Search - NFL Greatest Games Series: Green Bay Packers Greatest Games on DVD

The Packers are playing whenever you want -- and they're gon

Irreverent | La Crosse, Wisconsin, USA | 09/08/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"To those griping about the "missing" Ice Bowl and S.B. I & II, they are part of another set (actually a combo of two 2-DVD sets) which costs about the same as this and contains a lot more historical info, so just buy it and stop whining. It includes a painstaking reconstruction of the Ice Bowl using thousands of feet of film obtained from many sources, and it has lots of interviews and background stuff missing from this ten-game set. No true Packer fan could do without both packages

These aren't necessarily the games I would have chosen. For one thing, most Pack fans would really love to see the V**ings get creamed at least once, or maybe the V**ing game where Favre broke the all-time record for TD passes. However, surely Set Two will be in the works soon, especially after what happened to the Vikings early in 2008 in Mister Rodgers' Neighborhood, which I nominate for the next collection as being a milestone worthy of Favre's first win on 9/20/92 vs the Bengals.

Despite the absence of purple bloodshed, however, these are all GREAT games, many of them with the Holmgren-coached mid-90's teams with Butler, White, Brown, Levens, Freeman, Brooks, Chmura, Howard, you know the gang, with SB XXXI as the centerpiece, of course. Most have fine audio and video quality except for Favre's dissection of the Bengals on 9/20/92, and the 1983 Redskins game, but they are still worthy of inclusion and great to watch.

We have to skip a few tracks of noisy NFL blah-blah at the beginning of each disk. I would have also liked to see more background and follow-up on the games, and discussion & interviews with players and coaches. We get just the bare essentials, with much excised between the plays, including a few entire plays. This makes the flow a bit jerky and the transitions rather abrupt at times. However, this is a minor quibble, and it probably helped keep the price down, and enabled the producers to get the set in our hands a few months sooner.

What a tremendous value! Even the $50 list price in the Lambeau Store would be a bargain at five bucks a game, but nobody has any basis for complaining about this set at the price offered here, just over $2 per game, nice and compact, only about twice as thick as a single DVD package. These are GREAT games, all but one from the Favre era, surely some of the most watchable years of football that any team ever put together. The one pre-Favre game has the then-world champ Redskins with Riggins & co. getting the worst of the highest-scoring MNF contest ever with commentary by the tarnished MNF crew, unfortunately, minus Howard Cosell.

All in all, this is easily worth five stars. Maybe if enough of us buy it, there'll be a sequel. Not every team could say this, but for the Packers, finding ten more great games should be no problem!

Now what we need are the ten most embarrassing and humiliating losses by the Vikings, Bears, Cowboys, Patriots, and Dolphins. Just think -- the NFL could sell each of those sets to fans of 31 teams instead of just one . . .

Added: In the latter category, I remind fellow Razorback fans that Amazon has or had a DVD of the 2000 Cotton Bowl, where the Hawgs embarrassed and humiliated the highly favored UT Longhorns IN DALLAS . . . heh heh heh . . .

ADDED: Sorry, Favre-haters, but I understand how the current situation came to pass, without any evil intent on the part of anyone involved. Favre was pretty beat-up and discouraged after missing out on another SB ring in Jan 2008, so he decided to hang it up. GB bosses were correct to design the team around Rodgers, who had already shown what he could do when substituted for Favre in the Dallas game. Favre has never known anything much except football, so when July rolled around, as he had responded all his life, he just could not resist the siren call of the practice field. GB management made the right long-term decision to stick with Rodgers, so Favre had to go elsewhere. The Jets' managers were just penalized for concealing his injuries last year -- would we have wanted another few years of an iron man turning rusty?

As much as I hate to admit it, the V**ings have the best ground game in the NFL, a good match as Favre sees it, (I hope he's wrong). AP and Taylor will lighten the load on Favre, thus giving his 40ish body a chance at another SB ring (HE thinks, anyway), and letting him again hear his actions set tens of thousands of voices aroar, not always with joy, especially as we GB fans envision the coming season. That is what Favre has always lived for, and is very hard to resist (not to mention $10-12 mil). It was no longer available to Favre at GB -- who has a better QB for the next DVD set. Just as with Favre, GB will need to back Rodgers up with strong protection, good defense, a decent running game, and receivers who get open and hang onto passes, all of which could be coming together now.

I still appreciate how Favre made football (and even the sidelines) so wonderfully watchable, and enjoy experiencing not just a unique player, but a unique team (whose other stars also went on to other teams, including a few to the V**ings), in a unique era. That era has changed from the present to history, as all eras do. This set of DVDs allows us to visit that era whenever we wish."