The Naked Brothers Band: Season 1 [2 Discs] [DVD]

Embark on a journey to find the Water of Life to save your ailing father

The second half of the second season of Rawhide, starring Eric Fleming and Clint Eastwood, has arrived on DVD with fairly good transfers. Parts of some of the black-and-white episodes are grainy, and one suspects that the original materials, if they still exist, might look somewhat better; but whatever was used for the sources is at least very clean and unedited. The chapter markers on each episode correspond to the commercial breaks, as with other Paramount releases; and each disc opens automatically to an easy-to-use menu offering quick access to individual episodes. As to the programming itself, this series dates from a time when TV series typically disd 32 episodes a season. And it's clear from the variations in quality that it was difficult for a writing staff, of whatever size, to generate that many first-rate scripts in a season. They compensated by changing the mood from week-to-week, so that some episodes were deadly serious and grim ("Incident of the Silent Web"), and occasionally laced in mystery ("Incident of the Murder Steer") as well; and others seem amazingly light-hearted ("Incident of the Last Chance", which is essentially The Taming of the Shrew carried westward). Audiences enjoyed the escapism inherent in the setting, and the performances are reasonably colorful and accomplished -- Clint Eastwood comes off as amazingly callow in the early seasons of the series, reminiscent in some ways of Michael Landon's character on Bonanza, while Eric Fleming is intensity personified in his most serious scenes, and Paul Brinegar as Wishbone, the drovers' cook, steals most of the scenes that he is in, and Sheb Wooley as Pete Nolan, the scout, steals the rest.