Releasing August 25 from Anchor Bay Entertainment is the jam-packed and stunning Blu-Ray + Digital HD edition of The Walking Dead: The Complete Fifth Season. The set includes three hours of special features all about the show’s famous effects sequences, and discussions with the cast and crew about the characters and the making of the show. With beautiful picture and audio quality, fans will definitely want to have this set in their collection to relive this exciting and game-changing season of The Walking Dead.
The season’s sixteen episodes are on the first four discs of the set. Each episode has English and Spanish subtitles, and selected episodes also have commentary tracks. A slight menu problem exists with this feature, though: you can’t see which episodes have a commentary until you click on the episode title. To help you out, there are commentaries for “No Sanctuary” (which actually has two commentary tracks), “Self Help,” “What’s Happened and What’s Going On,” “Them,” “Remember,” and “Conquer.” The commentators range from showrunner Scott Gimple, to executive producer and director Greg Nicotero, to cast members like Norman Reedus, Melissa McBride, Chad Coleman, Sonequa Martin-Green, and several others.
The fifth disc in the set contains dozens of featurettes and deleted scenes from select episodes. There is a behind-the-scenes featurette for each episode where cast members, directors, producers, and writers discuss the character and story arcs that occur in that particular episode, providing great insight into each person’s motivations. At around five minutes, these are short snippets of information. While something with a longer format would definitely be more welcome, these bite-sized tidbits still go very in-depth into discussing some dynamics of the show that viewers might not have caught on to.
Each episode is also accompanied with a making-of featurette. Here, viewers get a glimpse how some of the show’s biggest and most memorable stunts and special effects were created, such as the water-logged Walkers in the food storage basement, and Eugene mowing down a group of Walkers with a fire hose. Perhaps most interesting was watching “The Making of Alexandria” feature, and seeing how the show pretty much took over an actual developing neighborhood to create the oasis from the apocalypse.
There are also “In Memoriam” featurettes for the four characters who tragically left the show this season, chronicling the journey that each of them made during their appearances. Other nice extras include “A Day in the Life of Michael Cudlitz” and “A Day in the Life of Josh McDermitt,” where the documentary crew follows the actors as they film certain scenes for the day. “Rotters in the Flesh” is a very cool behind-the-scenes look at arguably one of the grossest and most unforgettable scenes in the show, when the group comes across several Walkers in Atlanta whose bodies have been melted into the concrete by a napalm bomb.
The Walking Dead: The Complete Fifth Season is $79.99 for the Blu-Ray edition, and $69.98 for the DVD edition. Also coming in December is The Walking Dead Season Five Limited Edition Blu-Ray. The packaging depicts one of the napalm-melted Walkers from the episode “Crossed,” and was created by McFarlane Toys.
