If you savor the way Dancing With the Stars keeps physically damaging its denizens, you'll love Deadliest Catch: Season 4 ($29.99), out on DVD just before the April 14 launch of Season 5.

Sig Hansen, the indestructible Norwegian-American captain of the most TV camera-infested crab boat in the Bering Sea, broke his arms, ankles, toes, wrist, and back (twice). You couldn't do that on DWTS if Steve Wozniak landed on you while doing the Worm. Besides the ever-excellent possibility of gory mass death in quest of big bucks, the show offers dumb pranks to warm a Jackass fan's heart. (But the best scene happened years ago off camera to a Bering Sea fisherman friend of mine: He sat down exhausted on a crab pot, and the king crab reached up between the bars, grabbed my friend's testicle with his claw and would not let go, and my friend couldn't stand up very far because the crab was stuck behind the crab pot bars. Animal rights advocates love this story.)

Discovery Channel, hoping for more TDC-sized hits, is also releasing Iditarod: Toughest Race on Earth ($19.98), about the celebrated Alaska dogsled marathon -- not quite as deadly as crab fishing, but just as cold. It should happen to a dog. The show is also available on Blu-ray, and it's so spectacular it might be worth the price. You need to buy a Blu-ray, and it's safe to do so at last, because prices have plunged.

Smart people already knew John Houseman's name (he was Orson Welles' saner half at the Mercury Theatre, an Oscar-nominated movie producer, and the Juilliard drama prof who launched Robin Williams, Kevin Kline, Christopher Reeve, and other students. But what made him famous was the Oscar he won as a crusty old Socratic king crab of a law professor, and the TV show version of the influential film, The Paper Chase: Season 1 ($49.99). An immortal iconic performance, even though the law-student character (based on the screenwriter, a Harvard Law grad) is a nerf ball of a man.

In Beverly Hills 90210: Seventh Season ($59.98), the erstwhile high schoolers are finishing up at the University of Spoiled Children -- oops, I mean California University. Luke Perry has vanished, which hurts, but it clears out an ecological space for Jason Priestley to flourish.

In Ben 10: Alien Force: Season One, Vol. 3 ($14.98), former Cartoon Network child hero Ben Tennyson is now teen hero Ben Tennyson, battling aliens who snuck onto earth to destroy life as we know it. Also new on the animation front: The Mysterious Cities of Gold ($49.95), about kids rediscovering the Mayas and Incas in 1532, and The Nutshack: The Entire First Season ($19.98), about the sleazebag residents of San Francisco's hookeriffic Tenderloin district.

The reunion in Snoopy's Reunion: Remastered Deluxe Edition ($19.98) involves his old-time schoolmates at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm. It's not exactly the most revered Peanuts special ever, but it's a rarity, and it's got extras: the Flashdance parody It's Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown and Together Again: A Peanuts Voice-Cast Reunion. If you're a fan, be sure also to get David Michaelis' biography Schulz and Peanuts, now in paperback and packed with revelations (Schulz denied his own son credit for inventing the Red Baron and put in storylines about his own extramarital affair).

The hottest TV DVDs at this moment (including prereleases and the already-released): The Tudors: The Complete Second Season ($40.99), The Venture Bros.: Season Three ($29.98), In Treatment ($59.99), True Blood: The Complete First Season ($59.99), available May 19, and 24: Season Seven ($59.98), available May 19.

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