The Rat Patrol Season Two

Does the war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg know that Victor Newman on The Young and the Restless is actually Huaptmann Hans Dietrich, aka Hand Gudegast, as seen on The Rat Patrol? Yes, you read it here first: Eric Breaden of Jabot Cosmetics played a ruthless yet honourable desert commander in The Rat Patrol, the mid-’60s series that depicted the WWII heroics of four jeep-driving, machine gun-wielding U.S. commandoes and their battles against the Nazis in the sands of North Africa. Beyond that, The Rat Patrol offers little of interest to anyone other than: A) little boys who will find the combination of jeeps careening across the desert, manly men and gunplay to be even more riveting than staring at construction sites. B) Military geeks who get boners watching footage of WWII rolling ordinance. C) Middle-aged men who can remember when they fit the "A” part of this demographic analysis way back when TV shows advertised the fact that they were filmed in colour. From a historical point of view, everything in The Rat Patrol is startlingly accurate. Germans couldn’t shoot or fight for shit and Americans found bullets to be only a minor inconvenience, especially the character Private Tully Petigrew, who absorbs more lead than the average Toronto water drinker. If we can learn anything from The Rat Patrol it’s that you need to have guys with names like Brick Maquard and Dink Templeton behind the cameras when grinding out 26 episodes a season of desert located, action sequenced, stunt-heavy TV. Take that, HBO. Visually, the DVD is excellent; it must have been the original cache of the colour production. The only extras on The Rat Patrol are the five or so goggle wearing "Germans” who get gunned down in every episode.