A neighbor lent me a TV Guide-branded 3 DVD set sampler of 50s sitcom comedies: a disc apiece for Love that Bob, Ozzie and Harriet...and Benny's original CBS Lucky Strike program. The first two discs were of passing interest. Bob Cumming's show fundamentally creeps me out as it fascinates me, both too lightly frothy and too deeply fraught with psychosexual innuendo that doesn't even know its name yet, let alone dares not speak it (main nightmare women in chronic bachelor Bob's life are Nancy Kulp (about ten times more manly than in Beverly Hillbillies) and series narrator Ann B. Davis; this seems significant)...
weird program I'll return to in a different frame of mind

The Nelson Family is agreeable but Rick isn't a rock star yet in these episodes. It's Leave it to Beaver crossed with radio days Fibber McGee and Molly, solid but not compulsory weekly entertainment.

Ah, but Benny! Every early show from the first five irregular seasons gathered here (the show started as an occasional 'special' deal and steadily became more regular as radio obligations leveled off and TV confidence consolidated) is absolutely essential viewing. This is some of the funniest, best written and acted crazy comedy ever...however variably kinescope-y and deplorably musically redubbed for opening credits with one note synthesizer.

I'll happily write an essay on the genius of Benny later in the thread. For now, I want to know from those already hip to him, where to go next. Is the Good Times set worthwhile? How much on the market is early years PD, how much copyrighted later years stuff.

I can't get over how smart this is as kaleidoscopic hip and expertly played entertainment (throwaway gags about the likes of Christine Jorgensen and her sex change operation! brilliant fantasies incorporating the participation of Hope, Crosby, Marilyn Monroe, Bogart, Dean and Lewis, any guest star is possible) which seem more like Warner Brothers cartoons than stolid and square family values fifties sitcoms

Help me out here, would you?

Shokus Video specializes in old-time TV series, and a lot of their stuff is transferred from privately-held elements so there's not a lot of public domain overlap. I've gotten quite a few rare old Dragnet episodes from them. The quality can vary but I've always been satisfied with them. The Benny page is here, but their whole site's worth browsing.

Thanks, Bill. The Benny episodes seems a little pricey given the free-ness of the source materials for the early years, but that's only appropriate given Jack's legendary stinginess ;)

There are plenty of Benny shows out there on the cheapie PD labels, and most of the DVDs I've seen look about the same - that is, not much better than VHS. But that's to be expected, given that they appear to be sourced from kinescopes, and at any rate, they're certainly watchable (I suspect my standards for what's watchable are lower than a lot of people's - if I'm interested enough in the material, I'm usually able to overlook defects that would drive others up the wall). This one, at 15 eps on 2 discs, would appear to offer quite a bit of bang for the buck. The nice thing about discs like these is that it costs practically nothing to take a chance on them, and you'll probably strike gold frequently enough to make such experiments worthwhile.

Critics' Choice has also released several volumes of Benny DVDs, starting with this one.

Dave

I've gone on a similar hunt with You Bet Your Life episodes (I even have some Jack benny eps, now, that came packaged with some YBYLs)... The great thing about it is that so many of those public domain discs are so cheap; it's pretty painless to explore them.
In the case of YBYL, there are two great "official" DVD collections, with high quality transfers, great extras and packaging. But if you still want more (this should all apply to Jack Benny eps just the same), the PD discs ain't so bad... a few will have watermarks; and the transfers won't be restored or have issues with the credits like you pointed out... but a little shoddiness in the presentation of old, low-production value TV broadcasts isn't quite as damaging as misframing the cinematography of Sven Nykvist (but if it *will* bother you, then stay away... I've never found a PD disc that came up to the more official releases).
A lot of those PD discs feature some, or all, of the same episodes. What I wound up doing is just a little research to sort how many PD discs there were (by covers, UPCs, and DVD company), so I could order them all online without buying the same ones three times over. They're all super-cheap so if you screw up and get a double, it's not much of an inconvenience anyway. Then, I just made a short list of which eps were on which discs (with YBYL it was a bit tricky... I came up with a system using the last names of the first pair of guests and the first secret word); and sold off the ones that were nothing but repeats. The whole thing cost very little, in the end; and I now have probably more episodes of YBYL on DVD than anyone else on the planet. Heh heh ...I also uploaded all my findings, even the ones i didn't keep, to dvdaf... so hopefully people will have an easier time sorting through them in future. I haven't checked recently, however, to see if any new ones have come out.

"I also uploaded all my findings, even the ones i didn't keep, to dvdaf..."

What is dvdaf? Is it a public resource on the web? I, for one, would be interested in any information on additional episodes of YOU BET YOUR LIFE on DVD.

For Jack Benny, I've just sampled, but I strongly prefer the Alpha Video DVDs of Jack's show than the Critic's Choice DVDs. The Alpha Video DVDs I've seen are all from the fifties. The Critics Choice often mixes fifties half hour shows with specials from the sixties (and fifties). The sixties shows are really unattractive, with washed out color. I pick up Alpha Videos at Half Price books. (Alpha did a pretty nice job on RAMAR OF THE JUNGLE with Jon Hall and several fifties starlets who have come out of the pages of various stories of James Ellroy) Alpha can also be bought at amazon.com and other online vendors.

James' post makes me want to watch more of the Alpha Video Jack Benny DVDs I have. However, my opinion on the ones I've seen is that they are pretty pedestrian compared to his radio shows. "This is some of the funniest, best written and acted crazy comedy ever..." pretty accurately describes his radio show in its glory days during the forties and fifties. For me, the Jack Benny show was the funniest old time radio I've ever heard, definitely better than the esteemed Fred Allen. It's possible to get huge sets of mp3s on the internet, and you can listen to the show from week to week. Jack seems to be the butt of most of the jokes, and he seems to be loathed by most of his celebrity neighbors. His interaction with Ronald Coleman is priceless; I never would have guessed Coleman had such a flair for comedy.

I'm looking forward to James expand on LOVE THAT BOB / THE BOB CUMMINGS SHOW one of the great treasures of fifties television that I wish would get a legitimate release.

fwiw, I've been going through THE ABBOTT & COSTELLO Season sets and enjoying those immensely. The television series' episodes are more entertaining than any of their films I've seen, except for the superlative A&C MEET FRANKENSTEIN. The shows are surreal vaudeville and seem to use many of the second and third string Universal supporting characters. Nick Tosches has written the definitive essay on Hillary Brooke's legs, and there's not much to add to that. It's a little short of mind boggling to see Virginia Christie (later Folger coffee's Mrs. Olsen) as an on-the-make hotsie passionately kissing Lou Costello on the street.

He's talking about DVD Aficionado.

From their faq:

If John would be so kind as to supply his user name (handle), you could peruse this selection of YBYL.

Wow, thanks for the flood of info (some of which like DVD Aficionado is only washing over me, oversaturated right now, but likely to come in handy later). Again, thanks!

I'm resolved, first and foremost, to find more radio stuff, much of which, I'm already vaguely aware, flows freely over the Internet on streaming stations dedicated to "Old Time Radio" alongside The Shadow and Roy and Dale, and so forth.

What bit me on the TV Guide set, however much I hate the awful fake audio openings to these shows' credits, was the excellence of the early to mid fifties vintage episodes, which make the sixties stuff I'm better acquainted with seem like "Here's Lucy!" compared to "I Love Lucy".

My sense is that his earliest TV is practically interchangeable with ongoing radio of those days, and at about the same level of quality. This is very much like the Burns and Allen show of the same era: star coming out in front of the curtain to do monologues in the manner of the (later) Tonight Show (Benny's -often interrupted by network technicians pretending to rehearse the show around him- set the standard and the vocabulary and timing for every late night show's yet coined), and to describe what's planned for 'tonight' and chitchatting about Hollywood celebrity neighbors and rivals, Benny fantasizing verbally a Burns-Crosby-Benny vaudeville reunion he's too cheap to pay for, for example, but which he'll negotiate this afternoon on the golf course with his buddies...segueing into a 'sit com' play (utterly absurd) with Jack and Rochester lazing on their day off in hammocks while Eddie R. keeps his big toe and left hand in churning butter and making ice cream (Jack stuck his phone number on the back of a Hood's Milk truck) and rocking his employer while reading a murder mystery which causes distracted Anderson to rock so hard he tosses Jack into a tree...whereupon 'Ed McMahon/Andy' fat MC character Don Wilson shows up (eating the peanut butter Rochester had proposed to Jack as 'California Tan' makeup back in the dressing room), which leads to Jack reminiscing about his vaudeville act with Burns and Crosby, the show he can't afford to reproduce, but which we see anyway thanks to the magic of an old scrap book, imagination and television: an expert, four number campy but faithful representation of a revue as played in Scranton twenty five years ago. Cue arrival of old partners today, Burns show and Road Movie in-jokes accompanying, a contractually obliged commercial nonsensically fit into the story somehow, Jack wandering away, Crosby sticking in a song because the show requires he do one sooner or later, he tells us, repetition of hammock gag with one punchline followed by another featuring a cameo from Bob Hope up a tree...plus a closing monologue commenting on everything just seen, ending with Jack throwing us a kiss good night!

That's amazingly good value for twenty five minutes!

(The one with 'Bubbles' turning into Marilyn Monroe on shipboard ain't bad either!)

I used to watch the Benny show in reruns many years ago and I remember one must-have episode with Raymond Burr doing his Perry Mason character in a dream sequence having to defend Benny in court on a charge of killing a chicken. Burr's hilarious and if he had done something like this some 20 years later he might have had the second act/career revival in comedy that Leslie Nielsen had with AIRPLANE.

Don't forget Burr playing a hanging judge in AIRPLANE II--THE SEQUEL!

Certainly. It's: Werner von Wallenrod (yes, with the spaces)
If you check out:
http://www.dvdaficionado.com/dvds.html?cat=0&imdb=44736,0
...That will bring up all the DVDs of You Bet Your Life (except, as I said, I haven't checked recently... there may be some newer PD discs not listed yet). I scanned/uploaded all the PD discs... all those Amazon links, covers, UPCs, etc are accurate, so it should be easy to order whichever you want online (though be careful buying them used from vendors who may have them confused).
So, yeah... If you look at my collection...
A-L
M-Z
(besides looking in the Y's, there's one in the J's - Jack Benny - and M - Marx Bros' collection)
...you'll see all the YBYL discs you need to have if you want all of the episodes available. The ones not in my collection (for example, the Westlake one) will give you nothing but repeats.
Also, it's worth noting, the YBYL disc from Platinum is the same as the disc included in their Jack Benny/YBYL set... so if you don't care for Benny, you can buy the single Platinum disc instead and save a little more.
The two sets from Shout! are a bit more expensive, but worth it... Restored prints, optional commercials that originally aired with the episodes, deleted footage that never aired, and some good extras (Phylis Diller, for example, does an audio commentary on the episode she appears in).
Hope that helps!