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Welcome to UFO Gifts
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Roswell DVDs
DVDs about Roswell and the Roswell television series.
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Roswell - The Complete Third Season (The Final Chapter)
The sci-fi-themed teen drama Roswell begins its third and final season with Max (Jason Behr) and Liz (Shiri Appleby) back together and taking a desperate chance to find Max's son. After the many cosmic concepts of the previous season, the series dialed back the mythology to focus on the more--excuse the expression--human aspects of the characters. Roswell was often described as Dawson's Creek meets The X-Files, and accordingly Isabel (Katherine Heigel) finds romance with a lawyer (Adam Rodriguez), but struggles both with her mixed feelings about revealing her alien identity and with the aftermath of the tragedy in season 2. (The romance is later spoofed in a Bewitched-style episode.) At the same time, Max and Michael (Brendan Fehr) travel to Los Angeles in search of an alien bounty hunter that might be able to help them find Max's son. (They also find Roswell executive producer Jonathan Frakes making a guest appearance as himself.) Michael takes a night job that at first is played for laughs (in "Michael, the Gang, and the Great Snapple Caper"), then takes on threatening implications in a rousing two-parter that eventually leaves all parties not too much different from how they started. Michael also struggles in his relationship with Maria (Majandra Delfino), first when he makes new friends and later when she meets a figure from her past (Clayne Crawford) who revives a longtime music dream that might lead to bigger things. All the while, the alien trio faces the constant struggle of keeping their identities secret, even as the net seems to be tightening around them. When a key character returns in the series' penultimate episode, both the aliens and the humans they love face a critical decision. The Dawson's Creek comparison is also valid in an undesirable way: many of the background songs that characterized the series have been replaced for DVD due to licensing expenses. Newcomers to the series, of course, probably won't notice. Four episodes have commentary tracks, two by Frakes, who has some interesting information but leaves dead air and introduces characters we already know. Better are the tracks by executive producer/writer Ronald D. Moore on the Bewitched spoof and by creator Jason Katims on the series finale. Other features are a 13-minute summary of the season and Shiri Appleby's appearance on Japanese TV to publicize the DVD release of the first season in 2004. --David Horiuchi
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Roswell - The Complete First Season
Opening with a Dido theme song and featuring character-driven, sweet-natured melodrama, Roswell was a show with a surprisingly dedicated fandom, who twice won it reprieve from cancellation. One of its main strengths was, of course, the extent to which its premise--alien teenagers trying to sort out their identities while emotionally involved with their human contemporaries--was a free-floating metaphor for race and sexuality issues. Another was the strong ensemble that its cast developed: you believed in the strangeness of the alien trio and the well-intentioned normality of their three human friends. Jason Behr gave the alien Max a quiet authority and Majendra Delfino took the sidekick role of Maria and gave it both intensity and fine comic timing. It was also a show in which you were never sure which adults you could trust--William Sadleir trod a fine line of ambiguity as the local sheriff and Julie Benz was silkily sinister as an FBI agent. Anyone who ever loved this show will want these DVDs--and many others may want to find out what the fuss was about. Roswell is presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen. The special features include commentaries on six episodes by writer Jason Katims, the directors, and various cast members as well as a featurette on the making of the show and another on its adaptation from the original Roswell High series of young adult novels. The commentaries are unusually insightful on the casting process, and the discs also include the auditions for the part of Tess as well as a deleted scene and a music video. --Roz Kaveney
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The Roswell Report: Case Closed - The Declassified Evidence
It's been said that every report about the 1947 Roswell incident should be taken with a grain of salt. With that in mind, The Roswell Report: Case Closed is a key ingredient for Roswell fanatics and conspiracy theorists alike. This DVD attempts to disprove the U.S. Air Force's explanation of the crash by using the exact film clips that provided "proof" that the sightings were simply high-altitude experiments using crash test dummies. There is brief narration to accompany the images in this short (31-minute) exposition of the governmental "cover-up" of the crash, but the sights alone make for interesting viewing. Department of Defense footage shows the weather balloons, test dummies, and satellites that, according to their reports, were what confused folks into believing that they saw aliens and otherworldly spacecraft. The most amazing footage, however, comes from the Man High project and an incredible view of a 14-mile free fall from almost 102,000 feet. Whether or not anything actually happened at Roswell in 1947 is left up to the viewer to decide, but The Roswell Report provides plenty of speculation and rumor as food for thought. --Zachary Lively
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