Dogfights - The Complete Season One (History Channel)

This series of videos is great, now i just have to get season 2, The sound quality is just as good as on TV, and likewise for the picture quality. I'm glad i got this, because not only can you see the entire season 1, but in this they include bonus "dogfights", some of which were not shown on TV before this came out on DVD, so this is worth the money if you are interested in dogfighting, and WW1 and WW2 era aircraft.

Fabulously produced series. Great Value for Money. Worth every valuable cent you can find these days.

Kudos to the team. Highlight for me was interviews with the pilots and aces ... the Israeli - Jordanian dog fight was a classic - the pilot acknowledging that (and, I am paraphrasing here) .. "even though we are sworn enemies, as pilot to pilot, I really wished he had lived".

I was never into battles etc, but this is a must see. Warning :: It's highly addictive !

Very inexpensive for what it offers.

SUGGESTION :: I bought Dogfights Vol 1 and Vol 2 and saved a bunch of money :) Don't buy them together -- buy them separately. And with free shipping, you've got yourself a deal !

I caught the original "pilot" for this show on the History Channel in Fall of 2006 and absolutely loved it. Apparently I wasn't alone as many other viewers were so impressed that the History Channel made it into a full-fledged series. I have an intense love of military aircraft, and in particular anything having to do with WW2 air combat. In high school my friends had posters of their favorite bands hanging on the walls. I had posters of B-17's and Ju-87 Stukas. This, coupled with a sizable collection of flight sims and plastic aircraft models makes me a prime audience target for this program.

Dogfights uses state of the art CG graphics to recreate some of the great dogfights in history, covering all eras from WW1 up to the Gulf War. There seems to be a heavy emphasis on Vietnam and WW2 era dogfights in particular, and that may irk some folks, but really this is where the vast majority of such action took place and the show reflects this. In addition to this are two episodes largely relating to sea battles, specifically the hunt for the German battleship Bismarck, and the fantastic episode on Taffy 3 (a handful of US Destroyers and Destroyer Escorts taking on a greater force of Japanese cruisers and battleships, including the Yamato, and *winning*). Honorable mention goes to the episode on the Cactus Air Force flying F4F Wildcats, and the awesome episode "Long Odds" featuring extremely mismatched dogfights between Swede Vejtasa in an SBD facing off against 3 Japanese Zeroes, a very unique tale about a B-17 named "Ol' 666", and a dogfight between Mig-17's and the venerable F-105 "Thud".

The program typically covers certain pilots' exploits. These pilots are interviewed throughout the show describing how the dogfight unfolded, as well as interviews with flight instructors and historians. Starting forces are shown as well as side by side comparisons of the aircraft involved, marking their strengths and weaknesses. The WW2 episodes appear to be primarily based in the Pacific Theater, and the only WW1 episode is more or less of a portion of the series pilot. This too may get under some folks' skin, but I love this show in any way I can get it and I think it's safe to say most of the other posters here agree.

There is some controversy surrounding the show's noticeable highlighting of US and Israeli pilots. In truth I think the show would gain much by doing a 2 hour special on the Battle of Britain, but remember that this show was primarily intended for a US audience and thus the producers were trying to cater to this demographic. There were some episodes done from the Japanese and German perspectives in Season 2, but not much else, and as I said this will irk a few folks. There's a number of things I'd love to see the show do programs on;

-The aforementioned Battle of Britain
-Pearl Harbor
-Anything on the WW2 Russian Front (who doesn't want to see some I-16's zipping around?)
-The Nigerian Civil War where the newborn nation of Biafra's tiny mercenary air force took the larger nation's modernized Air Force to task using homemade fighter planes
-A whole episode on Hans-Ulrich Rudel's exploits in his famed Stuka (there's enough there to do a 2 hour special, at the very least!).

There's some uncertainty about the future of the show and rumors of cancellation, which makes a number of us fans a little bit uneasy. There's practically nowhere else we can go to get this kind of programming and that worries me and a lot of others. The bottom line though is that you cannot find a better program of this type anywhere and cannot recommend buying this series on DVD enough. You will not be disappointed!

I really enjoyed this program when I saw it on the History Channel, and was very excited to be able to get it through Amazon. It's really great how they used first hand descriptions from the pilots that flew the planes and the missions, and re-enacted the dogfights with computer animation so that you could see what the pilots were describing. It also gave great detail about the planes and their strengths and weaknesses. The only downside was that even though the commercials were edited out, there was still the annoying ritual that is on all History Channel documentaries, where they back up to re-tell half the story after each commercial. This tends to be a bit annoying since there are no commercials, so no reason to review the story. But it's still a great documentary and very interesting in spite of that one small situation.

I agree with a previous reviewer that probably the strongest plus in the Dogfights series are the interviews with the pilots. WWII history is about to pass from the realm of "living history", as most of the heroes who fought that war are dead. These interviews help ensure that the stories will be there to enthrall the next generation - assuming that the school systems will allow the stories to be told (but that's another soapbox and not appropriate for this venue).

I love the series; and have watched the episodes over & over - especially the one about the Battle of Leyte Gulf with Taffy 3. The only negative comments I would make from a technical standpoint (and these are not deal-breakers) are these. First, the rocking effect that happens every time a plane flys by is cool at first; but, repeated watchings of the episodes find that the effect starts to become annoying. I could do with the effect happening maybe once per episode, maximum.

The other thing that gets redundant is they show the same plane getting shot down 3-4 times, from different angles. I don't have a problem with seeing the event once from the attacker's cockpit & once from the recipient's vantage point. But, any more times is too repetitive.

As I said before, neither of these things are serious faults; and I'm certainly not suggesting that anyone not purchase the series. The special effects are amazing, and the subject matter is engaging. I'm always on the edge of my seat when I watch an episode, even though I may have seen it 10 times.