Brand new factory sealed dvd from Deuce Entertainment is a no frills pop-n-go video that starts up without any menus. They are licensed by MGM so the sourceprints used are good.

The hero of RADIO DAYS is an ordinairy Jewish kid who grows up in 1940s Brooklyn in a house full of relatives and listens passionately to the radio. But the movie is not simply his story. It is also the story of '40s radio itself, and it recreates many of the legends that he remembers hearing.

For example, the story of the burglars who answered the phone in a house that were burgling and won the jackpot on "Name that Tune", and the prizes were delivered the next day to the bewildered victims. Or the embarrassing plight of the suave radio host who liked to play around and got locked on the roof of a nightclub with the cigarette girl. Or the way the macho heroes of radio adventure serials turned out, in real life, to be short little bald guys.

RADIO DAYS cuts back and forth between the adolescent hero's working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn and the glamorous world of radio in Manhattan. And, like radio, it jumps easily from one level of reality to another. There are autobiographical memories of relatives and school, neighbors and friends, and then there are the glittering radio legends that seeped into these ordinairy lives.

There are so many characters, and they are in so many seperate vignettes, that it's hard to give a coherent description of the plot or plots. Although there is no narrative thread from begining to end, there is a buried emotional thread: What actually happens isn't nearly as important as how we remember it.