Tour of Duty The Complete Series DVD review

TITLE-Tour of Duty The Complete Series
PUBLISHER-Mill Creek Entertainment

Months ago I found this 11 disc set for around 10 bucks new. Having seen what I thought was the full series back when  it originally aired I grabbed the set ready to revisit a show I had enjoyed years ago in my youth

Airing weeking on CBS starting  in  the fall of 1987,Tour of Duty is as far as I know the first US weekly drama about the Vietnam War. At the time this was a hot topic again  thanks  to the success of films like First Blood and more so Platoon. Being made for broadcast TV of course the show had to be toned down some. But the writers and other people working on  the creative end managed to work in  a few neat ways of the restrictions of being aired over the public airwaves.

Now of course not long after buying this set I found out that GETTV is airing the show Mon thru Fri. Not that big a deal since I got the set cheap.Speaking of cheap....

The case is a really thin and cheap feeling cardboard. You remove the Tour of Duty top half and get a generic bottom half,covered with logos of the various TV show Mill Creek Entertainment has the rights too.Inside the case is sleeves,most of which have a dvd on each side. Sure it was only 10 bucks but this set even with  me taking extra care handling it looks like it could fall apart at any minute. I wish Mill Creek would have used their normal big plastic case full of dvds that I have on  sets like Married with Children.

After watching all 3 seasons of 58 episodes I discovered that I never saw the third season and don't think I saw the last half of the second season. Maybe the show changed nights and was on against another show I watched,I really don't know. After the first few episodes I realized that I am guessing thanks to music rights a lot of the songs in this release have been changed. Back when it was airing I clearly remember lots of hits songs of the era the show happens in  being used. In this release it is changed to very generic rock  music,that in quite a few scenes takes away for the show.

Even will all the  negatives,the cheap packaging and changed music,I still really am happy I found this set. Sure I could just watch it every day on GETTV,but then I would have to sit thru commercials and  only see 1 episode a day. I watched all 58 episodes of this series in a bit over 2 weeks and had fun revisiting a sadly kind of forgotten  80s drama.