Product Description

Attention evil-doers! The Tick is here, and he's wearing the blue tights of justice! Together with his trusty moth-costumed sidekick Arthur, The Tick keeps the streets of The City safe from a rogue's gallery of hilariously malevolent villains. So grab a snack, put your feet up, and get ready to laugh and cheer as everyone's favorite brawny hero swats evil on the snout with the rolled-up newspaper of goodness!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6869 in DVD
• Brand: Buena Vista Home Video
• Released on: 2006-08-29
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 252 minutes

Features

• Attention evil-doers! The Tick is here, and he's wearing the blue tights of justice! Together with his trusty moth-costumed sidekick Arthur, The Tick keeps the streets of The City safe from a rogue's gallery of hilariously malevolent villains. So grab a snack, put your feet up, and get ready to laugh and cheer as everyone's favorite brawny hero swats evil on the snout with the rolled-u

Amazon.com
Even with one episode missing, The Tick vs. Season One offers a dozen good reasons to enjoy one of the wackiest superheroes of all time. From his humble beginnings as an in-house comic book character created by 17-year-old Ben Edlund for a Boston comic shop, the Tick (with his muscular physique, twitching antennae, and form-fitting "blue tights of justice") has proven remarkably popular and versatile as a multimedia juggernaut, attracting a global fan base in comics, then this animated series beginning in 1994, and finally as a live-action comedy series starring Patrick Warburton as "the big blue bug of justice." All three of the Tick's incarnations are wildly entertaining, but the animated series comes closest to capturing the unbridled giddiness of Edlund's comics, albeit somewhat sanitized for a Saturday-morning audience of kids and Tick-loving teens and grown-ups. And while episode #11, "The Tick vs. The Mole Men" (widely considered to be one of the first season's weakest episodes) is missing here for legal reasons (but may be included in a future DVD release), the 12 episodes included are remarkably consistent in their well-written hilarity of character and plotting. "The Tick vs. Chairface Chippendale" is just one example of the series' rogue's gallery of oddball monstrosities (the villain's head is a wooden chair, after all!) and the show's clever writers are always finding inventive ways to incorporate in-jokes, show-biz homage (such as the villainous "Uncommon Cold," who sounds suspiciously like James Mason!), and choice bits of throwaway dialogue that will cause older viewers to burst out laughing.

It's regrettable that Buena Vista (i.e., Disney) didn't include any bonus features with this two-disc set (at the very least, the Tick's comic book origins should be acknowledged), and the color and clarity of these episodes varies a bit, from crisp and clean to just a little it fuzzy. But let's face it, the animation (as good as it is) isn't exactly state-of-the-art, and most of The Tick's quality is derived from the outrageous cast of characters (including patriotic superheroine American Maid and the Tick's moth-costumed sidekick, Arthur), all of whom reside in a kind of alternate world of hyper-imagination. Perhaps that's why The Tick has proven so enduring as a pop-cultural touchstone of the late 20th century: Whether he's in a comic book, an animated cartoon, or a live-action sitcom, the Tick is just a goofy, lovable, well-meaning reflection of our better selves, eager (as the saying goes) to swat evil on the snout with the rolled-up newspaper of goodness. Make way for seasons 2 and 3! --Jeff Shannon

Customer Reviews

These are not the DVDs the fans have been waiting for
You've been waiting over 10 years for the Tick to come out on DVD. You've eyed Amazon feverishly. You follow up every rumor. You even bought the live action disks.

And then, in seeming answer to your decade of diligent prayers and blue votive candles, it's finally here, and the package looks fan-freaking-tastic.

You call in sick to work, plunk yourself onto your sofa with a box of Lucky Charms, a gallon of milk, a cereal bowl, and your favorite SPOON! and prepare for a six hour TV-watching orgy.

You pop Disk 1 in the DVD player, and (once you get past all the ads) are nearly drowned by a wave of nostalgia. The main screen is full of animated eye candy, and you watch it at least a half dozen times. Finally you grab the remote and flip through the options.

That's odd... no special features. Must be on the other disk. I mean surely no one would release The Tick on DVD without acknowledging its origin as a comic book or its rabid cult following.

Hmm... now that's REALLY odd. There don't seem to be any commentary tracks either. You KNOW Edlund has things to say about the series. You've been scouring the Internet for Tick info since Mosaic was the only graphical web browser.

Well, you reason, all that other stuff is just parsley. The main course is the shows themselves.

So you push play on episode one, and you chuckle through the opening interview sequence, but something is niggling at you. Something doesn't look quite right, and yet the show looks exactly as you remember. It's not until the title sequence that it hits you so hard that you stop singing along in mid "Dum-dwee".

You pause to confirm your horror:

The reason this looks exactly like you remember from 10 years ago is because it's an analog-to-digital recording! Instead of recording from the original cells, the manufacturer recorded from video.

You sit there for a bit, stunned. They had 10 years to make this DVD, and this is the best they could do? Heck, it's not much better than the bootlegs you made with your first DVD-R. You don't really want to push play again. Your cereal has gone warm and mushy. After a bit you pick up the phone. "Yeah... it was just my sinuses. I'll be into the office in 30 minutes."

Belated indeed, and butchered.
Originally titled "The Tick: Season 1", this two disc set only included 12 of the first seasons 13 episodes. The missing episode is S1E11, "The Tick vs. The Mole-Men", in which The Tick and Arthur act as guide for a bunch of vacationing mole-men and their mole-king. When the mole-king falls in love with a Cindy Crawford lookalike, things get complicated. Disney swears the episode was left out for "creative reasons", which may have some truth as this episode is widely accepted as the weakest of the series - but some sort of legal complication is more likely (maybe they couldn't fit all 13 episodes on 2 discs?). The point is, don't expect any sort of definitive compilation here, this is Season 1 sans one episode. Maybe we'll see the Mole-Men episode as a bonus for Season 2 or, god forbid, a re-release of this Season 1 set.

Classic series. Horrendous DVD presentation.
I, like tons of other people, have been anxiously awaiting for SOMEBODY to finally start releasing the classic cartoon of The Tick ever since the inception of DVD. It seemed like every single series was getting some kind of DVD attention except for this one.

Finally, someone answered our prayers and Season 1 of the animated Tick has been unleashed on DVD.

But there's a dark side to this.

First of all, this set is missing episode 11 "The Tick vs. The Mole Men" due to what is being labled "creative reasons" whatever in the hell that means. While I know this is regarded as one of the weakest episodes in the entire history, this isn't the full first season due to its ommision.

Secondly, the video quality is HORRIBLE. It literally looks someone took some high quality VHS copies of the show and just slapped them on a couple of DVD's. The colors are washed out & bland and there's a really annoying interlacing issue in almost every episode that causes most animation lines to "shimmer" a bit. The shimmering effect might not be quite as distracting on smaller TV sets, but on big screen sets it is really atrocious.

The sound is also muffled and tinny sounding. There's also little bits of missing dialogue here and there as well. I'm thinking that a few episodes might be cut slightly actually.

So, while I am glad whoever finally got off of their duff to release The Tick animated on DVD, I think that they could have done a much, much better job than this.

I hope they realize the error of their ways with Season 1 and really put forth a whole lot more effort on subsequent season releases.

The show itself gets a full 5 star rating from me but the DVD presentation gets a 1.

I wish that Amazon had a seperate rating system in which you could rate both the feature AND the DVD quality seperately.