You Did It, Mr. Jones, Not My Client!

I was intrigued when I saw that one of the cable channels we get announced that it would be offering 'Perry Mason Marathons'; the original with His Roundness, Raymond Burr. How cool!!! Yet, I could only stomach one episode. It was chopped up with commercials to distraction. One of the benefits of 50s and early 60s teeVee shows was that they took nearly the entire hour. Well, I was right

Fans who enjoyed the show in syndication will be pleasantly surprised by additional scenes contained in the DVD versions. The original episodes were 53 minutes long—up to ten minutes were cut to accommodate commercials in the rerun versions. If you ever wondered why an episode didn't make sense, it's probably because critical scenes ended up on the cutting room floor.

Given the antiquity of the series, it makes no sense to commercial it to death like contemporary, high production quality, shows. Evidently, the channel figures that either 1) the viewers never watched the show during its run, so don't know how long an episode was, and/or 2) even those who did are too stupid to see that the episodes have been butchered for your viewing disappointment. Another sign of the decline of Western civilization.