MVD Rewind Collection: 1982: Greatest Geek Year Ever (2023) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of MVD Rewind Collection

1982: Greatest Geek Year Ever!, an extended dialogue about the so-called Golden Age of contemporary cinema in the year of 1982, was originally a televised documentary miniseries which aired on The CW in four episodes starting July 8^th, 2023.  Produced and written by Mark A. Altman and directed by Roger Lay Jr., the episodes were broken up into The Summer of Spielberg, Science-Fiction, Fantasy & Action and lastly Comedy & Horror.  

After the series finished airing it was eventually decided upon to cut the four episodes together into a feature and release it on blu-ray as well as streaming platforms alongside plentiful extras.  Amassing a whopping 165 minute running time and featuring about 40 minutes of unused or extended scenes/interviews, it feels a bit long winded and one wonders whether or not stitching perfectly poised episodes into one giant thing seems counterintuitive but alas here we are.
 
A bit like a time capsule featuring many extended interviews with key players who lived through it including but not limited to Mick Garris, Ron Howard, Dean Devlin, Zak Penn, William Shatner, Keith David, Adrienne Barbeau, Roger Corman, Nicholas Meyer and even Leonard Maltin, it is a star studded documentary epic which, in hindsight, I wish I originally saw in broken up episodic form.  

Touching on everything from E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Blade Runner, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Poltergeist, The Thing as well as the ill-fated E.T. Atari 2600 videogame, it is the very essence of nostalgia and yearning for a time when, as the filmmakers themselves said, the ‘nerds briefly won’.  There’s also a lot of debate opened up throughout the film about why 1982 is considered such a strong year for film, music and youth culture in general over other years such as 1977 when the Star Wars craze broke out. 

 
MVD Rewind Collection’s blu-ray disc release is nice and comes stacked with extras as well as reversible sleeve art and a mini-poster collectible and it makes for a fun swan dive into nostalgia, but again editing it all together into one giant monster makes the experience of watching this far more exhaustive than it needs to be.  One of the things that’s key about television is that particular episodes are edited in such a way that you have breathing room and time to reflect on an episode’s particular focus.  

Having it all as one with no breaks in between the episodes it feels like it is laundry listing thing after thing with little time to consider the ideas being exchanged.  Fans of the series wanting it on physical media will enjoy displaying this on their shelves but are also likely to either take breaks themselves or reach a point in this two-and-a-half-hour documentary film version of the series where they just abandon ship.  Don’t get me wrong, this was a fun watch and revel within geekdom, I just think cutting it all together as one presents more of a chore than a charm.

--Andrew Kotwicki