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