This Week in DVD and Instant Watching Part 2 (the streaming)

Hulu did nothing of note this week except annoy the hell out of me with a few lame April Fool's Day jokes. I logged on Tuesday morning and saw in the spotlighted shows section a picture of Terry Crews in "The Field," a spinoff from the producers of "Brooklyn Nine-Nine." I didn't expect a real full-length series, but I thought maybe they had some bonus shorts or something. No, it was just a joke. Ha ha. At least Netflix put some actual content up and didn't promote it on the main page--at least not that I saw. I guess I would have known something was up had Hulu either gone all the way and made all the spotlighted shows goofs, or had I seen the Hannibal cooking spinoff, but I either ignored or didn't see the Hannibal thing.

I emailed Warner Archive Instant about the utter uselessness of its Watchlist feature given my inability to delete titles from it, its apparent 100-title max, and the continued presence of expired titles (and the fact that when I try to delete them, it crashes the channel). I got a few very nice responses telling me the issues were both known and were being worked on. Hey, I'm just glad to know it's not just me. Hopefully it'll be resolved soon.

In the meantime, I talked a lot about the new update on Sunday. This week, they added a few stray movies and another set of James Fitzpatrick TravelTalks. Plus a new Showcase of existing titles being packaged together was created--adaptations of Broadway plays. I'm thinking there may be a full update this weekend.

I'll tell you who has done something this week: Netflix, which added a bunch of Cartoon Network programming at the end of March. A few weeks ago I said I wanted to give the Green Lantern animated series another try. Well, now I can! I think some of the material was already available, but it looks like a lot of it is new. It's worth investigating if you're into that stuff.

Jim Rash's Sundance Channel series The Writers' Room is now streaming. Also, just in time for the last season, here comes Mad Men season 6.

The April 1 catalog drop includes a bunch of repeats like Barton Fink and Chinatown, but also some more of those Fox classics that trickle in each month. Some of the more interesting older movies that jump out include Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, There's No Business Like Show Business, Man Hunt, The Odd Couple, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, Rocky I through V, The Graduate, the 1935 Les Miserables, Cheaper by the Dozen, The Bells of St. Mary's, and Stuart Saves His Family.

OK, that last one really doesn't belong in that group, but it IS available.

Some new and returning genre fare: Cotton Comes to Harlem, The Terminator, The Running Man, all 4 Death Wish movies (there were only 4, right?), Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Dragonslayer (I had the comic adaptation, but I don't remember seeing the entire movie).

Some of the more recent notable titles include Amistad, No Holds Barred (hey, give me a break), the full run of House (that wasn't already there?), Going Ape (I keep telling myself I'm gonna sit down and watch it, and it keeps expiring before I do), Disney Jr, series The Hive, Titanic, The Muppets Take Manhattan (wouldn't it be great to see "The Muppet Show" on Netflix? Answer: YES), Braveheart, and Mean Girls.

If that ain't enough, how about a Crackle update? In addition to the monthly batch of Seinfeld (and unfortunately several have been in recent months' batches), there is...well, it's hard to tell what's new on Crackle, but I think Lost in Translation and Paul Blart: Mall Cop are. And the channel is touting its "first ever original feature," Extraction, a martial arts B-movie, but that's apparently been up for a while. Oddly, it's in the "featured TV category. Crackle has some kinks to work out, folks!