What's not funny about Nazi POW camps? If Hogan's Heroes is to be believed, nothing! In fact, judging by the way things go down in this series, life in Stalag 13 wasn't too bad for our group of American prisoners of war, sentenced to serve in the camp under the watchful eye of one Colonel Klink. Sure, he may have been a bit of a curmudgeon sometimes, but there's nary a firing squad, or interrogation chamber in site.

But if you put the merits of this completely bizarre premise aside and through historical accuracy out the window and try really, really hard to forget everything you learned about the horrors of the Nazis and what was done to the prisoners who were crammed into their camps during the second world war, Hogan's Heroes is pretty funny stuff. Shamelessly goofy, utterly predictable, very repetitive and not exactly the definition of high brow or intelligent humor, but still… it's pretty funny stuff.

The basic premise of Hogan's Heroes is a simple one, but it worked, as it provided the writers plenty of opportunity to get the cast of characters into all manner of wacky hi-jinks. Essentially, Colonel Robert Hogan (Bob Crane) leads a group of miscreant American soldiers captured by the Nazis during the second world war. They're tossed into Stalag 13, a prison of war camp, run by Colonel Klink (Werner Klemperer) and Sergeant Shultz (John Banner).

What the German's fail to realize is that the American's aren't really meant to try to escape the camp, despite how they may talk about it and act when they're around. They are in fact in the camp to act as spies and to send information back to the Allied forces to aid in the war effort. Hogan, along with Newkirk (Richard Dawson), LeBeau (Robert Clary) Kinchloe (Ivan Dixon) and Carter (Larry Hovis) must keep up appearances so that the German's don't catch on to their plan without making too much of an effort to get out of the camp and ruin the intelligence gathering. Thankfully, the German's aren't the most intelligent lot, at least these ones aren't, which makes things a little easier for Hogan and his crew.

The following episodes, comprising the entire first seasons of the show, are contained in this set and are presented in the following order:

Video:

Each of the episodes is presented in its original 1.33.1 fullframe aspect ratio, as it should be. The pilot episode is in black and white, the rest of the episodes are in full color. Overall, the quality of the video in this set is pretty solid. There is some minor print damage noticeable throughout in the form of specks and the occasional scratch but other than that, these all look quite good. The black and white episode looks a tad dark but has nice contrast and a good level of detail noticeable in it. The color episodes are a slightly more mixed bag, in that some episodes look better than others in terms of picture quality and overall clarity. A few spots look a little bit on the soft side and in some scenes the colors are a little more washed out than in other scenes. As a whole, however, the image is perfectly acceptable and the episodes are always very watchable and of decent quality. There aren't any mpeg compression problems, and edge enhancement is mild, though noticeable.