That show you like is going to come back in style…

By now many have heard that Twin Peaks, possibly the most beloved short-run TV show of all time, is coming to Blu-Ray at the end of this month. For those who haven’t, it deserves to be shouted from the mountaintop yet again: TWIN PEAKS IS OUT ON BLU-RAY ON JULY 29TH.

I’ve made my love for that truncated series clear once before, in a post about the Star Pics trading cards that went along with the show, so we won’t relitigate the merits of David Lynch’s small screen masterpiece. Suffice to say that the whodunit about the murder of Laura Palmer was great, ahead of its time, all that. The show has had multiple DVD releases over the years, most lovingly done with enough bonus material to sate the hunger of devotees. What puts this upcoming set of discs — Twin Peaks: The Entire Mystery — over the top for fans of the show is the inclusion of not just Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the blisteringly odd prequel depicting the last days of Laura Palmer, but an hour-plus of deleted scenes from that movie. Many of the well-liked characters from the show’s two year run were left completely on the cutting room floor when Lynch hacked reels down to a feasible cinematic runtime, and for years the knowledge that this canonical material is out there unviewed has made it a holy grail for fans. (Peakies? Peakers?) And now we get it. It’s like lost Metropolis footage being found salted away in some Brazilian vault. Huzzah. Rejoice and make merry.

CBS Home Entertainment, which controls the distribution rights for the show, has been releasing YouTube clips on Tuesdays leading up to the release of the set, under their hashtag #twinpeakstuesday. (That “hashtag” has become a key component of modern parlance is more bizarre than any backwards talking little man that Peaks could have thrown at us.) Most have demonstrated the quality of the restoration that has brought the product up to HD standards, but there have been teases of the much-anticipated special features, including an interesting segment in which Lynch interviews the Palmer family, including murderous, molesting, BOB-infused Leland, in character:

As others have pointed out: Why oh why couldn’t Lynch have interviewed Leland as Gordon Cole? Take another look, sonny, it’s gonna happen again!

I recently loaned my old Peaks DVDs to a friend who had never seen the show. I made the mistake of talking it up too much beforehand, so that when he returned them to me without watching the second season, saying that he just couldn’t get into it, it felt like he was telling me my children were dumb as rocks and butt ugly. The show isn’t for everyone (what is?), but for those who love it it’s a fever, twenty-plus years on. There’s always speculation bubbling that Lynch may decide to return to that odd, creepy little town in the Pacific Northwest, especially with the advent of the Netflix business model, which makes it easier for shows of yore to be resurrected. I’m not an advocate of this, as we’ve been Kingdom of the Crystal Skulled and Phantom Menaced far too many times to think that we can ever truly go home again. But all this deleted material is a fine substitute, as is the HD upgrade. It’s like Dale Cooper driving into town for the first time all over again.