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