It’s a pretty lean week for home entertainment releases save for Guy Ritchie’s stylish Man From U.N.C.L.E., the stunning documentary Meru, the final season of the classic Golden Age Phil Silvers Show, and the arrival of a new mecha anime series from Sunrise Animation.

Theatrical Movies

This week’s highest-grossing release is Guy Ritchie’s 1960s spy spoof The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (Warner Bros. “PG-13,” 116 min., $28.98, BD $44.98).  One of this summer’s many box office disappointments, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. earned just $45 million in North America and only $106 million worldwide against a cost of $75 million, which means it lost money for the studio.  Still, in spite of a pedestrian storyline, this film does have enough surface pizzazz to please fans of 1960s spy “fantasies” like the Bond films.

For fans of Electronic Dance Music (EDM) there is We Are Your Friends (Warner Bros., “R,” 96 min. $28.98), which stars Zac Efron in a very predictable saga about an aspiring DJ from SoCal, who wants to become a bigtime player in the world of EDM.  This movie paints a reasonably realistic picture of the EDM scene and doesn’t omit the drug use.  Most of the critics didn’t like We Are Your Friends, which got just a 42% positive rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, but what do they know about EDM?

For those who like psychology (and films like Lord of the Flies), The Stanford Prison Experiment (IFC, “R,” 122 min., $24.98, BD $29.98) provides a chilling reenactment of the controversial Stanford University experiment in 1971 in which students who portrayed guards and prisoners in an experiment in which they quickly took on the worst aspects of prison behaviors in a startling demonstration of either “occupational determinism” (“you are what you do”) or the ease with which human nature can be perverted even by the illusion of power over others.

Even better is the documentary Meru (Music Box Films, “R,” 90 min. $29.95, BD $34.95), a mountain climbing saga filmed by Jimmy Chin, one of a team of three climbers attempting to surmount Meru, a Himalayan peak that is perhaps the most difficult mountain to climb in the entire world.  The views are dizzyingly spectacular and the tension is real in this powerful film that deserves more exposure.

TV on DVD
This is one of weakest slate of releases so far this year.  The only contemporary release is the cancelled ABC sitcom Cristela: The Complete First Season (Fox, 418 min., DVD-R, $29.98), which features comedian Cristela Alonzo, the first Latina to create, write, produce, and star in a primetime series.

The top releases this week are all vintage series led by McHale’s Navy: The Complete Series (Shout Factory, 3600 min., $169.99), which includes all 138 episodes of the World War II comedy series featuring the feckless crew of PT-73. Ernest Borgnine was the ringleader here with a strong supporting cast that included Tim Conway, Joe Flynn, Carl Ballantine, and Gavin MacLeod.

McHale’s Navy, which aired in the 1960s was good fun, but it was weak tea when compared with the best of all the TV service comedies The Phil Silvers Show.  Sgt. Bilko: The Phil Silvers Show: Season 4, The Final Season (Shout Fctory, 940 min., $29.99) includes all 35 episodes from the final season of one of the best series of TV’s so-called “Golden Age.”  Season Four’s move from Fort Baxter, Kansas to California’s Camp Fremont was a dubious move, but Sgt. Bilko’s never-ending schemes remained as engaging as ever.  Classic TV comedy was much more than just I Love Lucy, as this collection proves once again.

Another interesting Golden Age series is the off-beat western The Rebel, which lasted for two season (1959-61) on ABC.  The Rebel: Season 2 (Timeless Media, 1620 min, $34.99) contains 38 of the show’s 78 episodes.  Created by star Nick Adams, The Rebel was “a post-reconstruction beatnik,” an ex-Confederate soldier who roamed the West with a journal and a hog-leg pistol.  A whiff or two of “Beat” culture wafted its way onto uptight network television in this series, which may seem “tame” today, but was sort of cutting edge in its day.

Anime
This week’s top release is the mecha-heavy
Buddy Complex: Complete Collection (Funimation, 375 min., BD/DVD Combo $54.98).  Produced by Sunrise Animation (Gundam), this 15-episode series aired in Japan in 2014.  There’s nothing new in this narrative of high school kids piloting giant robots, but Buddy Complex is well done enough that mecha anime fans will not be disappointed.

Also due on Tuesday are the harem comedy Invaders of the Rokujoma (Sentai Filmworks, 300 min., Subtitles Only, $49.98, BD $59.98), which collects the 12-episode Silver Link anime from 2014 that is based on a light novel series with a title that can be translated literally as Invaders of the Six-Mat Tatami Room, and Gatchaman: The Movie (Sentai Filmworks, $29.98, BD $39.98), a new high-def version of the 1978 film, which was carved out of footage from the classic Gatchaman anime series.