6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog: Review: <i>Los Angeles Dodgers Vintage World Series Films</i>

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Monday, December 24, 2007

Review: Los Angeles Dodgers Vintage World Series Films

As you age, time foreshortens; a year is now 1/44th of my life, but when I was ten, it was 1/10th. December lasted forever, and Santa couldn't arrive fast enough. I was a skeptical kid: not having a chimney, I guessed him coming down the flue of our natural gas heater was pretty improbable, and thus his actual existence highly unlikely. Nevertheless, I remember my sister and I counting down every day to Christmas, marking off the dates on the Register's Mini Page calendar that ran on the first Sunday after Thanksgiving or so.

But if time ticks by ever faster as I age, the reverse is true of the Dodgers' World Series appearances. Growing up listening to Vin Scully call the games on a little lemon-colored Radio Shack radio, hanging in a hammock in our back yard and looking up at the darkening sky, Dodgers' excellence was something you took for granted. Of course they'll win the division. Of course they'll be in the World Series. I raged at the TV when Reggie Jackson threw out his hips on the basepaths, deflecting Ron Cey's throw and ultimately costing the Dodgers Game 4 in the '78 Series.

And so here we are today, Dodger fans famished, relatively speaking, by a string of mediocrities, punctuated by the last gasp, the 1988 squad that shouldn't have been able to do it; whatever pixy dust landed on that team seems to have been drained out of the future, glory bought on the installment plan. For a long while now, Dodger glory has been about the past, and not the recent past, either.

Nostalgia therefore being eminently salable, I received as a gift the 2-DVD set, Vintage World Series Films: Dodgers, containing footage of all five Los Angeles Dodgers titles. The first thing that really pops out at you is the brass band cheerleading that marked postwar baseball marketing; the old Angels fight song was of the same cloth, and sounds every bit as dated. All of the films are scripted, some of them ham-handedly so; there are places where it would have been far more interesting to listen to Vin Scully's contemporaneous calls. It's odd to hear Scully so pantingly commercial; "that's the dazzling type of play that makes baseball thrilling to watch" is so leaden a phrase, it defies comprehension how he could possibly utter it.

In a sense, you expect that. The 1950's were an era of declining attendance, partly fueled by the outgrowth of the suburbs; baseball was still played in stadiums far away from its likely customers, a situation that would be corrected in the coming decades (and one that the Dodgers were well-situated to take advantage of).

If the films have their tics, they also have their charms, the latter generally overshadowing the former. It's the first time I've seen Sandy Koufax pitch, and if you've never seen that, it's worth the price of admission by itself. Likewise old Metropolitan Stadium, which always struck me as being terribly small and obsolescent the moment it was built; the film makes it look like an overgrown spring training facility, without shade in the outfield seats (though given how little sun you get there, maybe that's a net positive). Needless to say, this is a must-have for any serious Dodger fan. It's too bad that there aren't videos of the Dodgers' 1977 and 1978 losing World Series efforts, because there's a lot of interesting history there, too; but you have to wade through the Yankeeography to get it.

Labels: dodgers, reviews