F Troop - The Complete Second Season

For a frontier outpost, Fort Courage sure saw its share of visiting show-business luminaries, including Paul Lynde as "The Singing Mountie," 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 military personnel salute this series' spoofing of military protocol and life as a morale builder during the Vietnam War. --Donald Liebenson