
I was excited to see that Shout! Factory/Timeless Media put out The Saint: The Complete Series about a year ago. It's one of my all time favorite shows and it was nice to see the box set. It's the first time that the complete 118 episodes are available in a US release. The show had 6 series, the first 4 are in black and white and the last two in color. The series was developed by Robert S Baker from the stories of Leslie Charteris. There were dozens of stories and plenty of a good number of novels, many of which were adapted to the show. There are 36 books by Charteris and several more by other authors. I'm only interested in the ones by Leslie. They recently made their way to eBooks and I'm considering buying them.

The complete series had a $200 list price and at first it was usually over $150. I waited. I'd already had all the episodes in various US and UK editions but I wanted the new version because it has more commentaries and featurettes that aren't on the US edition of the color episodes that I had. I could have picked up the color set of the UK release to get them but it would be better to have US DVDs in the long run. When it got to be $89 on a Deal of the Day I picked one up. Today it's going for $130 which is still a pretty good deal for 5,782 minutes of Simon Templar.
Back in the early days of DVD A&E, tops on my list of the worst DVD companies ever, had control of a good number of British series. They put out the programs in expensive DVD sets and in the case of The Saint, and The Champions, they never finished the series. Luckily most of those properties are no longer in their hands.
In 2001 A&E started with the color episodes of series 5 & 6 in 2 disc sets at $45 each. The 47 episodes were packed into 7 sets which totaled $315. They were hard to find cheap and I never bought them. In 2003 the 7 sets were packed into the Megaset which had a $200 list. Eventually I got one for a more reasonable price and I've enjoyed the episodes 3 or 4 times since. There was a separate release of the two part story Vendetta With The Saint that had a commentary by Roger Moore. That commentary wasn't included in the Megaset but it is included in the Shout! Factory release.
A&E put out the 2 sets of The Saint: The Early Years. They were pretty pricey, I don't remember the list but they sold for $45-50 a set. They only collected the first 28 episodes of the 71 B&W episodes. Then they quit. What jerks, huh.
Series 1 had a dozen episodes and they aired in the last quarter of 1962. I watched them when they aired in Canada a short time later. We got a lot of the British shows there and I was immediately interested in the adventures of Simon Templar. I even started reading the books when I was still a teen. Here's the rundown of the episodes. I'm pilfering the synopsis from the IMDb so I don't have to write my own. Then I can look this up and set all the info on a series of posts. The synopsis' were all written by "don @ minifie-1". He's written 11,768 of them. Wow, huh. They are well written and nice and concise. I've put the listings below so the post isn't so long.