Will Rogers earned worldwide fame and adoration as a humorist, but in the decades since his untimely death in 1935, he has been transformed into nothing short of an icon.

He has been commemorated in everything from books to Broadway, but Rogers' legacy shines particularly bright in his native Oklahoma -- a state that your humble reviewer also calls home. There is no shortage of items in the Sooner State that bear Rogers' name or likeness, from a county to a college, a turnpike to the Oklahoma City airport (a discomfiting tribute, perhaps, for a man who died in a plane crash). Oklahoma has never forgotten the man whose homespun wit and unassuming demeanor charmed world leaders, made him Hollywood's highest-paid movie star and even impacted the political arena.

Born in 1879 in what was still called Indian Territory, Rogers earned fame and fortune the old-fashioned way: He experienced a lot of life. By the time he became a featured attraction of Broadway's Ziegfeld Follies, the part-Cherokee cowboy had worked as a cattle puncher in Argentina and performed under the stage name "the Cherokee Kid" in a Wild West show that toured South Africa. Throughout it all, he would later say, he had never met a man he didn't like.

From there, he drifted into doing trick roping for vaudeville, eventually realizing that his greatest talent was for the folksy banter he regaled audiences with between stunts.

Rogers was pushing 40 when he arrived in Hollywood, but in no time he became one of the cinema's top stars of that period. He wasn't much of an actor. Eventually signed to the Fox movie lot (the precursor of 20th Century Fox), Rogers didn't even memorize lines. He preferred instead to put dialogue into his own words, a practice that sometimes posed a real challenge to his co-stars.

Nevertheless, something clicked with audiences. They couldn't get enough of the humorist, who also kept busy with routine radio broadcasts and a syndicated daily newspaper column. By 1935, it was rumored that Rogers commanded a salary of $15,000 a week. He liked to do his movies back to back, freeing up the remainder of the year to concentrate on his many other pursuits.

It was one such pursuit, his love of aviation, which cut short his life. In the summer of 1935, he and pioneering pilot Wiley Post died in a plane mishap in Alaska.

That same year, he had already shot five movies for Fox, four of which are included in this collection.

A musty ancestor to Christopher Guest's Waiting for Guffman, Doubting Thomas stars Will as befuddled Thomas Brown, a small-town sausage manufacturer who suffers the pomposity, incompetence and all-around foolishness of an amateur stage production.

Full of unaffected wisdom (no surprise there), Thomas gets his nose bent out of joint when wife Paula (Billie Burke) is cast in the latest production by the town's vainglorious dramatist, Mrs. Pampinelli (Alison Skipworth). Worried that Paula will shirk her homemaking duties, Thomas joins forces with his son, Jimmy (Frank Albertson), to foil Mrs. Brown and Jimmy's girlfriend (Frances Grant), who is also appearing in the play.

If you can't tell by the barebones storyline, Doubting Thomas is more than a bit dated. Will's curmudgeon shtick wears awfully thin, especially since it revolves on the antiquated conceit that a woman's place is in the home. In the movie's final third, Will essentially does little more than react to the laughably bad play put on by Mrs. Pampinelli and the townspeople, although there is an amusing bit in which he imitates a goofy crooner.

With its Hatfields vs. McCoys riff, In Old Kentucky boasts some genuinely funny moments as well as the inspired tap dancing of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. It is a slight comedy, to be sure, but entertaining and relatively harmless.

Will plays Steve Tapley, a racehorse trainer who is fired by his snobbish boss, Pole Shattuck (Charles Richman), for hanging out with the Shattucks' bitter enemies, the neighboring Martingales. Steve then goes to work for crazy, shotgun-toting Old Man Martingale (Charles Sellon) and his pretty niece, Nancy (Dorothy Wilson), vowing to get their prized horse, Greyboy, into shape to defeat the Shattucks' racehorse.

The movie adheres to a staid formula that characterized most Will Rogers vehicles. Our hero spends much of his time working to bedevil the rich, snobby and self-satisfied, and there is an obligatory subplot in which Will slyly helps unite young lovers. Directed by George Marshall, In Old Kentucky doesn't stray from the tried-and-true formula. Fortunately, it still manages to be intermittently amusing, particularly when the Martingales' house servant, Wash Jackson (Bill Robinson), tries teaching ol' Will how to dance.

Despite Bill Robinson's sizable contribution to the movie, In Old Kentucky bears the unmistakable whiff of 1930s' racism. Robinson's character is a few notches shy of pure caricature. In a particularly ill-conceived climax, Will dons blackface and shuffles about in an attempt to pass himself off as the house servant. Unless you wear white sheets and have "I Wish I Was in Dixie" as your cell phone ringtone, chances are you'll be a bit taken aback by the picture's casually racist attitude.

It isn't coincidence that the best film in this collection, Steamboat 'Round the Bend, was directed by legendary filmmaker John Ford. While the movie is hardly on par with Ford's finest efforts, it boasts an expansiveness and texture that make for solid storytelling.

Set along the Mississippi River during the 1890s, Will portrays Dr. John Pearly, a feisty salesman who hawks his own feel-good elixir -- chiefly booze -- out of his riverboat, the "Claremore Queen" (Rogers hailed from Claremore, Oklahoma). Trouble brews when the doc's good-hearted nephew, Duke (John McGuire), is sentenced to death for killing a fellow who had been harassing Duke's girlfriend, Fleety Belle (Ann Shirley). Grudgingly, the doc joins forces with Fleety Belle to track down a temperance-touting prophet who goes by the name of the New Moses (Benton Churchill), apparently the sole eyewitness to the slaying who can verify the incident was self-defense.

The third and final film that Rogers did with Ford, Steamboat 'Round the Bend aspires to be more than a simple star vehicle. There are laughs, sure, and even opportunities for Will Rogers to show off the trick roping that put him on the map. But the movie is more than straight comedy. Ford seamlessly juggles equal parts humor, melodrama, adventure and a hearty slice of the slice-of-life Americana that permeates so much of his best work.

Unfortunately, there is an element of racism here. Dr. John's sidekick in the flick was played by Stepin Fetchit, the black actor of yesteryear whose servile demeanor and "yassahs" represent the nadir of Hollywood's treatment of African-Americans. While Fetchit's performance in the picture certainly fit with the grotesque stereotyping of the period, his screen time is minimal and not nearly as offensive as the big minstrel-show gag of In Old Kentucky.

This George Marshall-directed comedy provides Rogers with the widest berth to offer playful, wry observations on Americana. The humorist stars as Kennesaw Clark, a small-town newspaper editor who, believe it or not, is a thorn in the side of the rich and powerful while also working as a matchmaker for a sweet young couple.

Oh, there's also some melodramatic business in which Kennesaw sets out to clear the name of a young friend, Lee Austin (Richard Cromwell), who was falsely imprisoned for stealing from a local banker. The blustery banker in question, known as "the Colonel" (George Barbier), runs everything in town, from the newspaper to the local school. He is chided by Kennesaw for his less-than-gutsy speeches ("You can't go wrong defending the Constitution ... hopping on board with the Founding Fathers"). When the Colonel fires Kennesaw for his cozy friendship with Lee, the scrappy editor starts a rival paper and recruits the town drunkard (Slim Summerville) to run against the Colonel for school superintendent.

More than the other films in this collection, Life Begins at 40 shows us the Will Rogers who won over a nation. "A bald eagle ought not to be our national emblem," Will - er, Kennesaw - observes about America's rampant consumerism. "It ought to be a can opener."

On the public's propensity for charity: "Americans will feed everybody that don't live close to them."

Or about people in general: "At 20, we don't care what the world thinks of us. At 30, we worry about what it thinks of us. At 40, we're sure it doesn't think of us."

The Will Rogers Collection, Volume 1 includes four separate DVDs in their respective keepcases, all in a handsomely illustrated cardboard box.

The print transfers of these films, all in their original 1.33:1 aspect ratio, are uniformly impressive. The cleanest is In Old Kentucky while the weakest are Doubting Thomas and Life Begins at 40, the latter of suffers from an occasionally dark image and a few random scratches in the beginning. Still, both pictures are certainly watchable.

Each movie is available in either Dolby Digital 2.0 or Dolby Digital 1.0. The sound is generally passable for all films, although all are burdened with the occasional muffled hum that dogs so many movies of the 1930s. Subtitles for all are available in English and Spanish.

For an excellent primer on the man from Claremore, Oklahoma, the collection boasts a 90-minute A&E Biography - Will Rogers: An American Original. Filled with great anecdotes and footage, this piece should probably be Exhibit A for curious viewers.

All four movies include a commentary track. Film historian Anthony Slide does a serviceable job on Doubting Thomas, In Old Kentucky and Life Begins at 40, although there are significant patches of silence throughout. The guy is a font of knowledge and offers a number of nifty anecdotes, but Slide could have used the interaction of another commentator. Moreover, it is strange to hear his comments for In Old Kentucky, which he dislikes and derides throughout much of the commentary track.

For Steamboat 'Round the Bend, the commentary duties are picked up by John Ford expert Scott Eyman. It is exceptional, as Eyman delivers a fluid, succinct dissertation on the film.

The Will Rogers Collection includes several Movietone newsreel clips. Among the more interesting is one that was shot after Rogers' death in 1935. The six-minute reel introduces us to a pilot about to embark on a cross-country mission to spread word of "The Will Rogers Memorial Fund." What is fascinating, however, is that it's raw footage, so that we can follow the staging of a news event.

Other Movietone clips included here are of less interest: the 38-second "Stage dedicated to Will Rogers in Hollywood" and 56-second "Film executives visit memorial to Will Rogers." Far too short is a 42-second clip of "Will Rogers off with Wiley Post to Arctic Circle."

Two other extras are also featured on the other DVDs in the collection, a Steamboat 'Round the Bend trailer and a four-minute restoration comparison. The latter is particularly interesting; the picture is divided, with the left side of the screen being a pre-restoration print and the right side showing off just how remarkable the improvements proved to be.

Will Rogers fans will be enchanted, but the casually curious will probably want to limit their inspection to Steamboat "Round the Bend and Life Begins at 40. Rogers was a great man, but that didn't mean his movies were -- with few exceptions -- anything more than formulaic vehicles to showcase his down-home persona.