking: what's the best year for TV show debuts in history?

There are a lot of choices. In 1994 we saw the premiere of Friends, ER, The Game Show Network, Due South, Touched By An Angel, My So-Called Life, and Inside The Actors Studio. Or how about 2000, which saw the debuts of Survivor, Ed, CSI, and Curb Your Enthusiasm? And 2004 wasn't too shabby either, with the launches of Lost, Rescue Me, Entourage, Veronica Mars, House, and Desperate Housewives.

This could be the coolest thing you see on the web today.

AMC has teamed up with Dynamoe (who creates some very awesome Mad Men things) for Mad Men Yourself, where you can create your own Mad Men-inspired avatar for your sites and your iPhone and your Facebook page or whatever. That's me on the right.

Expect a lot of Mad Men-themed posts here for the next several weeks. Not only is the second season being released on DVD tomorrow, but the third season starts on August 16. Variety is getting into the mix too with a special archive of Mad Men-era covers that fans of the show (and the magazine) can view at their site. Right now you can see a preview of the archive here. It's not specifically about the AMC show, it's more a look at the entertainment industry in the 1960s.

This isn't going to be the most earth-shattering news of the day, considering it's the most buzzed about show on television and just won Emmys for Best Writing and Best Drama. But it's good news for Mad Men fans: the series is THIS close to being picked up for a third season.

The Hollywood Reporter says that AMC has told Lionsgate that they want to renew the show for a third season, though the terms of the renewal depend on what deal they make with creator/producer/writer Matthew Weiner.

(S02E06) "If we were to take you to see some women in their underwear, would that be too much like work?" - Fred, to the Playtex guys

Is it just me or is Don's affair with Bobbie nastier than his affairs with Midge and Rachel from season one? Not just that it's rougher and more blunt, but the way that he's doing it. With Midge and Rachel, it seemed like a natural part of his life and it happened away from home and it was separate. This year it seems like he's making a lot of excuses to Betty about where he has to be, like tonight when he lies to her in the middle of the country club bash to call Bobbie. And there's also a meanness and a sadness to the entire relationship.

Having said that, I think I laughed more in this episode than any other episode of the show so far.

When Matt Weiner was a successful sitcom writer -- CBS's Becker -- he had this idea for another kind of show. He couldn't figure out how to pitch it, so he wrote a sample script. The Sopranos' creator David Chase read it and hired him. After copping a couple of Emmys for his work on that HBO drama, Weiner finally got his spec script sold. Now, Mad Men has earned 16 Emmy nominations and Matt Weiner is working on the second season of the show.

Recently, for TV Week, I interviewed Matt about the Emmy nominations. Here are some other thoughts he shared with me about Mad Men:

TVS: What's the show all about to you?

Matt Weiner: A lot of the episodes are about "who am I." A lot of the shows are about what's embarrassing. A lot of it's about denial, about how we juggle our work and our private lives. A lot of the issues that came up in the early 1960s are really hitting us right now.

The New People was a short-lived (17 episodes) Aaron Spelling drama that aired on ABC in late 1969/early 1970. It didn't have any name stars, but guest stars included Richard Dreyfus, Richard Kiley, and Tyne Daly. It was about a group of 40 college students involved in a plane crash and find themselves trapped on an island named Bomano. The island is deserted, but has buildings, supplies, and roads.

Some people wonder if Lost owes a little bit to this show. The setup is the same (a plane crash on an island where people start a new society), and weren't there originally 40 survivors of the Lost plane crash? The phrase "the new people" sounds a lot like "the Others." And Rod Serling created the show and wrote the first ep under a pseudonym, and J.J. Abrams has said many times that he's a huge Rod Serling/Twilight Zone fan. Alas, there is no connection. They didn't even know about the show before, and producer Damon Lindelof wishes he had known about it before so he could have named Charlie's band The New People instead of Drive Shaft. Heh.

After the jump, a video from the pilot episode. It's very 60s. Bonus: old commericals and the theme song, sung by The First Edition, with Kenny Rogers! Groovy.

... So I did. Yeah. Because I do everything the television tells me to. The search quickly led me to a YouTube video of a short cartoon that inspired Terry Gilliam's animations for Monty Python. Created by Bob Godfrey in 1961, "Do It Yourself Cartoon Kit" is extremely amusing. The sense of humor and animation is remarkably similar to Python's, so I really enjoyed it. Check it out after the jump!