"Jan & Dean: One Last Ride" (2000)

A rare DVD featuring the duo who originally glamorized beaches, fancy cars, beautiful girls in bikinis and old ladies from Pasadena!

You're looking at one of the first DVDs that we had to get a special order for back in 2002-2003. Because this wasn't at our local video store's shelves, but it was on their catalog, given I wasn't comfortable making online orders back then, we placed an order for this in person with the employee's help. About three weeks later, having provided our contact information, the store called us saying they received this DVD, and we went ahead to purchase it as normal.

Many people don't realize that Jan & Dean were the original "beach boys" before the five-man band, The Beach Boys, took place. That's right: This duo were the originators glamorizing and singing about waves, beaches, sunshine, and beautiful girls in bikinis. These were one, if not the only, live performance that ever made it to DVD, so let's talk about it (their film Deadman's Curve: The Jan & Dean Story is on DVD as well, but in terms of their live musical performances, especially the earlier black and white programs, they're either in compilation DVDs or are rare and out of print).

Besides that FBI copyright warning, this DVD starts right away to the feature presentation—only menu is the scene/track selection. It starts with a brief biography of Jan and Dean during their early and peak years, before transitioning into the live concert. The man wearing a suit and a top hat opens their performance with this:

"Ladies and Gentlemen, from Southern California, the Messiah of Malibu and the Sultan of Surf: Jan and Dean!"

Our famous duo comes in and are ready to go, though funny enough, the music playing as they entered happened to be "Whip It" by Devo. Jan and Dean start off singing their hit "New Girl in School," and the fun began. Their songs are just what you'd expect: catchy, foot-tapping, is lyrically all about that sunshine, surf, beautiful girls, and that old lady from Pasadena as well. Even though this concert took place back in 1981, their songs are as retro as you can get—dating back to the late fifties and early sixties. This video shows shots of fans in the audience having a great time, as you will too watching this. Upon watching this for review, we were jamming to their songs as our duo kept singing and interacting with the audience—made us wish we were there. As the show headed toward its end, their last two songs, "Happy Together" and "Barbara Ann" were sung with Howard Kaylin and Mark Volman who made an appearance at this concert. What a great way to close the show.

However, we noticed something. As our duo continued singing their hits, around the seventh and eighth tracks, "You've Got To Hide Your Love Away" and "Help Me Rhonda," Jan gradually started to lose his voice (this is normal, but it bears mentioning). Worse, Jan's body started looking a bit stiff; this may have been likely due to that car accident he suffered in the late sixties. However, all is fine since Jan would often be seen dancing on stage with a female fan. (Jan sadly passed away in 2004.) For Dean, he was fine and was able to sing out the entire time; there were times he'd bust out and play the guitar which was fun to see. Overall, we had our eyes on Jan for a bit making sure he's okay, and was, as he was able to endure throughout the whole show (heading into this show's credits, Jan was the first to leave).

For the DVD itself, this would've been a perfect time to add more features. Those planning to buy this DVD would have loved to see more features introducing them to the duo; and we say so because, as mentioned earlier, not many people know these were the original beach boys. Fans think that songs about the beach, fancy cars and beautiful girls were by The Beach Boys, not knowing that their band was inspired by Jan and Dean. That was a missed opportunity by Image® Entertainment.

This DVD video was printed with the MPG2 (Native D3D9 DXVA VLD Decoder) video codec, exported with 30p frame rate (59.94p) at a bitrate of approximately 9,000. For the audio, it has an AC3 compressed codec with a sample rate of 48000 (16 bits) stereo.

Fans of oldies music, including DVD and physical media fans in general, will enjoy this title. If you ever want to see how fun and enjoyable concerts were back then, this presents that nicely. Also, if you're a fan of The Beach Boys, you'll feel right at home with Jan and Dean's music; looking at the tracks, they do sing songs that ought to sound familiar to you from The Beach Boys. It's a great DVD, and though we wished more exclusive features could've been added, it's still something worth having in your personal collection. It's DVDs like this that quickly go out of print during the time of its release, which happened to be more than 20 years ago, so if you see this, you better grab them because there doesn't seem to be too many of them being sold. Highly recommended!

Kris Caballero

Founder of KCU Network and KCU Plus, Kris has been writing since he started blogging in late 2005. Officially back to doing computer programming, Kris enjoys reading books on Mathematics, Quantum Computing, Philosophy, plus playing old video/MS-DOS games, digital video archiving, listening to sports, public radio and classical music.

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