The most popular genre for television tends to run in cycles. One season most shows will be about lawyers. A year or two later it will be the detectives will have their shot to crowd the TV schedules. Now it is technological investigation that is all the rage. Back when I was a mere youth in the late fifties the big thing was the western. Cowboys dominated the world of a young boy then. As soon as school was done for the day and every Saturday we would put on our cowboy hats, strap on our toy six shooters and play cowboy. A piece of wood would become our valiant steed and girls were off playing somewhere else. We would watch westerns on TV, go see them in the movies and even looked for our heroes on the front of our favorite breakfast cereal boxes. We were fascinated with these gruff men who took on the Wild West and tamed the land. While some westerns were made in such a way that it was just mindless entertainment other series endeavored to create something that both the kids and adults would love. It had to have the rough and tumble action for the kids and engrossing stories for the grown ups. One TV western was able to rise to the challenge in an exceptional fashion’ ‘Rawhide’. This was a show that is classic, able to stand the test of time. It is as great at entertaining now as it was some fifty years ago. If you ask somebody from the baby boomer generation about the show two things will immediately come to mind. One will be the theme song by Frankie Lane. The other is a young actor just breaking into the entertainment industry, Clint Eastwood. Sure he was Dirty Harry and is currently one of the greatest directors ever to sit behind a camera but back then he was a popular cow poke. If you are a collector of classic television shows on DVD take a look at your collection. Odds are there are a lot of titles released through CBS Paramount. They have the absolute best catalogue of old and new television series of all time. This is just one of them. They are releasing this series in half season sets. Now we are up to season three volume two. If you grew up with this series it will be a trip through time back to a simpler time. Younger people will be captivated by the quality and pulled in as well.

This series is one of the most famous TV westerns ever. It came at the time where there was some stiff competition for the market share. It was also a time before DVRs so they have to make sure that the viewers wanted to sit down in front of the family television and watched it. ‘Rawhide’ achieved this by being vastly different from the rest of the pack, or herd as the case may be. The typical western had white hated good guys shooting and beating up the black hat villains. Then the Indian, this was long before political correctness, were painted as the savage red man. This series was a drama set in the old west. The stories were intended to pull in the viewers instead of just providing some weekly excuse for the action. The men here were not gunslingers. They were simple cattle folk. All they wanted to do was drive the herd to its destination and get their pay. Then they would go out and kick back at a little dusty town. These were the Americans that helped push our boundaries to the west coast. A cattle drive was a lonely place to work. There were difficult conditions and the cattle had to be cared for at all cost. The men of the drive would have to protect the cows from the ever present danger of rustler, drought a straying off course. The Native American knew the land and most of these men respected them. They shared a love of the vast land. This was one of the first westerns that treated the Native American as a people. In those days television was still new enough that the networks were still willing to take a risk with unexpected programming choices. It paid off, this show was and still is fantastic.

Since this was a character driven series the men portrayed had to be more complex than usual. In charge of the men and the cattle was Gil Favor (Eric Fleming). He would frequently wax philosophical about the hardships of the trail. As the trail boss it was up to him to make the difficult decisions and try his best to keep the men and herd moving forward. While the managerial decisions were up to Gil he needed a man he could trust as his ramrod; the man who sat in the saddle each day to make sure everyone kept on track. This position fell to Rowdy Yates (Clint Eastwood). He was young and fiery; never backing down from any obstacle. It has been said that an army marches on it stomach and the same is true of a cattle drive. The responsibility of feeding a group of very hungry men went to Wishbone (Paul Brinegar). Helping him in this arduous task was his assistant Mushy (James Murdock). There were many functions that were needed on such a trek. One of the senior wranglers, Hey Soos (Robert Cabal) was the go to man and also a source of many of the trouble found along the way. There was also a need to know what is up head and for that they had Pete Nolan (Sheb Wooley), the scout. He had to find water and food for the cattle along the way.

The biggest threat to the calm of the drive was typically the endless boredom the men faced. These were men with a surplus of testosterone and had an endless need for some form of excitement or another. Fortunately there was usually a small town along the way to help stir things up. Another atypical thing about the show was how it depicted the daily lives of the men. They would do things no other western show would like them mending their clothes or caring for their gear. This tedium was broken by some incident and the title of each episode reflects this theme. This series was much closer to the true cow poke than typical shown in Hollywood.

All of the episodes for this set and its companions were completely re-mastered. The black and white video does have some signs of age with an occasional speck here or there but overall the video looks great. The audio is presented in a very crisp Dolby two channel mono. CBS Paramount usually provides a plain vanilla set and this is no different. It would have been nice to see some additional material but this is the kind of series that can stand on its own. you may show your age but sit your entire family down and watch this series together, you will all enjoy it.