Cold War Hysteria [DVD]

It's a great value at $4.99 however the picture and audio quality on most of the videos is very low. Granted this is original films from 40s-60s, but you can do a quick YouTube search of most of these and find high-definition remasters which you can actually tell what's being shown and (very important) hear what's being said. For example, "Project Gnome," I can barely make out what is being said by the narrator it's so fuzzy and the picture quality is brown with streaks going through it. If you do a YouTube search like I said above, you can see an amazing remaster of it with near crystal clear and colorful picture also perfect audio.On a side note, the DVD case it came in was extremely faded (like it had been left in the sun for weeks) and it had an odd oily substance all over it inside the shrink wrap. The DVDs worked fine but the case had to be thrown out.

I ordered this set to use during a cold war section in a high school history class. There's a nice variety of videos to use and the students liked most of them. They got a kick out of the black and white, old style, documentary and military productions. I had a problem with the case that the dvd's came in, but the shipper took care of the issue. It's worth buying...

This is a must have for those interested in the post WW II American Civil Defense programs. 1940s thru mid 1960s.Great government films....many I saw as a youth, many are new to me....all are interesting.This is a great collection. A must have for those interested in the topic.Also a great value.

I was not impressed by the quality of this item. Most of the vidoes seems of low quality. Interesting info but but looks like stuff I could have gotten off the internet for free. Plus, the information was useless for my high school students

Good DVD for the money...Shows what America was like during the Cold War. A must-have for anyone studying that era.

This is a set of 40 documentary films, of various lengths, and with various target audiences, from the 40s, 50s and 60s. Alas, I could watch only 30 of them, because the third DVD began to fail.Let's deal with the flaws first. The set seems to have been assembled completely at random. A more obvious assembly would be in date order and a better assembly still would have been by target audience. Some of the films are aimed at politicans and other defence decision makers, especially those who controlled the purse strings. Some are aimed at members of the armed forces, at various levels. Some are aimed at the general public.A screamingly obvious flaw, which perhaps serves as a shameful insight into US society at that time, is the almost complete lack of people of colour in any of the films. One can understand why they are not represented in the shots of leading scientists: during that period, educational discrimination prevented them reaching such ranks. Similar discimination blocked them from achieving the high ranks of many of the senior officers portrayed in the films.But many of the films devote much footage to everyday America and everyday American troops and their almost complete absence from this footage is an utter disgrace. There is just one character who has anything resembling a serious role. In a dramatisation of a nuclear attack, an African-American man arrives wounded at a shelter and after his wound has been patched up, he volunteers his services to help out.This absence, perhaps contributes to the main benefit of the watching the films. That is the insight that they give into American society over that period. There is rampant fear of communism, although no doubt is ever left about the US emerging victorious if WW3 were to break out. Similarly, whilst it is made clear that nuclear war will inevitably cause many casualties in the US, there is great emphasis on the high survival rates expected.The picture quality is not great. I assume that most of them were originally shot on 16mm. Obviously, not up to contemporary cinematographic quality, but I would have expected better quality than we see in many of the films. However, the low quality explains how we can get 17 hours of films on just 3 DVDs.This is definitely one for my archives. The set I watched was bought a long time ago, but I have just bought another set so that I can watch the films I missed.

A very bad old documentary. i wish I could give it zero.it is more propaganda than a real documentary.dont waste your time.

Simply fantastic