Out on DVD: Julia, Jeeves, Scooby-Doo and a king who was a queen

(Photo courtesy Sony Pictures Television International)

This week's new DVDs feature a passel of great stuff from TV, including sitcoms, cartoons and Brit-lit adaptations both comic and serious.

Read on for more!

I know most gays are all about The Golden Girls, but as an Atlanta native, my preferred quartet of '80s ladies was Julia, Suzanne, Mary Jo and Charlene, so I'm thrilled that Designing Women: The Complete First Season has finally made it to DVD.

(Photo courtesy Sony Pictures Television International)

While it takes most series a while to find their voices, I was surprised to learn that Julia Sugarbaker (the incomparable Dixie Carter) delivers the first of her famous weekly rants on the pilot, and that the "Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia" speech that's so frequently screened at gay bars around the country happened in the second episode. So they were pretty much good to go right out of the gate. Carter, Delta Burke, Annie Potts and Jean Smart make one of TV's great ensemble casts.

And while we're on the subject of comfort-food television, I look forward to pouring myself an enormous bowl of Cap'n Crunch and settling in with the two new Saturday Morning Cartoons — Volume One sets just released by Warner Bros. The 1960s collection features The Flintstones, Secret Squirrel and Hillbilly Bears, among others, while 1970s includes Roman Holidays, Funky Phantom, Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch and Hong Kong Phooey. Baby Boomers may have popularized infantile regression, but I like to think Gen X-ers have perfected it.

Moving on to tonier TV, one of our favorite gays, Sir Ian McKellen, portrays one of history's most infamous queer kings in a BBC adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II. Don't expect the revisionism of the 1990s Derek Jarman version, but this production, originally staged in 1969, packs a punch nonetheless.

And one of our other favorite gays, Stephen Fry, is the very model of a proper English butler in the P.G. Wodehouse adaptation Jeeves & Wooster: The Complete Series, co-starring his longtime comedy collaborator Hugh Laurie (yes, the guy from House) as upper-class twit Bertie Wooster. If you've never read the original stories or seen these hilarious TV versions, I envy you the comic discovery you are about to make.