Product Description
-------------------
F-Troop: The Complete Second Season (DVD)
F Troop is set at Fort Courage, Kansas, a fictional Army outpost
in the West, in 1865, the year the Civil War ended. The
commanding officer at Fort Courage is the gallant but chronically
clumsy and accident-prone Captain Wilton Parmenter (Ken Berry),
the descendant of a long line of leaders. He is awarded
the Medal of Honor after accidentally instigating the final
charge at Appomattox: he is meant to call "retreat", but he
sneezes just as he is about to speak and his troops mistake this
for the order "Charge!" His superiors soon realize his ineptitude
and post him to remote Fort Courage, a dumping ground for the
least useful or trustworthy soldiers.
]]>
.com
----
Yes, you are seeing double in F Troop's second, and final,
season. In "The Singing ie," Larry Storch appears as
Corporal Agarn and his cousin, a French fur trapper. In "Did Your
her Come from Ireland?" Forrest Tucker brogues it up as Sgt.
O'Rourke's visiting Irish her. In "Wilton the Kid," Ken Berry
gets into the act portraying klutzy, clueless Capt. Parmenter and
his look-alike, a vicious bank robber. And in "One Russian Is
Coming! Only One Russian Is Coming!" Storch again doubles up as
Agarn's Cossack cousin. It's a sure indication that F Troop had
indeed jumped the stagecoach (particularly the 1967 episode
"That's Show Biz," featuring a frontier rock group, the Bedbugs,
and a rendition of Bob Dylan's "Tambourine Man" that makes
William Shatner's sound like the Byrds), but the show is so
unabashedly old-school funny, and its ensemble of crack character
actors so likeable, that one willingly takes the leap. During its
brief run, F Troop spawned its share of catch-phrases (Agarn's
"Who says I'm dumb" and "I'm warning you, Dobbs"), but this
season's "Bye Bye Balloon" contains perhaps the series' most
classic quotable, as the Hekawis' Chief Wild Eagle (Frank DeKova)
gazes upon the mysterious flying object in the sky and procls,
"It is balloon" (it plays better than it reads).
For a frontier outpost, Fort Courage sure saw its share of
visiting show-business luminaries, including Paul Lynde as "The
Singing ie," Harvey Korman as a Prussian balloonist in "Bye
Bye Balloon," Milton Berle as sham medicine man Wise Owl in "The
Great Troop Robbery," Sterling "Winnie the Pooh" Holloway as a
bespectacled sheriff in "Wilton the Kid," and Vincent Price as a
suspicious Count in "V Is for Vampire." One regrets the show's
switch from black and white to color and the replacement of F
Troop's original rousing theme song with an instrumental
rendition (the original, with vocals, obligingly plays over each
disc's menus), but the commercial-break freeze frames are fun.
Tucker, as the entrepreneurial O'Rourke, and Storch, as his
wildly emotional sidekick, are one of TV's great comedy teams,
and Berry displays Astaire-like grace performing the bulk of the
physical comedy. Those who dismiss F Troop as a mindlessly silly
sitcom are directed to the near-half-hour series retrospective,
in which personnel salute this series' spoofing of
protocol and life as a morale builder during the Vietnam
War. --Donald Liebenson