'SEINFELD: SEASON 8'

Jerry Seinfeld's laugh is infectious, but it's the other writers who supply the delicious details in the audio commentaries.

One had a boss who danced like Elaine, while another said his fiancee, a pediatrician, has "farm hands, sometimes a little dry and rough." He massaged that into "man hands." And George wasn't the only guy to reenter the dating scene with a photo of a woman who wasn't his onetime girlfriend.

Season eight, the first without co-creator Larry David, was a little scary, ultimately sillier, and it forced Seinfeld to collaborate with different writers. "Larry and I were this great band together; we were like Simon and Garfunkel, and then I got to play in these other bands," Seinfeld says in a short documentary called "Jerry Seinfeld: Submarine Captain," since he likened doing the show to being submerged in a sub.

Those new bands produced merriment and bizarro Jerry, a disdain for "The English Patient," the napping nook, the yada yada, muffin tops, and Jerry and Kramer swapping apartments and mannerisms after Kenny Rogers Roasters moved to town.

This four-disc set ($49.95, Sony) includes the documentary, audio commentaries, deleted scenes and other nuggets. "Seinfeld" is the opposite of a bad breaker-upper. The show ended after the ninth season, which everyone considered a bonus year, but the laughs just keep on coming.

-- Barbara Vancheri,

Post-Gazette movie editor

'WAIT TILL YOUR FATHER GETS HOME'

Back in the early 1970s, when the original 24 episodes of this cartoon series first hit the airwaves, I was more or less the same age as Chet, the slacker son of Harry Boyle, the protagonist, and his wife, Irma. Now, roughly 35 years later, as the Hanna Barbera vault has been tapped for Father's Day 2007, I am roughly the age of father figure Harry Boyle, with three children of my own. But one thing is certain -- viewed as father or son, the show is still funny.

As a cartoon series, "Wait Till Your Father Gets Home" (Warner Home Video, $44.98) was everything a program could be -- it was liberal, probably subversive and dealt with the social upheaval that began in the 1960s and ran into the next decade. Its humor is still relevant in 2007 because society seems to be confronting once again the same problems it did in the 1970s -- minority rights, freedom of speech and the dangers of ultra-conservative right-wingers, hilariously voiced by Jack Burns.

The changes that society was undergoing are viewed through the eyes of Harry Boyle's family -- wife Irma, sons Chet and Jamie, and daughter Alice. Harry, of course is the conservative, staid, successful business owner (think Howard Cunningham of "Happy Days" because the voice is that of Tom Bosley). In fact, the cartoon shares other similarities with "Happy Days," because it also began as a sketch on the comedy show "Love American Style."

Many later programs and characters were foreshadowed by this cartoon, including the hyper-capitalist Jamie, whose mannerisms evolved into Michael J. Fox's character, Alex P. Keaton, in the long-running series "Family Ties." It also seems to serve as a milder and less outrageous sibling to "Family Guy" and "King of the Hill."

Unfortunately there are only two special features, "Animation of the Nation," which describes the creation of the series, and "Illustrating the Times," a historical view of the culture that spawned this cartoon. They are both excellent and for anyone under the age of 30, and should be viewed before watching the individual episodes.

-- Larry Roberts,

Post-Gazette assistant managing editor/photography