Product Details

• Actors: Jeff Perry Peter Bloeme
• Directors: Peter Bloeme
• Format: Box set, Color, Full length, Full Screen, NTSC
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Number of discs: 1
• Rating: G (General Audience)
• Studio: PRB & Assoc
• DVD Release Date: March 1, 2005
• Run Time: 90 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• ASIN: B000EGFUK0
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #155,608 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars For a training DVD, I was hoping for more training assistance, April 22, 2008

By	Mary Jo Sminkey "author of cfwebstore" (Carlisle, PA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I've been a fan of disc dog sport since the early years and had the luck to live in the DC area where the championship events were held for many years. My first sheltie was pretty good at catching and I enjoyed doing local competitions with him but had too many physical challenges to be much of a freestyle dog. Even still, I bought Peter Bloeme's book on training when it came out and found it to be quite good, but simply haven't had a dog since then show much potential. Fast forward quite a few years and I have a young dog that shows great ability but has some issues in a few areas. I saw this DVD and since I've owned a number of excellent training DVDs in other sports like obedience and agility, thought I'd pick it up and see if it offered new insights into the sport since the years that the book was published.

Unfortunately, I have to say I was fairly disappointed. First, the actual running length of this DVD is not 90 minutes as it says on the Amazon page, it's 1 hour + 15 minutes of bloopers and some additional stuff (photo slideshow, etc.) And of that 1 hour of actual running time, only the first half has any actual training information! The second half of the disc is 20 minutes of competition footage and 10 minutes of basically commercials for the Hyperflite discs. To further shorten the actual amount of training information you get, after every lesson, you get interviews with various disc dog participants about how much they love the sport. A couple of these would be fine, but after awhile, you feel like yelling, "I get it, dogs like playing with Frisbees!"

Now, there's nothing wrong with the training information provided here...it just really doesn't go into as much depth as the book and provides very little in terms of actual troubleshooting. If you have a dog that is a natural at catching and picks things up quickly, you may find this DVD useful to provide an overview of the sport and the various tricks performed. If you are like me though and training a dog that has trouble in some areas and doesn't necessarily have huge drive for the disc that outweighs everything else in life, you'll be frustrated at the lack of information. For example, in showing multiples, you are supposed to tell the dog to "drop" the disc, yet there is no information provided on how to get the dog to drop or what to do if they try to tug the disc instead. Likewise in showing butterfly throws, the dog shown goes right for the disc, what if you have a dog that is put off by the butterfly throw and shies away instead? There's just little in here for the average dog owner that is going to run into problems in training, it just quickly goes through each lesson with fairly minimal information or different approaches shown.

Even the 20 minutes spent on showing competitions seems like it could have been better utilized. Commentary on the performances and explanations of why they scored as they did would have been great (you are given the scores but no explanation of them...and you have to remember the order for the categories for scoring as well since the numbers aren't labeled). And they don't even show performances from the different divisions like pairs and Microdog, which seems like a big oversight.

The one thing I did really enjoy was the blooper reel. They included a lot of funny bloopers and it was cute how they even had a "blooper summary" similar to the summary presented after each lesson in the training session. Also was glad to see a decent introduction to throwing and some of the different throws popular in disc dog sport. Most dog training DVDs are not professionally produced, so quality often can be very poor, but I have to give them kudos on a well-produced video that has good sound and video throughout. Overall though, this really should have been labeled more as an "Introduction to Disc Dog" rather than as a training DVD and I'd say grab the digital copy of Peter's book and skip this one, spend the money instead on one of the world championship DVDs which will give you a lot more to watch in terms of top-level performances in all the different divisions. Unless you are a really visual learner that needs to see things demonstrated, or have a burning desire to own everything "disc dog" related, I'd probably say pass this one up.