It isn't easy boiling down a TV talk show that ran for more than 20 years and upwards of 5000 episodes into a highlight reel lasting less than an hour. The folks who compiled Mike Douglas: Moments & Memories have done that with notable success by staying true to the host's own style: i.e., focusing on the guests, respecting the audience, and providing a balance of interviews, performances, and other material guaranteed to appeal to a wide cross-section of viewers. Douglas, who died in 2006, was an up-and-coming singer (he provided the voice of Prince Charming for Disney's animated Cinderella in 1950) who moved into TV in the early '60s, and his daytime chat fest was a popular destination for celebs of every stripe, who recognized and appreciated that the confident but deferential host preferred to listen to his guests rather than compete with them and was more interested in making them look good than in promoting his own act. Moments & Memories contains clips with an extraordinary variety of visitors (from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Mother Teresa, from two-year-old Tiger Woods to Muhammad Ali, from Marlon Brando to Paul Newman, from Louis Armstrong to Kiss' Gene Simmons), but what distinguishes it from almost all DVDs of this ilk is the presence of complete musical performances, in this case by the Rolling Stones (performing "Not Fade Away" in '64, surely one of their very earliest TV appearances) and John Lennon (a nice version of "Imagine," backed by the Elephant's Memory band). Music fans will find those two gems alone worth the price of admission. Bonus features include about an hour's worth of additional interviews and Douglas bio material. --Sam GrahamMore...
Oscar® is a registered trademark of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
This site has no relation to Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
See www.oscars.org for comprehensive Oscar® database.
Box Sets DVDs
DVD:
Search
- Fast and Simple
Classic Television on DVD:
NowChannel