Okay, I realize it's not even Thanksgiving yet, and of course, like last year the economy is, in Raymond Chandler's phrase, trying to crawl under a duck (there hasn't been any stimulus package in MY pants, I'll tell you that for free). But the ineluctable fact is we're all going to have to buy presents this holiday season no matter what.

That being the case, I'd be remiss at this point if I didn't mention that if you've got a little disposable income and some boomer friends on your Christmas list, you really ought to check out the latest installment of Walt Disney Treasures -- as always, limited edition box sets (we're talking metallic boxes, BTW -- you could go through plutonium with these things) full of interesting, heretofore unavailable stuff from the Disney vaults, complete with numbered certificates of authenticity and some other bells and whistles.

The aforementioned latest installment -- on sale today, as it turns out -- being Zorro: The Complete First and Second Seasons!

Disney's TV Zorro, for those of you born (to pick an arbitrary date) after the hit recording "Walking My Cat Named Dog" by Norma Tanega in 1966, was the first small-screen treatment of the venerable masked swordsman saga, and despite the subsequent charms of Antonio Banderas in the big-budget feature films, it remains, I think, the definitive adaptation. Guy Williams -- later the inter-galactic patriarch on Lost in Space -- played the dual role of the swashbuckling avenger and the foppish Diego de la Vega, but for most of us kids, the real attraction of the show was Henry Calvin as Sgt. Garcia, the show's loveably bumbling 2nd banana villain. A huge hit in its day -- the 78 half-hour episodes ran between 1957 and '59 -- the show was eventually cancelled not because of ratings, but because of a legal dispute over its ownership between the Mouse and ABC; after its demise, Disney did a couple of subsequent one hour Zorro specials before finally pulling the plug on the character. All of the episodes and the specials can be found on the two new box sets; bonuses include an intro by indefatigable film scholar (and high school chum of mine) Leonard Maltin, a profile of Williams from the old Disneyland show, an interview with Williams' stunt double, and a really cool little metallic Zorro lapel pin.

Here's a clip to give you an idea of the show's quite handsome for television in the 50s production values, the overall fun level, and the generally good looking restoration of the original film elements (this stuff was colorized in the early 90s, BTW, but fortunately everybody at Disney seems to have decided to forget about that little lapse in judgement).

In any case, you can -- and absolutely definitely should -- order both volumes of the TV Zorro here.

Oh -- and realizing that Disney is a family outfit, I've saved a personal reminiscence for the end. If you have kids, you might want to ask them to back off from the computer right now.

Anyway, and I'm not making this up, back in the day a classmate of mine insisted that the line in the Zorro theme song --

"Zorro, the fox so cunning and free. Zorro, who makes the sign of the "Z."

-- heard here in the original TV soundtrack recording by The Mellomen --

-- was actually

"Zorro, he f**ks Bob Cummings for free. Zorro, who wears the signs of disease."

Hey, what can I tell you -- I went to a really twisted elementary school.