Rawhide – Season Two, Volume One (CBS DVD Set)
Picture:
C+ Sound: C+ Extras: D Episodes: B-
Though
Eric Fleming was the lead of Rawhide
as Gil Favor, it was a young, unknown Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Yates that had
the most impact and was around for most of the eight season of the hour-long
show. CBS DVD is up to the second half
of the second season with Rawhide –
Season Two, Volume One, offering the 16 installments the second half of the
show. Besides the classic theme song by
Dimitri Tiomkin sung by Frankie Laine (who did not have a Top 40 hit with it)
that people still known, many of whom have never seen the show, the script
writing was top rate.
The shows
also have great acting, surprisingly good production values for the time and
solid journeyman directors like Ted Post, Don McDougall, R.G. Springsteen,
Andrew V. McLagen, Jack Arnold, Vincent McEveety, Herschel Daugherty and
Bernard McEveety. Best of all, the show
has not aged as badly as many of the many Western TV series of the time, including
Gunsmoke. No wonder CBS continues to
issue these sets. The fans are
interested. The quality of playback is
another reason.
The 1.33
X 1 image was shot in 35mm black and white here and it looks really goods for
its age, taken care of nicely by the CBS archive. There may be some variance between the
quality of each episode print, but such shifts are slight. The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono throughout the
shows are very good for their age too, often demonstrating especially clean
audio for the time and for TV. There are
no extras
- Nicholas Sheffo
