"Behold, the man who is a bean!"

I first started getting into the "Mr. Bean" comedies when I was in middle school. They aired on PBS right before "Are You Being Served?" which was my main Britcom of the time, so sometimes I'd catch the episodes on TV. Eventually I liked them so much I'd tape the episodes so I could watch them over again.

One Chinese New Year's, my grandparents came over as usual and I had to find something for them to watch on TV while my parents finished cooking. I put in my Mr. Bean tape and they loved it. Rowan Atkinson, who plays the malicious Mr. Bean, has an amazing face that must have some kind of rubber gene in it. My grandparents, who know as much English as I do Chinese (very little), were able to understand most of the crazy stuff he did and started chuckling in the kind of dry hearty way only grandparents had. Obviously this was something special!

As the years went by, my tape got more beat-up even though I didn't watch it often due to the loving monster called high school. And since I was in middle school when I taped the episodes, some of them had pretty bad quality because I didn't know how to use the antenna. So when I found out in a magazine that A&E were releasing all the episodes on a swell box set, I kept bugging my dad until he got it for my birthday.

Mr Bean: The Whole Bean collects all the episodes together in a three-DVD box set. The box is well-designed and very solid-looking, like a Fischer-Price toy - bright colors, distinctive shapes, that sort of thing. This will look nice with your other DVDs. Each of the individual "volumes" has its own box with different pictures of Rowan Atkinson as Mr Bean on the back and neatly lists the episodes and features. Vol. 1 has the first 5 episodes, Vol. 2 has the second 5, and Vol. 3 has the last 4 plus the listed DVD extras.

The menus for the DVDs are pretty simple and straight-forward: if you want to see an episode, click the title, and if you want to skip to a specific scene, click the title. Summarizing each episode on its own would be pretty pointless since "Mr. Bean" is mostly visual comedy, but they all have their own key points and scenes which just remain with you for a long time.

Unfortunately, a couple scenes are cut in "Merry Christmas Mr Bean" and "Do It Yourself Mr Bean" which just completely makes me confused but the cuts are fairly negligible and aren't obvious unless you've seen the episodes before.

Everybody has their favorite scene or finds one thing so funny it hurts, but for sheer WOW!-itude, I'd have to say "The Trouble With Mr Bean" is the best. In this episode, Mr Bean is late for the dentist so he has to dress in his car, and that's the reason why I gave this set 3s for Action Factor and Suspense. He's actually driving and dressing in his car at the same time - it'll make you go WOW! when you see it. I'm pretty sure they had someone to make sure Rowan Atkinson didn't crash and die, but Rowan Atkinson's a huge car fan and races cars as well, so it's probably all him. He's got some major skills.

What's really awesome about this DVD, however, are the extras. Besides your usual filmography and promotional trailer, there's bunches of more Bean. "The Story of Mr Bean" is a forty minute documentary on Rowan Atkinson and how he ended up creating Mr. Bean. I recognize some of the interview segments from an older documentary he did for PBS a few years ago, but luckily it has a lot of his live material, interviews with his comedic cohort, and some of his early TV work. My favorite clips were 1) Rowan miming some drumming onstage & 2) Rowan on an early 80s TV show getting ready for a date, breaking his only cup, and drinking all the different ingredients for coffee one at a time.

"Bus Stop" and "Library" are sketches that haven't been shown on TV for some reason, and I don't know why. Maybe they were too offensive, since the first has Mr. Bean nearly getting a blind man hit by a bus and the second has Mr. Bean accidentally defacing an ancient reference book at the library. The two Comic Relief sketches are Mr Bean at the skating rink and a mock-episode of "Blind Date" with Mr Bean and Alan Cummings (!) as two of the three contestants on a really cheesy dating show. The "Blind Date" episode is definitely one of the best extras on here and makes up for the cut scenes.

Mr. Bean's humor is not going to be enjoyed by everybody, because he can get pretty mean (cutting in line at the hospital), but he's also pretty cool as well (saving a man who had a heart attack with jump-start cables). The episodes were made in the 1990s so they're not a visual feast or anything, but they've held up pretty well so far and can be enjoyed by kids, old people, and those other-folks-in-between alike. [9.5/10]