Roaring Glory Warbirds, Vol. 3: Vought F4U Corsair

Roaring Glory Warbirds, Vol. 3: Vought F4U Corsair

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DVD Reviews of Roaring Glory Warbirds, Vol. 3: Vought F4U Corsair

DVD Review: A Pleasant Surprise!
Summary: 4 Stars

The roughly hour-long main program begins with our pilot-narrator standing before the Corsair. He takes us on a brief tour of the outside plane as he performs a pre-flight check of all of the important `parts,' and this alone was great! You get a close-up view of all of these details while a skilled pilot explains what he's looking for and why. Then he jumps in, gives us a tour of all of the controls, and takes the plane up!

It's wonderful seeing this classic machine actually in the air, not in a Hollywood film or old newsreel footage. The picture is quite sharp; the Dolby sound is wonderfully vibrant and great for that prop-engine sound. As the pilot does maneuvers with the F4U, he explains everything he's doing, eventually landing it.

The program then switches to a dramatization of a young pilot training for and then flying an F4U in battle. This was modestly but nicely done, too, and informative. It was interesting, for instance, to hear how flight manuals for these planes were so scarce that if a pilot could get his hands on one he would hoard it!

Extras on the disc include an actual F4U training film, which ran about half an hour. This was really interesting, too, on many levels: it explained aspects of the plane and how it should be flown in detail, and is also a time capsule of what kinds of training pilots received.

Other extras include a still photo gallery and pages from a Corsair flight manual reproduced on-screen, but this is the weaker part of the disc. This could have been much better if the disc's logo wasn't plastered across the top third of the screen, obscuring the images - I'm not sure what they were thinking here. Even better, I would love to have seen some of these diagrams reproduced in print form and included as an insert with the disc, though I realize that this would have added to the cost of the disc.

More information about the F4U's place in WWII warfare would have been appreciated, too. I would have given an extra star for this. As it is, this disc is more of a `here is the plane' presentation, with the added dramatization about the pilots.

I really wish they could add some British, German, and perhaps even Russian planes to this series, though I realize that the lack of availability of these planes may make this nearly impossible.