Search - Lucky Strike Presents: Your Hit Parade 1950s Collectors Edition on DVD

It was about the songs, not the singers.

Henando DeSoto | New York City | 12/29/2006

(2 out of 5 stars)

"I Loved this item, however, "Caveat Emptor!". This DVD was created from Kinescopes. In case you're not old enough to know what a "Kine" is, it was a process that predated Videotape. A Cameraman positioned a camera in front of a Television screen and filmed whatever was being broadcast. As you can imagine, Video quality was poor and of course, black & white but remember, That's all they had to work with! Considering these limitations and the rarity of this material, I was satisfied but you may not be. The box mentions names like Frank Sinatra and Doris Day having been associated with this show but that was on the radio. They won't be found here. The TV series starred Soprano Dorothy Collins, Canadian Mezzo Gisele Mackenzie, Leading man type Russell Arms and Hoagy Carmichael type Snooky Lanson. Very simply put, the show presented the top tunes of the day as numbers from a musical revue or Broadway stage show. The show aired once each week and so the producers were constantly under pressure to find new ways to present the songs. This could be a major problem when the song was a huge hit and refused to leave the charts. Years ago, I saw Dorothy Collins' night club act and she related: "I sang (Nat King Cole's hit) "Too Young" so many times that they literally ran out of ideas and finally had me singing it on a fire escape!". The four half-hour segments presented here are from November-December 1955 and you will see many of the songs repeated several times in front of one cheesy set or another. They tend to be MOR (Middle of the road) Pop hits. "Autumn Leaves", "16 Tons", "How important can it be?", "Suddenly there's a valley" with only two R&B hits (You may recognize one of them). LaVern baker's "Tweedle Dee" (Dorothy does a good vocal imitation of the great Ms. Baker). You won't recognize the other one (Harvey Fuqua and the Moonglows' "Sincerely" sung the McGuire Sisters way by Gisele) Good but not Soul. One episode is a Christmas episode and closes with Dorothy Collins singing live in Rockefeller Center. How rare is that? This quartet of stars were household names 50 years ago but are mostly long forgotten. Gisele would have her own one-hit-wonder with "Hard to Get" and Dorothy would go on to star in "Follies" on Broadway in the 1970's. This DVD also includes the original commercials for Lucky Strike cigarettes (singers hawking cigarettes? Dorothy even does so in a nurses uniform!) and Richard Hudnut Quick Home Permanents (hawked by Spokesmodel Julia Meade moonlighting from selling Lincolns on Ed Sullivan). The Commercials are wryly funny. Sound quality is on a par with picture quality and although I loved this, I can only recommend it to people who are old enough to remember when this was a hit TV show."

Not Worth the Price

Edwin G. Eigel | 01/11/2007

(1 out of 5 stars)

"On this DVD, the video is poor and the audio is not good. The title and the description of the contents are at best misleading. It does not cover the 1950s as one might suspect, but contains only four programs from a short period of a few months. The majority of "artists" listed on the jacket are not on the disc. It is not worth the price."

Memory Lane

Tammy Butler | Freetown, MA USA | 01/11/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Watching this DVD was an inspirational walk down memory lane. Many childhood memories came floodng back as I viewed the DVD.

The only drawback was the repetition of some of the same songs as one show followed another, perhaps in too close proximity in chronological time.

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