It’s been just over two years since I noted a rumor that the old TV series Tales of the Gold Monkey might be headed for DVD, and now — finally! — it looks like it’s actually happening. TV Shows on DVD.com reports that the series is now available in the UK and Australia, and an American release is planned for sometime in the spring of 2010. Even better — and quite surprising, given that this series lasted only a single year and is nothing more than a cult classic at best — it’s going to include an all-new retrospective documentary and recent interviews with the series’ stars, Stephen Collins and Caitlin O’Heaney, and there may be some other special features from the European release as well.

I can’t tell you all how happy this makes me. As I’ve explained before, Gold Monkey made a huge impression on me back in the day. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a good old-fashioned adventure story about a dashing American cargo pilot and a cast of eccentric characters who live and work in the exotic South Pacific of the late 1930s. Coming on the heels of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which had been released the previous year, the series was marketed (rather inaccurately, in my opinion) and dismissed (rather unfairly, I think) as nothing more than an Indiana Jones knock-off, but it was a fun show in its own right and deserved more of an audience than it got. I picked up a VHS bootleg of the series several years ago and was very pleased at how enjoyable it still was. You always run the risk when revisiting childhood favorites of discovering that they weren’t what you remember them being; happily, Gold Monkey was pretty much exactly what I remembered. The bootlegs, however, weren’t worth the tape they were recorded on. They appeared to be 10th-generation copies with such a bad picture that I often couldn’t tell what I was looking at, so I imagine viewing a nice clean DVD version is going to be like seeing the show for the first time. I can’t wait…

In a somewhat related note, I see that the ’80s detective series Matt Houston, in which Lee Horsley of The Sword and the Sorcerer played a Texas oil millionaire who solved mysteries as a hobby, may also be coming soon. Which means that pretty much every TV series that’s ever mattered to me is or shortly will be available for me to own, except for The Wonder Years and the originally aired version of WKRP in Cincinnati, both MIA because of costly music licensing issues. Oh, and The Six Million Dollar Man; I have no idea what’s holding that one up. I have to admit, it’s a strange thing to consider, so much of my childhood being out there on the market now. It’s kind of sad in a way, like a long quest is at last coming to an end…