Search - Wanted Dead or Alive - The Best Of on DVD

Peter Q. (Petequig)
Reviewed on 11/11/2010...

The best of young Steve McQueen.

WESTERNS WANTED

Mark Turner | 06/27/2008

(3 out of 5 stars)

"I wrote before about the wonderful ability that DVDs have offered when it came to allowing us to see television shows that we might have missed the first time around. It also offers another treasure in the ability to watch television shows that we remember from TV's early days. Such is the case this week with THE BEST OF WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE.

Before he made a name for himself as one of the top box office stars of the sixties, actor Steve McQueen gained a reputation on television. Often known as the king of cool, McQueen showed off his style and abilities on the small screen as well as the big.

Airing from 1958 through 1961, this series featured McQueen as Josh Randall, a bounty hunter on the trail of outlaws in the old west. Each week, Randall set out to capture someone new in a 30 minute time slot, offering a small moral at the same time..

McQueen's character was not your usual run of the mill western hero though. To begin with rather than carry a six shooter in a holster, he had a sawed off Winchester in a leg strap. While implausible, it didn't matter. It was unique, it was different, it was cool.

Randall was a good guy, always popping up in search of a bounty to be collected but not always pocketing the money. Helping a friend, making new ones, chipping in for the widow of a recently murdered sheriff, Randall did all these things and more in the series, several of which are on display in this single disc collection.

The BEST OF disc holds nine episodes of the over 94 that were shot. BCI Eclipse has released box sets of the seasons some were on but this BEST OF will give fans a fix or newcomers a jumping on point. Stories move from tracking down 2 brothers to clear his own name to helping a friend run for mayor in a corrupt town to aiding a rich man come closer to his son while searching for lost gold. And all in under 30 minutes!

With some feature films running well past the 2 and a half hour mark, many of these directors would do well to watch some of these old shows. The tales were simple, good guy vs. bad guy, but the compression of story into that 30 minute slots is something they could learn from.

The series also starred a number of people who either were stars at the time or who went on to bigger things. Michael Landon, Ralph Meeker, DeForest Kelly, Warren Oates, Lee Van Cleef, Lon Chaney Jr., Wayne Rogers, Mary Tyler Moore and James Coburn (who would go on to star with McQueen on both THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN and THE GREAT ESCAPE) are all seen on this disc.

If you're a fan of Steve McQueen, if you're a fan of westerns or if you're a fan of early television, you'll want to make a point of picking up this disc. It shows where the star quality of Steve McQueen began and offers a bit of early entertainment from the old west.
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Great Sampler

William Sutton | San Antonio, TX United States | 07/19/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"It's tempting to buy all the dvd sets of all my favorite old series I watched while growing up in the '50's and '60's, but prices being what they are these days I have to pick and choose. It's great these last few years that many of my favorite westerns became available, though I'm still waiting for more seasons of Have Gun-Will Travel. Gunsmoke was my first favorite and it's been coming out, along with almost-as-good Rawhide, but I'm getting tired of the studio doing seasons in 2 volumes just to wring more coins out of me. Getting to Wanted Dead or Alive, I was a big fan of the show it spun off from, Trackdown, but for some reason we did not watch Wanted very often. I don't know now if my parents wanted to see something else in it's time period or if we were not able to always pull in the station that ran it. This was the days when we had one tv and an antenna, living in small towns with maybe only one local station. Anyway, I'm glad I got this dvd. The series was like I remembered and I might go back and order at least Season 1. It's as different in its own way as Have Gun-Will Travel was--not your usual shoot 'em up western. Good transfer of pictures and sound, a nice representative selection of episodes and well worth the price."