"Did you know that one of your chimneys leads to the furnace?" - Aunt Clara (Marian Lorne) after one of her bumpy landings
Bewitched: The Complete Third Season DVD Review
By A.J. Carson
Special occasions and anniversaries always seem to bring bad luck to ad exec Darrin Stephens (Dick York). On his honeymoon, he learned that his pert new wife Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) was an actual witch who could simply twitch her nose or recite an incantation and have all of her wishes come true. This also meant that Sam's mother, Endora (Agnes Moorehead), would literally be able to pop in on the newlyweds whenever she wanted to. On their first anniversary, Darrin learned that Samantha was pregnant, but not before dotty old Aunt Clara (Marion Lorne) accidentally turned him into a tuxedo-clad monkey, and he was locked away in the city zoo. As season three opens, the Stephens are about to celebrate their second anniversary, and Darrin is in for another rude awakening - daughter Tabitha (played by twins Erin and Diane Murphy) has begun to display witchy powers of her own. She might have to manually twitch her nose using her tiny little fingers, but she still manages to make her toys fly around the room and her daddy appear whenever she wants him to.
Much of season three involves Tabitha and her newfound powers. Several of Samantha's family members are thrilled with their new little witch. Endora tries to teach her to control her levitation of items and how to disappear and appear at will. Uncle Arthur (Paul Lynde) pushes Tabitha's baby buggy on a red carpet that automatically rolls and unrolls itself as they move forward ("Endora Moves in for a Spell"). Darrin is horrified by the idea that his cherubic daughter is a witch, and is especially concerned that since Tabitha doesn't know any better, she might perform her magic in front of the wrong people.like his parents ("It's Wishcraft").
While Tabitha discovers her new powers, poor Aunt Clara continues to lose hers. While babysitting for the Stephens and the Tates, a botched spell turns Jonathan Tate into twins ("Accidental Twins"). She shrinks the Stephens' piano so that she can bring it up to Tabitha's room, but the spell wears off before she can get it upstairs ("The Short Happy Circuit of Aunt Clara"). Her subsequent attempts to remove the now full-sized piano from the stairwell may or may not have caused a blackout of the entire Eastern seaboard. When Sam has problems with a lamp, Aunt Clara insists on conjuring up an electrician, but she ends up with Benjamin Franklin instead ("My Friend Ben," "Samantha for the Defense"). While reminiscing about her days as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria, she accidentally transports the queen to modern times ("Aunt Clara's Victoria Victory"). Aunt Clara's condition gets to be so bad that Endora tries to force her to become earthbound ("Trial and Error of Aunt Clara").
Aunt Clara fans will be happy to know that she appears in almost one-third of the episodes in season three. This is especially nice since Marion Lorne died at the end of the fourth season, cutting her time on the series short.
Alice Pearce, the series' original Mrs. Kravitz, died during the second season. Sandra Gould becomes the new Mrs. Kravitz in season three. The two actresses couldn't look less alike. Pearce was pinched and slight while Gould is broad and open. They both possess similarly grating vocal styles that sound like fingers rubbing against an inflated balloon. In season three, Mrs. Kravitz is used a bit too much. The character is so over the top - sometimes she just stands in front of the Stephens' windows and stares inside the house - that Darrin and Sam could easily have her arrested and committed for stalking.
Familiar faces popping up in the third season include Maurice Evans, Estelle Winwood, Reta Shaw (TV's The Ghost and Mrs. Muir), Kathleen Nolan (The Real McCoys), Michael Ansara (Broken Arrow), Willie Mays, Marty Ingels (I'm Dickens - He's Fenster), Norman Fell (Three's Company), Paul Dooley (Tales of the City), Howard Morton (Gimme a Break), J. Pat O'Malley (Maude), Paul Sand (Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers), the Real Don Steele, Dick "Don't Squeeze the Charmin" Wilson, Joey Forman (The Joey Bishop Show), Dave Madden (The Partridge Family), and John Fiedler (The Bob Newhart Show). In the third season, Kasey Rogers joins the cast as the new Louise Tate.
The thirty-three episodes that make up the third season are divided onto four discs. The discs are housed in two slim, clear plastic keepcases, both of which hold two discs apiece. The fronts of the cases are decorated with production and publicity stills of Montgomery, York, Moorehead, and other members of the supporting cast. The backs of the cases include titles and brief synopses for each episode. Some of these synopses contain errors in the descriptions, as if they were written from faulty memory. The interiors of the cases and the discs themselves also include production and publicity photos along with the cityscape over which Samantha flies in the show's opening credits. The DVDs continue the cityscape theme. Each disc also spotlights one of the cast members - Montgomery on disc one, York on disc two, Moorehead on disc three, and Murphy on disc four. The keepcases slide into a cardboard outer sleeve.
The DVD menus, which start off full-motion before freezing on a static image, mimic the series' animated opening credits. Viewers can play all of the disc's episodes or choose them individually. The episodes are divided into chapters, but there are no scene selection menus.
