Product Description
Using forensic analysis to uncover the truth behind 13 elusive & mysterious creatures. Studio: A&e Home Video Release Date: 05/27/2008 Run time: 611 minutes
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The History Channel's fun, scary-scientific Monsterquest roams the world in search of real-life monsters. A current inheritor of the style of the memorable Leonard Nimoy series In Search Of…, the show digs up dirt on the best known urban-legends monsters. Or are they…real? Each episode, punched to the hilt with meaningful music and dramatic narration, serves up a well-documented (or at least much-rumored) freaky phenomenon. The titles of individual episodes give the flavor of the show: "America's Loch Ness Monster," "Mutant Canines," and "Birdzilla." This is not a skeptical enterprise, like National Geographic's Is It Real?, but an eager survey, complete with re-created scenes that visualize the beasties for us. One of the fun things about Monsterquest is that it introduces us to a collection of crackpots--er, witnesses--who have glimpsed the elusive monsters, such as the Wisconsin man who spotted a dog-creature and has since filled his home with lupine bric-a-brac. You're never far from some true believer who insists, "It looked like a friggin' werewolf." Naturally, there are also rational approaches: legitimate scientists examining bits of fur and tissue, DNA testing, lie-detector sessions. Snippets of historical monsters lend some pleasing shivers to the modern accounts. Watch a few of these in a row, and you'll feel like you're in the room with the UFO buffs in Close Encounters of the Third Kind ("I saw Bigfoot once!"), but the appeal is undeniable, especially for adolescent monster enthusiasts. And yes, Bigfoot gets not one but two episodes to his hairy self. Bonus wackiness: a 15-minute reel of unused footage and a few strange occurrences that happened to crew members while shooting. --Robert Horton
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Monsterquest - Complete Season 1 (History Channel) (Steelbook)
- DVD: 0 pages (2008-05-27)
- Publisher: A&E HOME VIDEO
- Label: A&E HOME VIDEO
- Starring: Monster Quest
- Director: The History Channel
- Encoding: Region 1
- Format: Box set, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC
- Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1,
- Rated: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
- Studio: A&E HOME VIDEO
- DVD Release Date: 2008-05-27
- Run Time: 611
- Average Customer Review:
 based on 8 reviews
- Sales Rank in DVD: #5425
Avg. Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating: 
Summary: This show is just okay. 2008-11-28
Comment: Can not say that I love Monsterquest. They could ''polish'' all the visual effects and it wasn't fascinating to watch it.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating: 
Summary: One of the best shows ,must have dvd ! 2008-11-07
Comment: This is one of the best of it's kind, I"m so happy that they released this show on dvd. And I'm very impressed that they did it so quickly.I love to watch all eposides.I can hardy wait each new week to see what the new show will be.Season 2 will be released on January 20th 09. Thank you so very much History Channel. Hope that there will be many more seasons.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating:
Summary: My son loves this show 2008-10-03
Comment: my son loves this show. he has been watching it since it started on tv. I figuered it would be a great christmas present for him.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating:
Summary: Things That Go Bump in the Night--or the Mind? 2008-07-27
Comment: "Monster Quest" is one of life's guilty pleasures. Each episode features high production values, good narration and a spooky story. The series clearly leans toward the "monsters are real!" side of the spectrum, but it presents the views of skeptics as well (albeit in a pretty perfunctory way).
Each hour creates an entertaining atmosphere of mystery, but the show is honest in reporting negative results. The camera traps that are set to take pictures of elusive beasts yield lovely shots of deer, horses, cows, cars and even eagles, but (so far, at least) never a Sasquatch, skunk ape, or dog man. DNA testing shows that the mutant monster dog is not a dire wolf--it's a big feral dog. The footprint of an elusive orang pendek (hypothesized to be a relict specimen of homo floresiensis) turns out to belong to a bear. And a clever experiment with high speed photography does a good job of refuting the theory that "rods" captured on ordinary video cameras are creatures from another dimension.
Whether you think of monsters as real or as folklore, this show will do nicely if you just want to sit back and enjoy a spooky, interesting story for an hour or so.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating:
Summary: Cryptozoology All-Stars 2008-07-15
Comment: Cryptozoology enthusiasts will no doubt rejoice at the long awaited DVD release of the first season of History Channel's successful Monsterquest series. This deluxe metal case comes with four DVDs, containing all thirteen episodes of the original first season. Amongst the creatures covered are Champ (the lake monster of Lake Champlain), bigfoot, giant 'thunderbirds' sighted in the Midwest, the Florida skunk ape, giant squid, Indonesia's orang pendek, rods (strange rod like things caught on film), strange dog like creatures killing pets and livestock, mystery big cats in the US, the Bray Road Beast (a 'werewolf' in Wisconsin), giant fish, and the rumored ape-human hybrids Stalin wanted to create. Quite an exhaustive list of monsters, both well known and more obscure.
Each episode is relatively straight forward - they give an overview of the monster or creature in question, some interviews with witnesses, the camera crews go out looking for evidence or footage, and some comments from 'experts,' both skeptical and believing. Unfortunately, as interesting as the subject matter is, the show rarely comes up with anything new in the field. I mean, we still are no closer to 'proving' the existence of sasquatch one way or another. But it does give some interesting and up-to-date information on sightings, especially with the more obscure cases. Monster lovers young and old will no doubt appreciate the amount of background information given on these creatures, and the sightings aren't especially frightening for most children, so all ages can appreciate the show. Incidentally, the 'bonus' footage only consists of outtakes and unused footage from some of the episodes, mostly in the form of interviews with witnesses. This could be useful to researchers, but theres not alot of new data.
The biggest downside to this release is that, as nice as the packaging is, the individual discs are painfully difficult to get out of their little slots and I'm always afraid I will damage them. I really hope they change the packaging for season two, when/if they release that. Furthermore, the 'giganto' episode featuring the search for the extinct ape gigantopithecus is not featured on this DVD (hopefully we'll get that later on in season two). Still, in spite of these small flaws, this release is AWESOME. Anyone with an interest in the paranormal or unexplained will get a kick out of this. And if you like this, keep your eyes peeled for season two, which has more episodes (twenty or so I think) not only exploring new monsters (chupacabras, hogzilla, the beast of exmoor, ghosts, etc) but also re-visiting some of the cases from this season! More goodness indeed!
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