Sam & Max Freelance Police - The Complete Series

Product Description Remember, kids, we're professional cartoon characters. Don t try this at home. Based on Sam Purcell s enormously popular underground comic, The adventures of Sam & Max: Freelance Police! is an edgy and often irreverent, impudent, insolent, impious and silly series about a pair of likeable law enforcement types who don t take guff, from anybody. It' s about the timeless struggle between good, evil and snacktime;the weekly mishaps of a sixfoot dog, Sam, and a threefoot rabbitything, though he prefers the term lagomorph, Max, who have a mirthful time trying to resolve only the weirdest criminal cases of the day. Really.For your own good, and the good of mankind, enjoy Sam & Max: Freelance Police! Bonus Feature:A COMIC-CONversation With Steve Purcell!!!3 Animated Shorts Originally Seen on FOX KidsTMSam & Max: Our Bewildering Universe An original animated short written and codirected by Steve PurcellTelling The Tale Of Telltale Games A look at Telltale Games with cofounder Dan Connors, design director Dave Grossman and technical artist Daniel HerreraSam & Max Season 2 Playable Demo by Telltale GamesOriginal Series Bible by Steve Purcell Amazon.com Sam & Max: Freelance Police was a cheeky, comically perverse Fox animated series with a brief run on television in 1997, based on a comic book by Steve Purcell. Sam and Max are lifelong friends, the former a six-foot dog in generic-looking detective clothes, while Max is a short, unclothed rabbit (or, as he is often called, "rabbity thing") with a maniacal grin. Together, they set about writing wrongs and generally getting into well-meaning mischief, often receiving cryptic instructions by a never-seen Commissioner and working closely if warily with a child inventor called the Geek. The Complete Series includes 12 half-hour episodes, most of those divided between two short but imaginative tales that unabashedly derive inspiration from pop culture touchstones. (The very relationship between Sam and Max is reminiscent of the friendship between Gilligan and the Skipper on Gilligan's Island). Opener "The Thing That Wouldn't Stop" is like a wacky Scooby Doo adventure, in which the unflappable Sam and unhinged Max enter an alternative universe through Geek's refrigerator, where a green monster is pulling fridge repairmen to the other side. "Dysfunction of the Gods" is a very funny episode in which our heroes try to stop an apocalypse by repairing the romance between Zeus and Hera on Mt. Olympus. (They turn to a very modern idea to get the job done: putting Zeus and Hera on a Jerry Springer-like talk show that they personally host.) "A Glitch In Time" is one of the best stories, in which Sam and Max fool around with history's timeline by making little tweaks in the past and checking out present-day consequences. Much of what they see is rewardingly funny, but things go too far when they're separated: Sam becoming a horse groomer and Max a lab animal undergoing experiments. "The Trouble with Gary" is a variation on The Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life," in which Sam and Max try to help a boy with the power to alter anything (including people) in his environment. Two more Twilight Zone storylines are quoted in episodes "The Invaders" (which recalls a TZ program of the same title) and "Sam & Max Vs. the Uglions from Outer Spacer" (echoing TZ's famous "To Serve Man"). Special features include an interview with Purcell, in which he explains that Sam and Max were born in his parodies of his brother's comic drawings. There's also a trio of very funny Sam & Max shorts from Fox days, and another short that mocks the infamous "alien autopsy" film allegedly suppressed by the federal government. --Tom Keogh