I wrote about George Burns in a previous review of his TV specials (please click here for that review). And honestly, nothing has changed my perception of Burns at this stage in his career. To many younger viewers, George Burns might be an unknown - he certainly was to me when I first saw him in Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys, in 1975. But of course, he had been a legendary performer, along with his wife Gracie Allen, during vaudeville and the early days of radio and TV. However, after her death, he was under the radar as far as the public was concerned until his career revival with Simon's film, and then the smash Carl Reiner box office success, Oh, God in 1977. After that monster hit, you couldn't get away from Burns -- even if you wanted to -- back in the 1970s and 1980s. He would go on to a reinvigorated nightclub career in Las Vegas, several other movie roles (including two Godawful sequels), numerous TV specials, and concerts such as the one filmed for George Burns Live in Concert.

I was never a fan of this newly recognized George Burns. Later on, I had enjoyed his older TV series in reruns, and I always got the impression that Burns probably was a whole lot funnier off-camera - a little rougher, a little looser. But this new Burns was automatically presented as a "national treasure," a label which, regardless to whom it's applied to, immediately gets my hackles up. Quite often, that label is applied for some arbitrary reason (in Burns' case - because he was still performing in his 80s) that has little to do with that person's true accomplishments. It's a label that you had better agree with, too -- or suffer the wrath of a vocal, sentimental mob. What made Burns funny in The Sunshine Boys was a decidedly unsentimental air about him. He was a tough survivor. But after Oh, God, a bad case of the "cutes" set in with Burns (which, as the total pro he was, he cannily exploited), and suddenly, we were constantly assailed with descriptions of how "cute" he was, how "adorable" he was, how "sweet" he was. What happened to that old vaudeville tough guy?

With the main video camera locked down tight in a mid-shot of Burns, George Burns Live in Concert is content to just let Burns do his thing, which is fine, but it makes for a very uninvolving one hour. Occasionally, a different camera angle will pop up, but it's very brief, and we quickly go back to the head-on shot. Working with a small orchestra and a piano player, Burns does the exact same material he did on all of those TV specials you no doubt saw in the 1970s and 1980s again and again: the "Trixie and the cup of coffee" bit, the totally out of date "hippie" joke that involves Rudy Vallee, and all the silly little patter songs you've heard a dozen times before. On the cover of George Burns Live in Concert, there's a quotation stating, "George Burns' funniest concert ever!!" That quote is not attributed to anyone. This isn't George Burns' funniest concert ever -- it's the same George Burns funniest concert.

The DVD:

The Video:
It may boldly say "digitally remastered" on the front of the George Burns Live in Concert cover, but the shoddy production values of this disc are hardly anything to crow about. Shot on chintzy looking video, it's hard to image what it must have looked like before they "remastered" it.

The Audio:
The English 2.0 mono track is adequate and unexciting. There is no close captioning option.

The Extras:
There are no extras for George Burns Live in Concert.

Final Thoughts:
Hey, if you really, really like George Burns, you can probably safely rent George Burns Live in Concert. You already know the material; you enjoy him, and the jokes are funny in the way that only jokes told a thousand times are funny. But that's as far as I go; all others -- skip it.