Hawaii Five-O - The Complete First Season
by Gene Nelson
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Harry Endo, Jack Lord, James MacArthurDirector: Gene Nelson
Brand: PARAMOUNT PICTURES
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Spanish (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Spanish (Subtitled); Portuguese (Subtitled); English (Published), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Box set, Closed-captioned, Color, Full Screen, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 1271 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-03-06
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Paramount
Movie Reviews of Hawaii Five-O - The Complete First Season
Movie Review: Finally, 5-0!
Summary: 5 Stars
Why it took so very long for Hawaii Five-0 to come out on DVD still mystifies me. The show was a classic while it was still running, and it's remained a classic ever since.
One thing I want to clear up -- the show's title is Hawaii Five-0 -- that "0" is correctly a ZERO, not a letter. The show was named after the USA's 50th state.
Many people -- Amazon.com included -- incorrectly assume the title is Hawaii Five-O ["O" being the letter, not a zero], which makes searching for other seasons of the show difficult, because the only way what you're going to find what you want is to search using the "O" letter -- which annoys Five-0 buffs big time. I hope Amazon takes note.
One other item: during the entire 12 years that Five-0 ran on television, there was only ONE star: Jack Lord. All the other members of Five-0 were billed as "feature" players. No matter who showed up as a guest actor or actress, NOBODY was ever billed as "starring with" -- Five-0 meant Jack Lord. HE was the star. The ONLY star.
The best thing about the DVDs -- and I've got all of them that are currently available -- is that they take us back to the actual time when the series was being filmed. If a specific "issue" is treated in one particular episode, that issue was very specific when it comes to the history of the late 1960s and all of the 1970s. Many episodes were considered daring at the time they aired -- Five-0 tackles Vietnam, organized crime, the Soviet threat [and of course, that of Red China], and struggle for the Hawaiian people who were -- and still are -- trying to maintain their Polynesian identity, and the show sometimes got downright daring AT THE TIME THE EPISODE FIRST RAN ON TV.
Five-0 tackled such stuff as venereal disease, political corruption, drug use which was so very prevalent at that time, and aired one two-part episode focusing on the US military and its secrecy about trying to create our own weapons of mass destruction. Jack Lord was the first person in television history who ever uttered the word "bastard" on television.
Most folks who are new to the series do not understand what it was like to live in the late 60s and 70s, and not many know that much about the history of the period. What seems "tame" to us now created all kinds of furor when viewed on television during those years. Five-0 was forced to reinvent itself in the later years of its run, because of the nationwide furor about violence on television -- and if you've seen the show in recent years -- shows that have been badly chopped up, often to the point where the shows don't make a great deal of sense -- the DVDs will give you every single moment of what ran on television when commercial time was FAR less that what we put up with today. When
Five-0 was forced to tone down the violence [and there's lots of violence in the first 6 or 7 years] and to keep the show running and maintain viewer interest, it turned to character study as a way of filling that gap. Specifically, it became more cerebral -- but it worked.
So when you watch the first set of DVDs [and the later DVDs as well], keep in mind what life was like when leisure suits were "HOT" [they now look quite ghastly to me], disco music was sweeping the country [thanks to John Travolta] -- yep, McGarrett ends up in a disco himself, more than once -- and all kinds of other social matters were highly important, probably more important than they are today.
To watch Hawaii Five-0 [remember that zero!] is to remember history. And now, as in the first place, the show managed to do that in great style.
Summary of Hawaii Five-O - The Complete First Season
Filmed entirely on location in Hawaii, the show followed Jack Lord as he played Steve McGarrett, head of an elite state police unit investigating "organized crime, murder, assassination attempts, foreign agents, felonies of every type." James MacArthur played his second-in-command Danny ("Danno") Williams, with local actors Kam Fong, Zulu, Al Harrington, and Herman Wedemeyer, among others, playing members of the Five-O team.There's plenty to like about Hawaii Five-0, the late '60s cop show debuting on DVD by way of this seven-disc set including all episodes from the first season, along with the two-hour pilot that preceded it. Like the music, featuring Morton Stevens' popular theme song. Or the lovely Hawaiian scenery. And let's not forget "Book 'em, Danno," the signature line delivered (although not nearly as frequently as one might expect) by star Jack Lord's Steve McGarrett, not to mention Lord's perfect hair and wrinkle-free slacks. As for everything else, let's just say that Hawaii Five-0 has not aged well. Some of that is inevitably due to the infinitely more sophisticated production values of the series that have followed in its wake; Five-0's technology, sets, and other practical elements are laughably primitive by current standards. Problem is, the cheese factor extends to pretty much every other aspect of the show as well. Most of the action sequences are utterly tension-free, and the pace is frequently glacial, with interminable scenes bogged down by talky exposition. The dialogue is risible: McGarrett refers to one adversary as "a dirty, double-dealing fink," while the so-called hippies who populate the islands utter the kind of idiocies that could only have been written by cubes whose closest contact with the counterculture came from TV commercials for Hai Karate men's cologne ("Looks like splittin' the scene was real cool, baby" is but one egregious example). Lord does a decent job as the stiff-but-heroic McGarrett, variously described as "a hardhead," "an organizational misfit," "a brilliant operator," and "a rebel," but by and large the acting (including guest shots by Sal Mineo, Ricardo Montalban, Gavin MacLeod, and Yaphet Kotto) is wooden. Story-wise, "Cocoon," the pilot, features an intriguing premise wherein U.S. intelligence agents undergo sensory-deprivation torture before spilling their secrets; elsewhere, the elite Five-0 team deals with jewel thieves, gold smugglers, kidnappers, gamblers, murderers, mobsters, all-purpose "criminal masterminds," and even "Red agents" spreading the bubonic plague. In sum: with its light (if not quite frothy) tone, Hawaii Five-0 will offer harmless escapism to some viewers, especially those with a nostalgic bent. Others, however, will long for more substantial fare--you know, like Deal or No Deal. The DVD set includes a single bonus feature: "Emme's Island Moments: Memories of Hawaii Five-O," a retrospective with James "Danno" MacArthur and other cast and crew members. --Sam Graham
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