The Good

Clint Eastwood and the rest of the cast make this show shine.

The Bad

Very sparse extras.

City Slickers this isn't.

Clint Eastwood starred on this show for eight seasons as Rowdy Yates. While Eric Fleming as Gil Favor was the boss on the trail, I think that it was readily apparent that Eastwood was the driving force behind Rawhide. These two men led a cattle drive that brought them face to face with many different kinds of adventures.

All titled "Incident At, Of or In" something or other, there is plenty of gunplay, horseracing and intrigue to satisfy any western fan who hasn't ever seen this show. I'll admit that I was new to this, but I really took to all the stories that dealt with the Confederacy, the wrongly imprisoned and just about every other device that makes the Western genre what it is.

Rawhide: The Complete First Season is well done TV.

Features

Incident Of The Roman Candles

Rowdy, Gil and Pete unknowingly find trouble when they try and help a young boy who is trying save his father. Culled from the Second Season of the show the creators of this DVD saw fit to put this on here as a bonus feature. While I don't know if it tells us anything about the future of the show or how the characters evolved, I do know that fans of the show have another installment to look forward to.

Production Notes

This is a small but informative bit of information that has been done for the episodes in this set. While I usually don't review these, they typically are not as extensive as they are here. The "Notes" discuss the show, the cast members who are guest starring on the episodes, and they even talk about the critics who were reviewing the shows at that time.

Video

Full Screen Format. Presented in black and white (and for some reason packaged in a color box) these shows seem to have been well cared for since they were made in 1959. Sure, I am willing to bet that a lot of the episodes were shot at the studio (in this case Paramount), these older shows have a way of really pulling off the Western feel of movies much bigger. I think this is because each episode has the look of a movie and because of that, that is how we see them. Sadly, these episodes don't look too cleaned up but I think some of the dirt on the image adds a lot to the show's presentation.

Audio

Dolby Digital - English Mono. I didn't notice anything that special about the audio but that's probably because it was very simply done. I never had the feeling that I wasn't watching something that was well put together, and ultimately I think the images and the sound work well off one another. This seven disc set contains about 20 hours of content, all of which has been nicely compressed and well cared for.

Package

Clint Eastwood takes up the majority of this front cover while the two other cast members are much smaller behind them. In the distance are mountainous regions as well as Yates and Favor hard at work bringing the cattle home. The back gives us three shots from the show, all of which feature Mr. Eastwood in some capacity. We are given a minute description of the show and some technical specs. The seven discs that make up this set are packed into four cases which list out and describe each episode. While I am put off by how much color there is in this packaging (simply because I think it could mislead consumers), I am buoyed by the showcasing of a bunch of black and white pictures.

Final Word

At the very least, if you grew up watching television in the Eighties then I am sure you remember there being a dogfood commercial that used the Rawhide theme song as a way to sell more kibble. I never knew until I watched this show that this is where it was from, so right off the bat I was ahead of the game.

There is a grittiness and depth to Rawhide that really lives by Clint Eastwood's performances. Everyone else on the show is good, but it was apparent even at this early stage of the actor's career that he was going to go on and do bigger things. It is the way he embodied character of Rowdy Yates that seems to continue to inform his work and other characterizations.

Rawhide was released .