allanrcrook another Hollywood hijacking effort.such warfare was carried out by the British - LRDG -long range desert group- forerunner of the modern British elite SAS - strategic air services- - no Americans involved. period.I hear the next illusion will be capture of a German enigma coding machine from a submarine - that help shorten WW2, all-British again, in reality.ever since 'objective Burma', Hollywood has riled he British. otherwise, a low.budget, old German vehicles and US jeeps running around the Arizona desert, affair, with unlikely plots....eg German medics saving US combatants.I think Bogey did a tank special(sahara...something) in set in north Africa. in it, he outdid audie murphy's REAL exploits.(I am nothing if not fair :).making a line to post this rant. :)make up to 0 lines to post this.

Little-Mikey This show is escapist entertainment because it is supposed to be escapist entertainment. And that just happens to be why I like this show so much. The plots were short and simple. They HAD to be since the show was only a half hour long (not a full hour like COMBAT or 12 O CLOCK HIGH). So in a nutshell, the Rat Patrol came, they raided and then they were off. In 30 minutes, there was not much more they could do in the time allotted. True, some of the episodes are kind of silly but other episodes are really good.Unlike most war related features of the time (tv shows, movies, etc), the Germans were not depicted as villains, but as the opposing force. The Germans were lead by Captain Deitrich, who actually respected the Rat Patrol and on more than one occasion, teamed up with the Rat Patrol on a truce. One truce, for example, was declared to rescue an Arab girl who had fallen into a well.The main selling point of this show was that it was in color! Another selling point was to promote one of the stars (Lawrence Casey) as a sort of teen-zeen idol. It was a tactic that would work until 1968, when the public would quickly lose interest in anything war related and THE RAT PATROL would drop suddenly in the ratings war and get the cancellation ax later that year.

SipteaHighTea One of the episodes I like in the Rat Patrol was where a patch of penicillin was poisonous. Sgt. Mofft tries to warn the Germans and the British about the batch after the Germans show up and threaten to shoot up the British convoy unless they were given some penicillin. Well, both sides did not listen to Mofft and Mofft jumps on a jeep with a machine gun and shoots up the penicillin. Next thing you know the German soldiers are shooting up the convoy and stealing the rest of the penicillin. The amazing thing is that the German officer who is chasing the Rat Patrol is standing next to a half-track acting cool, calm, and collected while bullets are flying all over the place.

DKosty123 The concept for this series came from a World War 2 saga titled THE DESERT RATS. It was expanded upon & fictionalized on ABC television.This color series was filmed in Spain for ABC in Color. Visually, the DVD set of season 1 that I have looked at is great.There are several things to note which make the series not as good as it looks. ABC had an extremely limited budget shooting these & if you watch the first season a lot, you will find that many of the action shots are re-used in several episodes. No matter what plot is being followed, the same action sequence used in an earlier episode pops in.The half hour format this series follows does not allow enough time for character development. COMBAT , the Vic Morrow series which was also on ABC, always had an hour to develop it's plots. There are some multiple parters to try & make up for this problem during the first season, but not enough. The main cast is quite good. Christopher George is a good actor & brings Sgt. Troy as close to being real as you can imagine. His three comrades in support are fine also. Hans Guidecast (now Eric Braden or Victor on THE YOUNG & THE RESTLESS) does well as the German Captain in pursuit of our heroes. often though, the scripts are limp & sometimes the re-use of the action sequences does detract from the quality of the series overall.If you pick up the DVD set, watch for Ed Asner (Lou Grant) & Gavin McCloud (Captian Steubing of the LOVE BOAT Murray on Mary Tyler Moore series) in guest roles. The three parter features Claudine Longet several years before her lover Spider Savage died in mystery circumstances. This series is watchable & the DVD pictures are so good you can see the characters sun tans. Overall though, not as good as you remember when you were a child as the plots look a little limp to a grown up.Sometimes, the jeeps suddenly get new equipment when our heroes are nowhere near their own lines. Amazing how they can do that & always get what they need & never run out of ammo. The action theme and fine camera work make this watchable. When I was a child, I picked up & read a series of 7 paper back books based upon the series characters. The books developed the plots & characters in much more depth than the show. This makes my view of the series a little more negative than it should be.