This two-disc set from Ventura and Motor Works Media LLC is an official GM Licensed product expressly conceived for diehard fans of the Corvette, the 50 year-old American sports car that introduced the idea of performance to Detroit auto production lines.

It's basically one 69-minute docu on the genesis, development and wild times of the Corvette, augmented with a number of extras of varying interest. The show itself is on disc one and divided up into segments based on production year - 1953 -62, 63-67 etc.. With a brisk cable-docu style and a smooth narration by Bill Rogers, it breezes through the years fast-cutting between footage from the GM archives, photos, and concept drawings to tell its tale. Newsreels and humorous clips from public domain educational films, TV soap operas and the like both smooth out the narrative and provide a jumpy antidote to poor attention spans.

Overall the show has a good sense of humor, which nicely counterpoints the deluge of information it gives on every aspect of the car. The development process is more interesting than it might sound to a non-Detroit fan, and although the docu's ultimate goal is to laud the merits of the car and GM, there's a surprising willingness to talk about negative aspects. In 1953, the narrator says, the average performance-minded American male wanted a Ford product, while the Chevy was something for Mom to get groceries with. Corvette's first model was an undepowered coward of a car that earned poor reviews. Early production numbers were tiny and the car was trounced by the Thunderbird for sales. The Corvette didn't even show a profit until later in the '50s. Always threatened with cancellation, it was kept alive by engineers and design mavens who developed new ideas for the car in secret, against GM policy.

Wins at famous races and a reputation for performance-first was topped by a 1963 redesign that finally made the Corvette an "American car I wasn't ashamed to drive in Europe," according to performance director Zora Duntov. When the era of the Muscle Car came in the 1960s, the Corvette still stood tall.

Much of the rest of the docu is a glowing tribute to the Corvette, simply detailing the political changes in the company that mandated its several redesigns, and showing off reels of promotional imagery that were used through the years to sell it. There's a particularly memorable still shot of the car posed before the Monorail at Disneyland. The pleasing narration maintains a light touch that keeps the docu from being too reverential. When the car reaches "middle age," there's a nice joke about cars and people going to seed.

Most of the extras are on the first disc:

1) A color docu on the 1957 Sebring race in Florida, a GMC promo. Car fans will love this vintage short, that has rather good color. (15:35)

2) Another docu on the 1960 Le Mans race in France, actually titled Les 24 Heures du Mans. This is much longer (34:06) and goes into much more detail. Driver Dick Thompson narrates and hosts, and the footage shows all the local color and excitement of the race. There's a lot of talk about how the heavier Corvette accelerated slower and didn't go as fast as the winning Ferraris, but handled better on the Le Mans curves. We see everything, from the cars being shipped to France to the use of the new Corvair as the official GM car of the race. The pit action is fun and amusing, nowhere near as scientifically-managed as it is now. The narration stresses performance concepts and is geared to appeal to car freaks. This may be the best item on the disc.

3) Hall of Wonder is a flaky-but-fun promo (3:47) presented by "Your Chevrolet Dealer" and hosted by Dave Garroway of the Today Show. It's a very early Corvette promo that seems to think these impractical sports cars would be bought by ordinary Moms and Pops and not car nuts.

4) Bonus Footage is a short (2:46) musical montage of Corvette shots seen elsewhere, and seems rather superfluous.

5) In Memory of Zora Duntov is another brief (2:18) musical montage that recyles images.

6) A Screen Saver and other PC weblinks (containing, presumably, the Corvette expert interviews mentioned on the disc packaging) are given menu headings, although they're CD-Rom based.

Disc Two has only one extra, a complicated Corvette Timeline. It contaings fifty brief episodes, one for each year of Corvette production. After 40 - 70 seconds of newsreel highlights giving a capsule look at the year in general (coronations, discoveries, culture fads) we're shown some shots of that year's Corvette with a repeat of basic model info from the main docu.

In a way, this entire extra and the second disc are also superfluous, but the info is interestingly presented and might be appreciated by the Corvette fanatic. Once into the menu selection, the screen becomes a graph-like array of content info. The cultural highlights are mostly trivia (1961 = the founding of OPEC; 1966 = Star Trek debuts). At the bottom of the graph can be seen the steadily-climbing base price for each year's car, and below that each year's championship winner for four major sports, baseball, basketball, football and hockey! Maybe the GM people know that car owners want that info at their fingertips at all times.

All and all, the Corvette: Fastest Fifty Years DVD set is a desirable show for the car fan who believes in a Corvette-centric universe.

Ventura's DVD set of Corvette: Fastest Fifty Years is expertly packaged. The video on the discs often looks okay, but much of the docu and newsreel footage in the shows and excerpts has a grainy and vaguely low-res look to it, looking not much better than compressed video seen on our 500-channel cable systems. Some of the older promos are particularly pale and soft - all the fine print text on Hall of Wonder is close to impossible to read. The lengthy 1957 and 1960 car race movies (possibly the most attractive items in the set) basically look okay. The Sebring show has reasonable color for a show of its age, but the Le Mans featurette has faded almost completely to B&W, with just a few light tones showing through. In the main 50 years show, the images change so frequently that the overall middling quality is less noticeable.

The content of these car-oriented shows is so important to the intended viewer that they might not even notice the quality. I'm sure that most of the footage used for the show came from one-of-a-kind vaulted prints that had faded, etc.. Menus and overall graphic design are reasonable, if not inspired. The packaging is very handsome, however.

There's also a Best Buy Package deal that includes a music CD with the disc at at bargain price. From the webpage, the music on the CD doesn't appear to be Corvette-related.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Corvette: Fastest Fifty Years rates:
Movie: Good
Video: Good - / Fair +
Sound: Good
Supplements: many, see above
Packaging: 2 Keep cases (2 disc set) in card box
Reviewed: February 19, 2004