Customer Reviews

American Pickers: The Complete Season 1

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If you are even thinking about buying this then you already know that the show is amazing! I absolutely LOVE it. So I'm not gonna talk about the show, I'm gonna talk about what everybody is talking about and that is the PATHETIC history channel. BEWARE!!!!! Most of the DVDs they offer are not the full season. They are using a lame advertising tactic to make you buy this DVD which costs $2 a show. Absolutely ridiculous!!! Please make them do something about this and go to the historychannel.com and write to them how unhappy you are. I read numerous other people being upset about this and it pissed me off too so I wrote to them. Please pass the word so they can fix this and give us the ENTIRE season.

Now about this DVD itself, I decided to buy it because I thought this was the only season out of all offered that was complete. After getting it, I still think it's not. Very sad! :( Shame on you history channel!

From the moment I saw a teaser for American Pickers in December, I couldn't wait to see the first show. As a former flea market and yard sale addict, I miss the days when you really could find some amazing pieces of American history or pop culture at such venues. But those days were gone decades ago. So the thought that I could enjoy that vicariously through this show was pretty intriguing.

And it did not disappoint. American Pickers is everything I hoped for and more. Mike and Frank really know their stuff, and the people they come across in their travels are a breed of American which is quickly disappearing...along with the treasures they have hidden in barns, garages, old opera houses, and even tunnels!

One of the charming attributes of this series is the way Mike and Frank relate to each other. There are none of the insane ego dramas which plague-no, make that completely destroy-other reality shows. And over the time that these two have worked and traveled together, they have developed a language all their own-something I have experienced myself with my business partner. It's very real, and quite funny at times. (I especially like when the guys are freestylin').

The pieces of history they unearth are truly amazing! Bicycles, scooters, motorcycles and sidecars. Visible gas pumps, a giant advertisng character with a movable arm. And don't forget Frank's favorites...oil cans, big little, round, square and beautifully kept or beautifully rusted. They even found a man who collects BUILDINGS! That's right, he has a White Castle hamburger joint in his front yard, and the General Store he shopped in as a boy in his back yard-fully stocked, of course-along with quite a few more buildings from his home town.

I love this show. I hope it comes back for many more seasons. One disturbing thing I noticed at the end of the first season was a switch to 1/2 hour shows. PLEASE, DO NOT MESS WITH THIS NEARLY PERFECT JEWEL OF A SHOW! Keep 'em an hour, and keep 'em coming!

American Pickers: The Complete Season One
12 Episodes on 3 Discs, released on June 8, 2010

"American Pickers" is a show in the History Channel that really ought to run back to back with "Hoarders" on A&E. Mike Wolfe and business partner Frank Fritz call themselves "pickers" and are the owner of Antique Archaeology in Iowa where they hunt for unique, old, rusty antiques in hopes of flipping them for a profit.

Mike and Frank do not go for the obvious choices, but really dig deep through piles of junk to find relics like a saddle, metal signs, an old cigarette vending machine or soda pop machine, or their favorite pick-ups involving "man-tiques" like motorcycle parts and relics. Meeting the people who have collected (or hoarded) this stuff for generations always is a story in itself when they reveal how they obtained certain items in the first place. Mike and Frank love to delve into American history by learning about rare pieces.

It is an educational and interesting show and I bet it stirred the pot for a lot of people sitting at home to wonder what their stuff is worth. But as you can see on the show, sometimes your stuff is worth zip, especially when it can be turned over to reveal a $9.99 sticker! Assuming your junk has value could really initiate and aggravate hoarding symptoms and watching the show does not develop the skill of how to find pieces worth something since they seem to "pick" some of the most unlikely items.

While antiques themselves are not my bag, resale and flipping is very alluring and fun to watch. Not as much as the psychologically hypnotizing "Hoarders" show, but pretty cool nonetheless.

Bonus Features: None

I ran across this show on Netflix and watched a few episodes. One episode showed the slick talking Mike and Frank on a rural property of a frail elderly man in Iowa. They were seemingly kind and gentle to the old man. But they then gave him $75 for an old saddle he had; even I sitting out in TV land could see it was worth far more and the old man could not defend himself. They took it home and got it appraised; $5000. It was obvious from the video that the old man's life would have been transformed by receiving even half of this but there was no mention of going back to give him a fairer price. Other such examples. How can these vultures live with themselves? Appalling, taking advantage of the clueless elderly and robbing them of their valuables.

American Pickers succeeds due to both the chemistry of its leads and the diverse diamond-in-the-rust locals they investigate. Mike and Frank, our guides through virtually infinite untapped resources of iconic antiques and mangled auto parts, have a brotherly rapport. Mike is the natural leader, charismatic but not afraid to get his hands dirty. Frank is his trustworthy and can-obsessed Sancho Panza. They are immediately likable, down-to-earth and just all around friendly.
The places they visit throughout the course of the season vary immensely, and take them across the continental US, through decaying out-buildings and the homesteads of collectors, eccentrics and at least one gun-totting Southern gent. Sometimes it feels very much like the houses these men scour for odd, stylish antiques (and their rugged cousins "mantiques") could be contenders for the show Hoarders. Unlike that depressing program, however, the people who graciously allow their lives to be picked through by our heroes are presented as unsung salt-of-the-earth folk. Real people whose amassed wealth lingers in the objects they have spent their years storing. The stories of the objects add intrinsic value beyond the appraised monetary worth. Through Mike and Frank, the audience becomes a part of the legacy of battered farmhands and auto-part enthusiasts alike. This is the reason the show exists on the History channel. It is a piece, or rather, hundreds of scattered pieces of vintage Americana, soulful and rich. Surprises abound in overgrown yards, in dilapidated trailers. After continual viewing, American Pickers might very well lead one to consider with a more meticulous eye their own storied objects, to foster an appreciation for the life on shelved dolls or a gear for a childhood bicycle. While most American TV is preoccupied with the ills of materialism, American Pickers takes viewers down a path less travelled. Treasures await in the tall grass, in the rotten squalor of a thousand forgotten realms.

After no longer finding Fox news very funny, even tiring of Stewart and Colbert, and sensing that, at least since Bush, Olberman had lost much of his audacious eloquence and rhetorical thunder, I was fine with cutting loose from my cable connection and retiring to old movies. Then I discovered "Pawn Stars," which by itself caused me to reconsider. "American Pickers" was a slower learning experience for me. It didn't have a "con artist" (intended in the best, old carnie sense of the word) like the alternately affable and ruthlessly decisive Rick or a potential mega-media star like Chumley. But Mike and Frank grow on you, an unlikely pair of latter-day Midwestern prospectors who not only take their quests seriously but manifest genuine feeling for each other as well as their elderly providers. The show generates little of the interest in actual resale value as does "Pawn Stars" or in the before and after shots of ancient artifacts that have been expertly restored by one of Rick's many "buddies." But it compensates with plenty of human interest (though try not to be initially put off by Mike's in-your-face mannerisms and amplified razor-blade voice: you soon come to respect him as a straight-up guy you'd do business with any day, and it doesn't hurt that Frank's softer, Teddy Bear personality is always on hand to counterbalance the more strident Mike).

It soon becomes apparent that Rick and Mike have been prepped by the same reality TV coach--the pauses, inflections, exclamatory remarks ("The minute I saw it I knew I had to have it!") soon stand out despite the differences in their personalities. Both shows constantly challenge those who are so inclined to play the role of the invisible co-star(s): the camera crew that's doing the prepping, the set-ups, the ghost-stepping in the footprints of Rick's family or Frank and Mike. When the latter pair discover the ultra-bizarre underground "mole" collector, and follow him into his precarious labyrinthian lair, you have to wonder how a single camera man could have tracked them, and the same when the pair split up to approach a prospective client singlehandedly so as not to "spook" him with a two-person full-frontal approach. Yet the number and variety of camera set-ups suggest that the pair are being shadowed by more than a one-person production team.

Of the two shows, "American Pickers" definitely has more socially redeeming value. Testimonies by the treasure hunters aside, the real bonanza, the ultimate "pick," is pure Americana--an appreciation for America's past and the collection of weathered and withered yet diverse characters who have devoted their lives to assuring that a few concrete fossils will be preserved for future generations to appreciate (the show performs a service if it motivates young people to expand their time horizons beyond the immediate present or discourage them from limiting their speculations to Steve Jobs' announcement about the next iPod in six months).

What some may find disturbing about the show is the mirror it's bound to hold up to those of us who find time slipping away considerably faster than our possessions (at times, there even seems to be an inverse relation between the two: we acquire "things" faster than we lose them. ...a misguided effort to console ourselves for what we sense is being irretrievably lost?). Mike's and Frank's "clients," despite being in their '90s and literally swamped by scrap metal and "old stuff," are frequently reluctant to part with an old bicycle part they may find a use for some day.

The show strives mightily to overcome the sense of the elegiac and largely succeeds, but not without a continual unsettling undertone. All of the junk, rust and dirt--convertible into cash or not--is a symbol of human mutability and our ultimately futile attempts to overcome it. Still, you can't help but regret that these guys never had a chance to pick through Charles Foster Kane's vast menagerie before it all went into the fireplace at Xanadu and up in smoke. Besides "Rosebud," who knows what else they might have found?

The reason I like this show so much is all the history I learn. If it weren't for this show, I'd have never heard of half the stuff they talk about. Mike and Frank are great together, and they have been picking for 20+ years. This is one of my favorite shows on TV.

Great DVD very interesting seeing the history of America in differant items and what there worth to collecters, also the American landscape, great entertainment.

am erican pickers is one of the best programs,now that we have it on DVD we can watch it at any time.

I watch this show on History Channel all the time. I am also from Iowa like these guys so I had to buy it.