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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good, almost great, June 18, 2001
By A Customer
Being only five years old when the Ice Bowl took place, I have spent much of my adult life attempting to re-create in my mind what it must have been like that arctic Sunday afternoon when the Packers and Cowboys attempted to play a game of football in weather unfit for man or beast. This video does a remarkably good job at transporting you back to the late sixties, when NFL football was still very much a game.The reminiscences of players, coaches, journalists, and broadcasters is blended quite skilfully with the vivid footage of players shivering in makeshift tents on the sidelines, errantly melting their shoes in front of portable heaters (because they had no feeling left in their feet), mistaking effects microphones for sources of heat, and fashioning makeshift ballaclavas out of whatever was available. Such imagery lends great credence to the words of the participants. Under such conditions you could forgive NFL Films for reducing the actual game to little more than a sideshow, but with many drives presented play-by-play, the tape pretty much flows like an actual broadcast (maybe better, given the absence of commercial breaks). For once, the famous goal-line sneak by Bart Starr is presented in its proper context - as part of an amazingly determined drive in which Chuck Mercein's reception a few plays earlier probably swung the game the Packers' way. If there are any complaints, they're that Earl Mann's narration is sometimes a little too melodramatic and the "play-by-play re-creation" of the inimitable Ray Scott cheapens the overall quality of the production. Scott's voice still has the same remarkable sense of drama and suspense it did when he was the top voice at CBS, but surely it would have made more sense for him to have replaced Mann as narrator. "Re-creating" a play-by-play seems a overt appeal for the dumbed-down market. That this is "The Greatest Game Ever Played" may be moot, but certainly this is one video whose time is long overdue. In the absence of footage from the original CBS broadcast, this is as close to real as it will probably ever get.
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