Unlike the other review, all six of these discs played fine for me. I really enjoyed these shorts from both an historical perspective and for entertainment value. After watching them for a while, they become quite formulaic, but this in itself is quite entertaining to see as the absurdly greedy criminals go to no lengths to make a quick buck. For example, in one of the shorts involving a racketing scheme on a children's charity hospital, the thugs that set up the fake charity come to an impasse when they refuse back payment on an iron lung keeping a little girl alive; if the girl just happens to die, they can return the machine to keep their cash flow in; as one of them remarks to his boss, "It's that little kid that's gummin' up the works. I got an idea..." The boss replies, "I don't want to hear it...But if you have a plan, be careful." We then see the thug in a dark alley smashing up the fuse box to cut the power to the iron lung. Inevitably, in each episode, the police outsmart the criminals with their crime labs, undercover work and detective skills. Later in the series, the design of each story becomes a bit more sophisticated, while the subjects become more obscure and unlikely to affect the lives of your average viewer, shifting the tone of the series from informative/newsreel style to the fatalistic nature of the film noir of the era. The last of the series, "The Luckiest Man Alive" is especially entertaining in this respect. I would recommend this to any fan of classic American crime. As the back of the case describes, this series is a study of mankind's most seductive and destructive pastime -- crime.
