DVD Review: "Motown: The DVD"

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

DVD Review: “Motown: The DVD”

Let’s begin with the facts. Motown: The DVD contains 18 vintage clips of Motown artists performing some of their best known songs. Only five of the 18 are actually live performances. Of these, Gladys Knight and the Pips’ performance of “Grapevine” at the 1972 Save the Children Concert and Smokey Robinson & the Miracles doing “Tears of a Clown” on the Andy Williams Show in 1971 stand out. The rest of the clips have been gathered from a variety of U.S. and overseas sources including the Ed Sullivan Show, the Mike Douglas Show, Hullabaloo, and Live from the Bitter End.

Interspersed between the songs are excerpts from interviews with Motown artists. These include Mike Douglas speaking with Smokey Robinson, Motown-founder Berry Gordy on a local Detroit show called Teen Town, and some thoroughly cringe-worthy shtick featuring Lloyd Thaxton with the Temptations. Bonus features include previously unseen footage from the Motown Picnic, circa 1970. Basically it’s the company’s home movies. There are a couple of poignant shots of a young Michael Jackson in this footage. The complete Gordy Teen Town interview is here, as is a 1959 featurette about what was going on in the world in the year that Motown was founded. A Maypo commercial and a trailer for a Brigitte Bardot film are fun, but that is no reason to buy this DVD. Sadly, the 1959 newsreel is the most interesting thing in this package. The accompanying booklet features a nice essay by Stu Hackel.

The music on Motown: The DVD is, of course, above reproach. That said, this disc is as close to non-essential as you can get. Compare it to a really well done documentary on a related subject, Standing In the Shadows of Motown, and it falls far short. While some of the vintage footage is interesting, the whole thing has the feeling of something that was thrown together to clean out some leftovers in Universal’s vault.

Tags: Andy Williams, Berry Gordy, Ed Sullivan, Gladys Knight & The Pips, Lloyd Thaxton, Michael Jackson, Mike Douglas, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, Stu Hackel, The Temptations

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 6:53 pm and is filed under DVD Reviews, Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

sini
Fair enough, but how many DVD's of any kind can compare to Standing in the Shadows of Motown?

kshane
Very true. I was just using that one as an example because it's on a related subject. This dvd falls short when compared to many others.

Mike
I just watched this DVD and I have to respectfully disagree with your assessment. I loved the raw quality of the editing, with no narration or new interviews. There are so many interesting tidbits in the interviews, and especially the respect (or lack thereof) accorded to the Motown principals at different times in the 60s and 70s. The Martha and the Vandellas promo clip for "Nowhere To Run," shot in an a real, working auto plant is worth the price of the DVD alone. The extra audio channels contain 5.1 mixes and, for some tracks, isolated vocal tracks. To me, there's a lot to recommend this DVD as a document of the time and of these performers in their prime.