The big news of 2011 is that the long-awaited Ernie Kovacs DVD box set will be released in April by Shout!Factory.  I spent most of 2010 working on curating the set, and was given unprecedented (for me, anyway) access to the Ediad collection of Kovacs material, as well as to holdings at the Paley Center for Media in NY.  It was a great opportunity to re-re-revisit the material, and to connect dots about the material and the arc of Ernie's work, and to be able to put together this career retrospective.  Major, major hats off to Jordan Fields at Shout!Factory and a special statue-erecting to Josh Mills (Edie's son) for their dedication to the project and to their trust in me.

The Ernie Kovacs Collection has six discs and around thirteen hours of Kovacs shows on it, plus bonus material, rare footage and some things no one's ever seen.  Make sure you buy the set on Shout!Factory's website!!  See sidebar for details.

Here's a sampling of the classic Kovacs programs included:

• It's Time for Ernie (1951)
• Ernie in Kovacsland (1951)
• Kovacs on the Corner (1953)
• Kovacs Unlimited (1953)
• The Ernie Kovacs Show (AM, 1955-56)
• The Ernie Kovacs Show (PM, 1956
• The Saturday Color Carnival (color version of "Eugene", 1957)
• Kovacs on Music (1959)
• Take a Good Look (show, plus extra clues, 1959-61)
• Kovacs Specials (ABC, 1961-62)

And here's some of the rare goodies that fill out the discs:

• 8mm home movies taken on the set at WPTZ
• "The Mysterious Knockwurst"
• "It Happened to Ernie" promo film (Lemmon shaves Kovacs' head!)
• Take Good Look sales film
• "Silents, Please" show wraps, shot in Ernie's den
• Muriel cigar commercials with Edie Adams
  
• interview with Jolene Brand and George Schlatter (from Dec 2010)
  

For the complete detailed list of the six discs' programming, click here to read the press release.

For several years, the Best of Ernie Kovacs TV programs were available on home video, but are currently out of print (which is why the set turns up on Amazon and eBay for silly amounts of money). Originally produced in 1977 for Chicago Public Television by John Lollos, the 10 episodes were released on VHS and then again on DVD.

"The Best of Ernie Kovacs" concentrated on Ernie's later shows because they were available on videotape for remastering and editing, while the eralier programs that were extant at the time were on 16mm kinescopes.  You have to remember that in the late 1970s classic TV was a harder sell, and image quality was a factor in convincing a PBS affiliate to back the show.  Lollos accessed Edie's original 2" tapes of "Kovacs on Music" and the ABC specials to make new 1" masters to create the "Best of" shows.

     

If you're really lucky, you may be able to turn up the Showtime documentary "Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius" or the A&E Biography episode "Ernie Kovacs: Please Stand By".  Both were released on VHS in the 1990s and are way out of print.