Customer Reviews

Greg Garrison Presents The Best of Dean Martin Variety Show (Volume 6)

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This is a review of the complete 'Best of Dean Martin...' sets. I'm not critiquing any specific volume, so I apologize in advance that this review is found on every one. However, since my review is for all buyers and not just those of a certain volume, this seems necessary.
'The Dean Martin Show'(1965-74) was a favorite of mine as a child &, outside of the vaudeville slapstick, it still holds up pretty well. As for the packaging, however, Martin's longtime assistant, Greg Garrison, has edited this whole thing together with no consideration to content or style: on e. volume, excerpts from all nine seasons are poorly tossed together, with the jump from time periods being extremely jarring & the style of the show completely lost. Included are reminiscences from guest stars of the show, but these are poorly edited into the format, looking more like cheap quality early 80s videos. A friend of mine, who also likes 60s TV, was just horrified when he saw this mishmash.
So, basically, if you're someone who just wants to see the show and has no concerns on how you view it, these'll possibly be fine. Contrarily, if you have fond memories of the show and its style, which Martin worked hard on, you'd probably do better waiting for a better package. A season by season release, as most TV offers now, is long overdue.
The real culprit here is Guthy-Renker, who has the rights to the show. It's an extremely dated company that does this very same thing to all programs to which they received the rights, such as 'The Carol Burnett Show' & 'Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In'. I believe 'The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour' has had this same problem, but handled by a different mishandler.

I was very disappointed in this dvd. The condition was as promised - no problems there. The issue is with the dvd itself. It was poorly put together -- in some skits Dean's hair was blonde, others it was dark. But the material itself wasn't very good. I don't feel it did Dean justice. I had originally planned to buy a few more of these dvds but after seeing this one, I will not do it since they're done by the same guy.

I agree that I wish these shows weren't chopped up and didn't jump around all through the years. It would be better to see the shows in their entirety. Also no one is really interested in hearing comments from others. Unlike someone else said, I didn't think there was too much Bob Newhart. The sketches with him often resulted in unplanned laughs happening. It's Jonathan Winters that I just don't find funny, maybe it's me.
Of course the jokes can be corny, that's the way it was then. I still like them. People probably went to the show to see Dean, not to find clever jokes.
If you like Dean you'll probably enjoy these DVDs, just be warned they are clips from shows, not the whole shows. It's better than nothing until someone puts out the complete series.

I've thought that these DVDs would be better if they incorporated entire shows and I've said as much. However, this one was even less entertaining than the others, making it impossible for me to even rate it as average with three stars. Orson Welles was a very talented man but sketch comedy and magic did not appear to be his forte. I don't even know what the logic was in picking some of the other acts for this program.