As I have mentioned before, I was a huge fan of The State when it was on MTV in the 90’s. I thought the show was brilliant and hysterical, and I have quoted lines from various skits throughout the years. As the 10 men and 1 woman in the group had moved on to work on other TV series and movies like Reno 911!, Stella, Michael and Michael have Issues, Wet Hot American Summer, The Ten, and Role Models, I – like many other fans out there – grew more and more impatient for the show to be released on DVD. Hell, I even bought the Skits and Stickers VHS compilation tape back when that format was all the rage.

Well, MTV finally released the series on DVD this summer, and I finally watched the whole thing. And when I say the whole thing, I mean every episode both with and without commentary, as well as all of the special features, deleted scenes, etc. So what did I think?

As much as it pains me to say, I was a little bit disappointed. It’s not that the show isn’t funny, or that it got less funny. It was in the 90’s and it still is now very funny stuff. I think the main problem was with me; in all the years since I had watched it last, I had remembered it being so brilliant that there was no way that the show could match my unrealistic delusions. When I watched the DVD’s, I was expecting to be laughing out loud, my side hurting, milk that I never drank shooting out of my nose. Instead, I laughed. I chuckled. When a skit that I remembered began, I smiled in anticipation. But it just didn’t hit me that hard.

The commentaries were interesting, but I have to be honest, they could have been funnier. There were little tidbits here and there about who designed this set, or what happened on that shooting day, and the origins of certain characters, and the relationship the guys had with MTV, but I was expecting more zany interplay between the group members. And while I understand that it could have been a bit much to have all 11 members of The State talking in a single commentary, it did seem like a lot of the same people were showing up in most of the commentaries: Michael Patrick Jann, Todd Holubek, Joe Lo Trulgio, Ken Marino, David Wain, and Kevin Allison. I have nothing against those guys, but it would have been nice to have heard from Michael Ian Black, Michael Showalter, Thomas Lennon, Ben Garant, and Kerri Kenney-Silver more often. Oh, and Ken Marino, I think you’re great, really I do, but don’t eat or slurp coffee when you’re doing audio commentary – that’s just not cool.

The deleted scenes were fun to watch, but for the most part, it was fairly obvious why these skits didn’t make the cut. They even say that in the commentary – that these sketches were dredged up and weren’t ever intended to be seen, Still, it was nice to get to see some “never-before-seen” footage. (As an aside, I’ve never understood that phrase – surely everything has been seen by SOMEONE at some point, even if it was just the guy who filmed it. And even if the cameraman was blind or it was a hidden camera type situation, the second a single person found and watched the footage, you can’t really still justify calling it “never-before-seen.”)

The Spring Break appearances were a nice treat, as were the free form promos. And the version of the theme song sung by little kids on the Bonus Disc is fantastic and worth the price of admission alone. I found an Easter Egg, that was literally just a still image of an Easter Egg laying in some grass. Get it? Very “State.”

I also wasn’t crazy about the music they had to take out of the release and the random images that needed to be blurred. Don’t get me wrong – I understand why they had to take out a lot of songs and replace them with canned tracks, and they were very up front about the cost of using the original music being far too high to justify. And hell, they were able to use certain pieces of music here and there, which was a pleasant surprise. Personally, I found all of the blurred images more distracting – why did they have to blur out a cardboard cutout of Yoda? Were they really worried that Lucasfilm would come after them?

Anyway, I have a lot of fond memories of The State, it’s a great show made by very funny people, and I’m glad I could re-watch all of those old bits on DVD. Like I said, the fact that I was let down really has much more to do with my building the show up too much in my own head, so I have no one to blame but myself for not being completely blown away.

Well, myself and Ken Marino for slurping hot coffee in my ear.