The Good
The comic zaniness never ceased in this swan-song of a season.
The Bad
No Extras on the Final Season? Bad, bad, bad.
Hogan’s Heroes: The Complete Sixth Season is the final 24 episodes of Colonel Hogan’s (Bob Crane) and his fellow POWs efforts to hurt the the Nazi’s during World War II. Whether they are going up against the “krauts” in cases of treason (“Klink For the Defense”), or stealing a dynamite truck with unexpected results (“It’s Dynamite”), or hurting the movement of Nazi tanks (“Look At the Pretty Snowflakes”), everything is done with a levelheaded sense of comedic wit. While I know that this show bothered a lot of German people (and others), mainly because it kept dredging up the war in the 1970s and also portrayed the Nazi’s as being bumbling fools. Also, the sly ways that Hogan and his Heroes kept pulling the wool over their captors eyes, making behind closed door deals, and simply turning being a POW into a mockery (truthfully, it seems like these guys could have escaped whenever they pleased) was bound to bother at least a few of the Germans who had served their country faithfully.
Whatever the case, if you can’t laugh at yourself you’ve got a lot problems. This show may not look at war in a way that historians would like, but for all its comic and slapstick efforts, Hogan’s Heroes: The Complete Sixth Season is a welcome edition to the lexicon of TV on DVD.
Features
No Extras came with this DVD.
Video
Full Screen. Aside from certain dirt on the picture here and there, I was pretty impressed with the way that Paramount compressed these shows to DVD. Everything looked really sharp with the colors (this show puts off a lot of blacks and browns) really coming through. Hogan’s Heroes: The Complete Sixth Season still seemed to have that early TV to color look, so there is a slickness here that maybe made the POW conditions look a little sharper than they should have.
Audio
Dolby Digital: English Mono. Solid audio. I was able to sort of juxtapose how the audio sounded on TV vs. How it sounded on DVD. Truthfully, they are about the same. It isn’t like the audio is employed to tell another story that goes against what we are seeing on the screen. It follows the action and actually seems to always have a hint of American, patriotic strains for both sides. In this regard I guess maybe people shouldn’t have seen this show as “Anti-German” after all.
Package
Hogan, with that “goodtime” smile on his face, and his Nazi foils standing behind him take up the front of this slipcase cover. The back portion gives us various shots from the show (all of which seem like they have been highly glossed up), some minor Technical Specs and a description of what Hogan’s Heroes: The Complete Sixth Season has to offer. The four discs that hold the episodes are each in one double, slim case. These each have the same cover as the slipcase and on the back they list out the episodes, their airdates and a description for each.
Final Word
I have to be honest this show has really grown on me. When the powers that be at MovieWeb first gave me this show to review, I was coming at it cold. I had heard of Hogan’s Heroes, but I didn’t really know what or who they were. Then, in between getting some seasons of this show to review, I started catching it on the local station KDOC in Orange County. All of that made me realize just how great Hogan’s Heroes is. Every episode is like a mini movie in which the Americans go out of their way to outsmart the Nazis. Basically, the episodes usually have Hogan and his team getting some information that Colonel Klink (Werner Klemperer) and Sergeant Schultz (John Banner) don’t know they have. Then, Hogan and his team use this information to upend their captors, even though life in this POW camp doesn’t seem all that bad.
Sure, Hogan and his men always win and I didn’t really ever think that they wouldn’t, but there is something comically comfortable about Hogan’s Heroes: The Complete Sixth Season.
Hogan’s Heroes was released .
