Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Great series
Comment: I have very fond memories of watching this series with my Dad when it was originally broadcast.
The DVDs were well done - good quality video and audio - and as memorable as I remembered from my childhood. I only wish my Dad was still here to provide his own comments and viewpoint.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Powerful Pictures
Comment: This was a magnificent achievement in its day. As a teenager I eagerly awaited every episode. Thrilling, especially since much of the footage had been captured from the Japanese and Germans and even images made by Americans had not been seen in the moviehouse newsreels. Seeing it again at age 72 I now realize that it was heavy on atmosphere but short on details. The pictures are still powerful and worth seeing again and again, but this is not really a history of WWII. It is primarily about the men and their day-to-day perils--battles and boredom. Many notable battles are merely mentioned (as if we should know of them, as we did back then) and the few action sequences are severely curtailed (less than five minutes to capture Iwo Jima, for instance). Nonetheless, this is a series that captured the eyes of America and though the focus is on the Navy personnel, every branch of the service has its moments. The price, incidentally, makes this a terrific bargain and a terrific stocking stuffer for veterans of that and future campaigns.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Sea Sickness
Comment: I'm a history fan and I was really excited when I got this set as a gift. The Series is a collection of footage from different countries that participated in the War. The idea of presenting the War from different vantage points was appealing, and this approach seemed ideal for bringing together complex naval operations. The best lessons that the Series presents are probably how not to make a naval documentary.
The starting credits for Victory at Sea is rolling ocean scene, with the camera bobbing up and down and the horizon shifting and tilting. After about two minutes of this you're ready for a Dramamine. This seems like a film making faux pas: don't make your audience vomit.
Broadway music and war epics don't mix. The music and the scenes seem to be mismatched: as German dive bombers are destroying London, the music almost whimsical. The music is constant, and unrelenting. Without the footage and the narrative, you could be watching a Looney Tunes cartoon and a chase scene with Foghorn-Leghorn.
If the opening credits didn't make you nauseous, the narrative will. The narrative is riddled with clichés and hyperbole. As ships are getting bombed, the narrator seems to compelled to constantly explain: ships on fire, ships sinking and men dying. Between the music and the narrative, it almost seems like they made the film for radio broadcast.
The biggest failure of this series is that it does a terrible job with explaining history. There are few maps showing locations and positions of ships. The maps they do show are vague and not very useful. The documentary series "Why We Fight" does a better job at explaining wartime tactics and the Axis threat.
Customer Rating:
Summary: missing episodes
Comment: This is a very good series, BUT there needs to be instruction on seeing all of the episodes. I found it in another review, click the ARROW next to main menu. I was some upset to think that I only got 15 of the 26 episodes.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A great Historical epic brought to life.
Comment: Seeing the Series Vactory at Sea has returned me to my childhood where we knew that it was the right thing to fight the bad guy. This series presents the events in it's historic proportions.
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