As I mentioned earlier in the week, I was having a difficult time getting my hands on a copy of “The Secrets of Isis”, which was released on DVD on Tuesday. I’ve given up on the traditional brick and mortar DVD outlets in our area and have decided to stick to online when I really need to add a movie or TV series to our collection. My copy of Isis arrived yesterday from Amazon. Earl and I spent much of last night watching episodes and the huge assortment of extras available with this set. I’ve said before that I am a fan of the work of Andy Mangels, who was in charge of putting this set together. Andy is gay comic extraordinaire and appears at conventions and whatnot. He can also be seen on some of the special features on the Wonder Woman DVDs. We’ve corresponded on numerous occasions and he’s a great guy.
“The Secrets of Isis” is a live-action Saturday morning show from the mid 1970s. Usually coupled with the popular “Shazam!” (the version with Billy and Mentor in a Winnebago), Isis appeared in the second-half of the hour in her own program. In response to criticisms of violence in the Saturday morning shows of the era, Isis, like many of her Filmation Production counterparts, included a moral at the end of each episode. These 30 second vignettes reinforced the theme of the episode in an educational manner. Unfortunately, they were all chopped off of the master copies of the episodes in the 1990s, and subsequently discarded by the folks at Hallmark, who owned the rights and property to the show for a number of years. (The rights were sold to BCI Eclipse earlier this decade and that’s why we finally have a DVD release of the program).
I can’t help but think that the United States would be a better place today if some of the Saturday morning programming for children were less about war, strife and violence and more about everyday scenarios with a supernatural twist (for example) and just a touch of a moral message through the show. The moral messages through the Filmation Productions, including Shazam and Isis, certainly had a HUGE impact on me as a child and quite frankly had a big part of the shaping of my adult moral foundation. Isis didn’t tell me how to think but she was an outsider that was reinforcing the basics that my mother and father successfully instilled in me.
“The Secrets of Isis” DVD set includes many of the morals from the first season episodes. These were obtained from fans of the show that were able to capture them on videotape in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The quality of them varies considerably and comes nowhere close to the rest of the DVD set, however, I’m happy that Andy Mangels, as well as BCI Eclipse, decided to include these on the set as they are a very important element to the show.
I could easily post all the morals from the set as I believe that the messages still hold true today, but I’ve decided to include only one for your enjoyment.
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