After a 40-Year Nap, 'Mannix' Blazes Back

"M-A-N-N-I-X!" On DVD! Yes, TV fans, it's true. It's time for Barracuda convertibles, babes in short skirts, pistol-whipping bad guys, Cali landscapes and irresponsible gunfire in public places. Yes, "Mannix," that beloved private-eye show of yesteryear, finally wanders in from the 405 freeway to your local DVD purveyor today with the official, complete, six-disc, 24-episode first season. That would be a valentine from 1967, when actor Mike "Touch" Connors began an eight-year run on CBS, often in the Top 10, as the private eye with a sardonic smile and an open collar.

The official tab will run you $54.99.

"I just got the thing in, and I'm going to sit down and watch some of it this weekend," Connors told us in a phone interview last week. "I haven't seen the pilot episode since it aired 40 years ago."

Connors was talking from his home in Encino. He's 82 and retired. He and Joseph Campanella, who played his boss the first year of the show when they worked for a company called Intertect, both look great on the commentaries that are part of the extras. Connors sounds just like he did back in the day, too. The episodes look beautiful -- blue skies, brown eyes, Connors's close shave.

We truly regret to remind viewers that Gail Fisher, who played Mannix's secretary and made history as one of the first black actresses to star in a network television series, was not a character on the first year. That's right: No Peggy. No flashing smile, no bedroom voice. (Not that we had a crush on her or anything.)

But the rest of it, the nutshell of the entire eight years, is right here. Here's the rundown on the pilot episode, "The Name Is Mannix":

He gets in a fight in the first 10 minutes. He runs. Fight, fight. He takes off his tie. He runs. Car chase. Femme fatale (blond, leggy, slightly hysterical). He turns her down: "No, baby." He runs. Guys get shot, often by Mannix. A helicopter blows up. Mannix solves mystery. Credits roll, over that great Lalo Schifrin score.

You want television when men were men? On the pilot alone, Connors broke his wrist and dislocated his shoulder, doing his own stunts. Did he cry about it? Heck, no! He recruited his visiting son to stay over a night "so he could hold up my arm so that I could shave the next morning." They filmed the rest and drove home. It was Christmas Eve.

We wrote last year in this space that Mannix was the best television show, like, ever. We opined that it was a prosecutable offense that it was not officially on DVD. We reported that for years, two Web sites and thousands of devoted fans had petitioned CBS to release the show on DVD, all to no avail.

And, now, finally, Mannix joins the ranks of "Kojak," "Columbo," "Mission: Impossible," "Hawaii Five-O." Time capsules from the late 1960s and 1970s, when crime dramas on television did not aspire to be realistic and men drank and smoked and punched people and had no families and drove fast cars and life was generally great.

Ken Ross, executive vice president and general manager of CBS Home Entertainment, writes us in an e-mail that the company "always" planned on releasing the disc. This was news to Connors, who couldn't get his calls returned for years when he would try to ask when the show might resurface.

"We think the fans will find the wait was worthwhile once they experience how great the episodes look and sound on DVD and watch the special features," Ross writes.