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Route 66 -
Season One Volume 1

Martin Milner (Tod Stiles) and George Maharis (Buz Murdock) star in this classic television drama about a couple of young guys who set out to see America in a brand new 1961 Corvette drop top.

What makes this show truly unique is that it was filmed in a different U.S. city each week, giving us a stark glance at what living in America looked like in 1960. It was a vastly different landscape, people lived a lot closer to the dirt back then. (I'll bet that decrepit New Orleans dock in episode three is a multi-million dollar condo development if it wasn't washed away by the levy failure.)

No television show had ever attempted anything on this grand a scale before, the technology necessary to make mobile TV production a practical enterprise had just been made available.

The first episodes of Route 66 are dark affairs, the show brightens up - both in terms of lighting and storylines - in the years that followed. The gritty storylines are penned by TV's finest authors (mostly Stirling Silliphant here) and the show also had a roster of fine directors like Arthur Hiller and Roger Kay during this period.

Like Wagon Train, The Fugitive or Lost In Space, the only constants are the two stars who become entangled, mostly for romantic reasons, in other people's problems. For the most part the stories are compelling, if a bit slow paced and overly melodramatic at times. But then, TV viewers of the day preferred to luxuriate in their favorite shows, they were meant to be transportive and Route 66 is that.

Then there's that car - that luscious 'Vette the boys tool around in. I'll take that car cross country right now! (In fact, I did cross the USA in a 1969 Mustang convertible a few years ago.)

Every show opening is stylish and thrilling, with the guys casually rolling into whatever town they're visiting, only the iconic theme music by Nelson Riddle stays the same week to week (and even it gets some jazzy re-arrangements from time to time). It's amazing to see these locations as they existed nearly 50 years ago; if you live or lived in or around the places Tod and Buzz visited you'll be doubly amused.

The superbly photographed locales during the first half of season 1 include the Mississippi Delta, New Orleans, the Louisiana Gulf, Page Arizona, Carlsbad Canyon, and small towns in Texas (El Paso), California (Malibu & Indio), and Oregon. They even arrive at the Riverside, California race track in time for the Grand Prix stock-car races.

Sadly, not every print is pristine though most look pretty darn good. There are some sound and picture problems on a few episodes but it's certainly an improvement on the torn up prints of old.

There are bonus features like guest cast bios for every episode (which is a nice touch and handy to have for those 'who was that guy?' moments) along with a few commercial bumpers and actual ads that aired with the shows in addition to a photo history of the Corvette.

An episode commentary or two might be nice since the actors are still around, maybe next time?

TVparty! for TV on DVD!

Reviews by Billy Ingram,
as seen on VH1, Trio and Bravo.
On BRAVO'S 100 Funniest Movies this month!

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Route 66 Season 1 - Volume 2
Order now!

Episode 16 --"Fly Away Home (Part 1)" -- Tod becomes a crop duster for a struggling company.
Episode 17 -- "Fly Away Home (Part 2)".
Episode 18 -- "Sleep on Four Pillows"
Episode 19 -- "An Absence of Tears"
Episode 20 -- "Like a Motherless Child"
Episode 21 -- "Effigy in Snow"
Episode 22 -- "Eleven, the Hard Way"
Episode 23 -- "Most Vanquished, Most Victorious" -- At the request of his aunt, Tod traces the life of his saintly cousin through the Los Angeles slums.
Episode 24 -- "Don't Count Stars" -- Tod and Buz get involved in a custody case over a 9-year-old heiress and her drunken, gambling "uncle."
Episode 25 -- "The Newborn"
Episode 26 -- "A Skill for Hunting"
Episode 27 -- "Trap at Cordova"
Episode 28 -- "The Opponent" -- Buz visits and inspires his boyhood hero, a former boxing great (Darren McGavin) who is now on the skids.
Episode 29 -- "Welcome to Amity"
Episode 30 - "Incident on a Bridge"

Back to Route 66
with Martin Milner!

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YOU MAY ALSO ENJOY:
Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 4

From the back cover:
Film Noir Classic Collection vol. 4: More film noir classics now on double-feature discs! Each movie digitally remastered. Accessories to crime: Extras to investigate!

Commentaries and featurettes on all titles.
Act of Violence (1948): Ex-GIs are on a collision course in a crisp tale directed by Fred Zinnemann (The Day of the Jackal).

Mystery Street (1950): CSI Noir: John Sturges (The Great Escape) helms a procedural whodunit in Boston environs.

Crime Wave (1954): A hardboiled cop: Sterling Hayden (The Asphalt Jungle) heads an L.A. manhunt.

Decoy (1946): A drop-dead dame: femme fatale Jean Gille revives her hunk from the dead (!) because he knows where the loot is buried.

Illegal (1955): D.A. Edward G. Robinson turns to defending lowlifes in a snappy remake of The Mouthpiece.

The Big Steal (1949): On the lam, down Mexico way: Out of the Past's Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer reteam, Don Siegel directs.

They Live by Night (1948): In love... in danger. Thugs force lovebirds Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell to be accomplices.

Side Street (1950): The duo returns as struggling Manhattan marrieds who unwittingly get their hands on mob dough.

Where Danger Lives (1950): a corpse behind. A dead end ahead. Woozy Robert Mitchum and Faith Domergue are on the run.

Tension (1950): Genre icon Audrey Totter is bad to the bone. But milquetoast hubby Richard Basehart may be worse!

Product Description:
Ex-World War II pilot Frank Enley (Van Heflin) is a respected contractor and family man. Then his troubled, gimp-legged bombardier (Robert Ryan) shows up with a gun and a score to settle. Perhaps neither man is what he seems to be as director Fred Zinnemann (The Day of the Jackal) guides a searing Act of Violence, "the first postwar noir to take a challenging look at the ethics of men in combat" (Eddie Muller, Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir).

Murder lives on Mystery Street. John Sturges (The Great Escape) directs a revealing-for-the-era procedural about a Boston cop (Ricardo Montalban) solving a whodunit with the help of a Harvard forsensic expert (Bruce Bennett). Welcome to CSI Noir.