Search - A Century of Flight on DVD

Great hope - greater letdown

GTF | Washington, D.C. | 04/04/2006

(2 out of 5 stars)

"I had great hope for this 4-disk video set. It was beautifully packaged in a well-designed plastic 4-disk folder which was placed in a beautifully illustrated metal can case. Unfortunately, the contents fell far short of my expectations. While it was reasonably well produced and showed much interesting footage, it suffered from a number of faults, the principal being its predominant emphasis on warfare, some of which, particularly the coverage of the First World War, was only loosely connected to aviation. During the first 100 years of aviation, major warfare entailed perhaps 10 of those years, mostly the two World Wars, yet, the first two disks are almost entirely devoted to those two conflagrations with relatively minimal coverage of the period of initial development and the development that took place between the wars, to say absolutely nothing of the post-WWII era. There always seemed to be a sense of hurry to get back to one war or another. In general, there was a lack of depth, skimming over many significant events, in the rush to get back to battle. There were errors in presentation that any aviation buff would be sure to catch, such as discussing one aircraft while showing another, sometimes even from another era. With the many thousands of hours of historic film available it's hard to understand why the producers felt it necessary to show many of the same cuts repeatedly during several of the discussions. The sequencing was disjointed often leading the viewer to ask, "how did we get here?" The third disk was devoted to space exploration. Moving from the second disk to the third suffered from some of the same sense of disjoint leaving one to think that not too much went on in aviation during the period after WWII ended. However, of the four disks, this one was, nevertheless, by far the best. With the exception of a somewhat incongruous insertion of a segment on Chuck Yeager's historic flight beyond the sound barrier, the disk followed a timely sequence from Goddard to the moon landings, giving all of the appropriate nods to the Russian accomplishments along the way (they were, after all, first, if not best, in many areas - first satellite in space, first man in space, first woman in space, first space station - where most other U.S.-produced histories of space flight have tended to gloss over those embarrassing facts). The final, fourth "bonus" disk was a hodge-podge of films and clips ranging from another mini-doc of Chuck Yeager, to a copy of the famous original WWII film Memphis Belle (which, inexplicably, while originally shot in Technicolor, was reproduced here in black and white). Lacking depth and continuity while being obsessed with warfare did not lend itself to my finding it particularly entertaining. But that's just me. Overall, on a scale of one to five, I'd give it a two. Moderately interesting, a bit more frustrating. But, hey, it was only $29 bucks - waddya' expect?"