The saga continues in this thought-provoking second season. Set in Capeside, a small coastal town near Boston, Dawson's Creek tells the story of five teenagers struggling through adolescence. Dawson Leery (James Van Der Beek), an introspective dreamer, and Joey Potter (Katie Holmes), a precocious tomboy unaware of her beauty, have been best friends since childhood. Pals Jennifer (Michelle Williams), Pacey (Joshua Jackson) and Jack (Kerr Smith) join them as they live, love and learn.
Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment is officially announcing today the December 16th release of
Dawson's Creek - The Complete Second Season on DVD. This is a 4-Disc set featuring 22 episodes that pick up right where the first season leaves off. The running time is listed at 977 minutes, and it is presented in 1.33:1 full screen video just like it originally aired. Audio is digitally mastered and presented in English Dolby Surround sound, and it is closed captioned for the hearing impaired. Spanish and Portuguese subtitles are included. List price is $49.95 in the U.S., and CA$59.95 in Canada.
Extras-wise, Columbia usually doesn't provide too much on TV-to-DVD sets, but this time they've made an exception! The Dawson's Creek - The Complete Second Season package squeezes in Audio Commentaries (from Kevin Williamson and Executive Producer Paul Stupin), an Interactive Tour of Capeside, the ability to check out the "Dawson's Creek Summer Diaries," a DVD-ROM Link to the Official Dawson's Creek website, and bonus trailers.
Additionally, the back of the box mentions that this release "Features brand new music selected by the Executive Producer." You may be asking, "What kind of a 'special feature' is that?" In our opinion, Columbia is doing a great job here of giving the consumers a heads-up. They are saying that the music rights to songs used during the original broadcast of these episodes were either unavailable for DVD release, or else the rights cost so much that it would drive up the price of the set. So they got the show's Executive Producer involved (at least one of them; 7 people have been given that credit during the 6 year run. For Year 2 it was Kevin Williamson and Paul Stupin, so we hope it's one of them who was consulted). This person helped choose new music which should be an adequate replacement that is cost-effective for DVD production, yet still mostly invisible to the fans as it should strike the same mood and play the same role in telling the stories. We thank Columbia for being up-front about this issue, and we hope all other studios take note!
Anyone who purchased the
Dawson's Creek: The Series Finale DVD that was released last Tuesday has seen this cover art included inside, and knows that there is a $5 rebate card for
Season 2 enclosed as well.
We would like to thank all the people who have written in to let us know about that insert, or that other websites had already posted release information about
Season 2. I'd like to specifically mention Arielle, Chris Kobryn, David Levy, Chris Wills, Marc Fichera, James Bruce, Thomas Stewart, Kevin, Rajni, and Rusty Bartlett (I apologize if I've left anyone out). We feel that we owe you a bit of an explanation, and here it is: Columbia is one of several studios which provide release details to press channels a bit early, so we can prepare news items (like this one) for release on their specified announce date. The announce date for
Dawson's Creek - The Complete Second Season is today, Oct. 6th. The agreement we make to get this info is that we hold it back until then, or else risk losing ALL of our access to the studio's info system. Here at TVShowsOnDVD, we always do our best to act in a professional, responsible manner, which means we live up to our agreements. If we get scooped by someone else because of this, that's the price we pay for having continued access to all the material you want to know. We hope this explanation helps our readers understand the situation.
