The 6th season of Perry Mason has an interesting thing happen in the second DVD set. The season has 28 episodes and there are 14 episodes in each set. The sets are sold separately. Perry Mason only appears in a couple of brief scenes in each of the four episodes starting with The Case Of Constant Doyle. Perry's supposed to be on the mend from an operation and he can't take the cases that come up in the office. In real life Raymond Burr was also recovering from an operation. Guest stars appear as lawyers and Della Street and Paul Drake lend a hand. Bette Davis heads the group of guest stars, the other three are Michael Rennie, Hugh O'Brian and Walter Pidgeon. They aren't Perry Masons but I did like Bette as the feisty widow. Her lawyer hubby had died fairly recently and she wants to continue to work. She helps Michael Parks, playing a troubled teen, out of a spot of murder.
Because it's got a new group of victims and criminals each week we have a lot of other guest stars to enjoy. Here's a few that I knew: Adam West, John Morley, Gary Lockwood, Robert Armstrong, Leonard Stone, Jeannette Nolan, Ellen Burstyn, David Hedison, Harvey Korman, R G Armstong, Mala Powers, Edgar Buchanan, Strother Martin, Jesse White, Leonard Nimoy, Peter Breck, Antoinette Bower, Joyce Van Patten, Michael Parks, Trevor Bardette, Lee Van Cleef, Richard Jaeckel, Julie Adams, Gerald Mohr, John Larkin, Faith Domergue, John Anderson, George Kennedy, Harry Lauter, David White and Jackie Coogan. There's plenty more that I didn't remember.
The stories are about the same as the previous seasons and I enjoyed them just fine. I was glad to have picked up the series so cheap on one of those Amazon Deals of the Week or Day. This year they don't seem to have anywhere near as good a selection as they did in the past. I see that the Collected Perry Mason TV series was issued last October and it's a fairly reasonable $107.99 for the whole 271 episodes. That comes out to 233 hours on 72 DVDs.
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