Ronald Reagan – The Great Communicator (MPI)
Picture:
C+ Sound: C+ Extras: B- Episodes: B
The DVDs
that were being released even before the passing of former president Ronald
Reagan continue to roll out and Ronald
Reagan – The Great Communicator (1999) offers five programs made by “Hail
To The Chief Productions” (if you can believe that name) to honor the man. Though there is no voice over narration or
interviews, each segment is a mostly chronological assembly of all kinds of
archival footage to chronicle the man and his roads to success.
Though we
could count the five programs as episodes with no extras, the double DVD set
(running roughly seven hours, thirty minutes) offers the following first four
programs as the main segments, then a final segment as the extra:
1)
The Reagan Presidency (1981 – 1989) is a thorough series of clips
from the beginning of his presidency, how he handled and survived the
assassination attempt. the height of that presidency and its conclusion.
2)
The Military & The Soviet Union shows the things Reagan did do to
battle the Soviet
Union
and is a reminder that it was real strategy instead of forceful, military
pandering that brought on any success.
Mikhail Gorbachev never gets enough credit for helping to make things better,
but neither leader could have foreseen the Chernobyl disaster that was ultimately the
Soviet’s undoing. Add Afghanistan as their Vietnam and this segment has its limits.
3)
Reagan On Government & The American Dream will incense many who were not
happy government programs were cut, his ideas are very quaint and now that we
have seen what really happened, a distraction for the way programs and rights
were being rolled back. Too bad this was
not true, as all this viewer could ask is if he meant all this, what went
wrong?
4)
The Man
offers the most personal and honest segment, leaving the politics to the side
somewhat to show his life with Nancy and outside of the White House.
5)
Legacy Of A Leader has some overlap with the previous segments (perhaps
making it an extra) that also try to cover many moments not necessarily in the
previous programs that simply would not have made sense to include in
them. This runs well over two hours
long.
By not
adding anything, the images are often open to interpretation, depending on how
much you did or did not like Reagan and his presidency. They are edited together to have the most
positive impact, but that is never going to be strong enough to illicit nothing
but praise or positive responses unless you are preaching to the already
converted. Most important, though, is
that it is a rare chance to see the progression of a presidency and such sets
should be done for all the presidents since the dawn of film.
The full
frame images are usually in color and from videotape sources, but a few film,
and old black and white tape clips also show up. This is the kind of varying quality you can
expect from documentaries and this set is somewhere in the middle of being that
and a special interest title. The Dolby
Digital 2.0 sound is usually monophonic, as that was the state of most of TV
during Reagan’s tenure. This is good
enough though, especially because any of this footage that has been issued
before was likely on long out-of-print VHS or Beta videocassette sources, so
this is an archival-level improvement. That
puts in on par with the Passport Video Reagan set also covered on this
site. This set lacks the Hollywood materials of that one, but I
think this one is more comprehensive.
- Nicholas Sheffo
