Hearing a story about something and being left to wonder whether it’s true or not is a fun little game to play. Making things even more interesting is never really knowing with one hundred percent certainty if the stories you’re hearing are true or false because their validity just can’t be proven. That would be where urban legends come in. Even though most people often associate these legends to be nothing more than fictitious tales, most of the time we really have no way of saying with the utmost confidence that something did or didn’t happen. It goes back centuries to when medieval knights roamed around all the way through to today where a single call on a cell phone could spell death. Urban legends can be quite silly, but they shouldn’t be taken lightly at all because they can be a foretelling of things to come.
Each episode of the series Urban Legends takes a particular category or subject matter and presents three urban legends that fit the mold. Each legend is detailed and examples are given, but whether they are true or not is not initially told. The series likes the viewers to try and figure that out for themselves since only one of the three legends in each episode is real. They make each legend quite convincing and it really can sometimes be quite difficult to determine fact from fiction, but some of the more commonly known legends do pop up at times helping your decision-making skills a bit. At the end of each episode, the true story is revealed while the others are debunked and proven to be false. It’s a fun way of presenting things, but I honestly would have rather the creators simply give us real or fake urban legends (with or without proof of either) and explain them, give examples, and reveal their origins. Making it a game kind of throws the series into the realm of Mythbusters which has been doing sort of the same idea for years.
The series is fun, but it gets old really quick making me overly disappointed because I had such high hopes for it. A lot of the urban legends are fun, but there are a number of them which are so easy to pinpoint as totally false making the whole “guessing game” portion of the show completely useless. Not to mention that once you’ve seen an episode once then there is really no need to ever watch it again. Give us all truth or at least what we have been brought to believe as truth even if legitimate explanations aren’t there. Look at Surviving History as an example because that’s a series that I’ve enjoyed watching over and over again because of educational information brought about in a fun way. Urban Legends had the right idea in mind but was too focused on making their series too much like Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction. Remember that short-lived show?
Unfortunately Urban Legends is faulted by something that countless shows have fallen victim to over the years and that is bad reenactment acting. I can’t blame this series for that because, let’s face it, reenactments suck. The acting is never believable and any validity or seriousness of the situations being reenacted is totally taken away because of how laughable the recreated scenes are. Forgive me because it’s honestly not an awful show because it really does provide some fun every now and then, but the capability of being so much better is there. Hopefully that problem is fixed in future seasons making Urban Legends a series that can be appreciated for the utter goodness these freakish stories can bring.
Episodes
Disc One:
It Seemed Like A Clever Idea
When Animals Think
What A Way To Go
Mixed Up In Crime
Cheating Death
No Excuses For Stupidity
Fickle Finger Of Fate
Neighbors
Disc Two:
The Stuff Of Nightmares
Good And Evil
Mail Mix-Ups
Marriage And Affairs
The Dark Side
The Human Body
Weird Woundings
The episodes are shown in Full Screen format and having never seen the actual show on television; I do believe this is about the same quality that you’d gotten then. All looks fine.
The episodes are heard in Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo Sound and it does a more then adequate job for this series. Slight touches of music fill the background while mostly narration and interview clips make up the rest of what you’ll hear and all comes through clearly.
45 “Mini Myths” – About forty minutes worth of little snippets of myths that are discussed in quick fashion. Not much to any of these, but they are still kind of fun to check out.
Urban legends are always something that have intrigued me for a long time now and they just bring about so many different situations and discussions. We’ve all sat back at times and talked about what it would be like to see Bloody Mary in a mirror or finding yourself in a tub full of ice with your kidneys cut out. Come on, we’ve all wondered about it. Then the Urban Legends series of films came out and it got even more people involved in the talks, but they’re certainly not for everyone. This series is fun, interesting, and educational but it’s just not going to be the right choice for all audiences. The first season of Urban Legends has some entertainment to it but I fear as if all the episodes are things you’d watch once or twice and then be done with them. Add hardly any special features into this set and you’ve got yourself a series that may only be worth a rental. Be careful, though, because you could end up being given a snuff film by mistake while someone watches from outside your window and then reenacts the snuff film on you.
Just sayin’!
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A&E Home Video presents Urban Legends: The Complete Season One. Starring: Michael Allcock (narrator) . Running time: 330 minutes on 2 discs. Rating: Not Rated. Released on DVD: March 31, 2009. Available at Amazon.com
