When I saw this show on PBS back in '85, I didn't have a VCR, and after I got one, I looked forward to the day when the show would be made available on tape. When it finally did become available, I was pretty ticked to find out that a third of it had been cut (who knows why).
When the DVD came out, I was a bit reluctant to buy it because it was so inexpensive. I figured that all that had been done was to transfer the tape to DVD. But, for the money, why not? Tapes don't last forever. So I went ahead and gave it a shot.
I am both surprised and pleased, therefore, to announce that the DVD is in fact the complete broadcast, just shy of 90 minutes, not just a transfer of the tape, which is only 59 minutes, and the quality is everything you'd expect from a DVD.
Understand, though, as has been noted in other reviews, that this is called The Concert Years for a very good reason: the emphasis is on Judy's concert performances, not her movie roles. Therefore, there are very few movie clips. Likewise, this is not a biography, though there is a fairly liberal sprinkling of biographical material along with archival footage that you probably will not have seen elsewhere (such as her first appearance on film at age 7).
Unfortunately, very little was filmed of her concerts. It is amazing to me that, given the popularity of TV by the mid-fifties, it never occurred to anybody to capture some of these performaces, not just on television, but on broadway (imagine having a professional film of the Carnegie Hall performance). Therefore, the "concert" footage used is mostly from her television show which, granted, did try to recreate to a large extent the concert experience and did run during the middle of her concert years.
However, with only a couple of exceptions, whoever put this together exercised excellent judgement and chose those performances which show Judy at her best, e.g., Ol' Man River, Chicago, Smile, As Long As He Needs Me. And, yes, the DVD is worth buying just to get her "little tramp" performance of Over The Rainbow, performed in concert.
The point of the whole thing is to show how Judy performed in front of a live audience, and the DVD does just that.
This is the real deal, all almost-90 minutes of it. And there's stuff here you won't find anywhere else. Highly recommended.