Bill Cosby Show – Best Of Season One + Hawkeye – The Complete Series + Marcus Welby M.D. – Best Of Season One + America’s Wars Box Set + Last Voices Of WWI – A Generation Lost + Revolutionary War: Heroes & Battles + WWII: The War That Changed The World (Mill Creek DVDs) + Apocalypse: World War II (E1 DVD Set)

 

Picture: C     Sound: C     Extras: D     Episodes: C+/C/C+     Documentaries: B- (C+ for Revolutionary and Apocalypse)

 

 

Mill Creek has some new DVD releases that are either abbreviated, combined or expanded variants of titles they or others have issued before(for the most part), as you are about to see.  We have also added another war title from E1 for comparison.

 

 

Bill Cosby Show – Best Of Season One is a cut-down, basic version of the full Season One set we covered from Shout! Factory at this link:

 

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/4235/The+Bill+Cosby+Show+%E2%80%93

 

It is abbreviated and does not look or sound as good as the full set, but those not interested in the full set might want this version.

 

 

Stephen J. Cannell tried to bring the Last Of The Mohicans to life as the little-seen Hawkeye – The Complete Series (1994) with an interesting combination of Lee Horsley (Matt Houston, the William Conrad Nero Wolfe) in the title role and Lynda Carter (Wonder Woman) as the female lead.  Not awful, but not distinctive, it comes across more like Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman than the exciting show it could have been.  Though one-time Lone Ranger John Hart (a hit in the role before Clayton Moore) seems to have had the most commercial success playing the character on TV in a Lord Lew Grade 1957 series called Hawkeye & Last Of The Mohicans, Horsley quietly pulled ahead logging the most hours of anyone ever to play the role.

 

 

Marcus Welby M.D. – Best Of Season One is also a cut-down, basic version of the full Season One set we covered from Shout! Factory at this link:

 

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/9862/Marcus+Welby,+M.D.+%E2%80%93+S

 

It too is abbreviated and does not look or sound as good as the full set, but those not interested in the full set might want this version.

 

Now to a series of war documentary releases that contain several titles we have covered before.  We begin with a box set called America’s Wars and include the American Solider and WWII Remembered sets that also showed up as the single Chronicles Of War set:

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/9715/Chronicles+Of+War+(w/American+Sold

 

We covered the Victory By Air section here:

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/10121/The+Dawn+Of+War+%E2%80%93+T

 

That leaves three programs we did not cover, but are not bad: World War I – The War To End All Wars, Korea: The Forgotten War and Vietnam War Stories, a good piece about a fiasco many are trying to make us all forget.  This is 49 DVDs (!) in all and makes for a strong set,

 

More testimony can be found in Last Voices Of WWI – A Generation Lost, a double disc, six-episode set that is not bad about a war that is disturbingly discussed less and less.  For the nearly eight years we have had this site going, we have seen too little on this war and this is soft in anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1, but is watchable and you get top see footage as rare as the testimony you will hear.

 

The same applies to The Revolutionary War: Heroes & Battles, which obviously needs more reenactment and stills since records do not exist from the time, but it is interesting simply because this is another war highly ignored and less and less discussed.  You get four episodes here and they are not bad.

 

WWII: The War That Changed The World has five previously issued programs including The Dawn Of War which we covered here:

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/10121/The+Dawn+Of+War+%E2%80%93+T

 

WWII Remembered, which we have in the America’s Wars set above, so we repeat that link:

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/9715/Chronicles+Of+War+(w/American+Sold

 

Fight For Freedom was not bad, but could have been better and we covered it here:

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/10384/America%E2%80%99s+National+Trea

 

That leaves the new-to-us War In The Pacific (24 episodes!) and Hitler: The Untold Story (13 episodes) that make this a better set than if they were not part of it.  The set has 11 DVDs.

 

Finally comes Apocalypse: World War II, released by E1 instead of Mill Creek, but offers unnecessarily colorized footage all over the place of the war when so much was in color and this tends to somewhat trivialize the content, as much as it is authentic.  We get 6 episodes, two hours of bonus footage and for all the footage being shot in 1.33, this has been cut up to fit an anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 frame, so it disappoints all around.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo