I ended up getting the Blu-Ray set as a Christmas gift despite my anger over the pulled extras. If it was a freebie I could accept it for what it was.

Now having gone through Season 1, I have this to report. Kino has totally screwed up the sound mixing on multiple episodes, especially "Dead Weight" and "Blueprint For Murder". There are multiple scenes where the background noise and sound F/X are raised to levels where the dialogue is getting crowded out or in some instances almost obliterated. Especially the scene where Hollister takes Columbo out on his boat where you can hardly hear anything above the roar of the motor, or in "Blueprint" when Columbo is talking to the construction foreman at the 51 minute mark. In this case, after watching this scene I pulled out the old DVD and compared. It's no contest. On the DVD the dialogue is front and center and distinct, but on the Blu-Ray you practically have to engage the subtitles.

So not only did Kino welch on the promised extras for this set, they then did substandard work on the audio. A perfect capper to their ruining of what should have been a Blu-Ray set for the ages. I'm not even going to bother with whatever they do for the 80s-90s episodes at this point.