When It Was A Game: The Complete Collection (1991)

Most of us know baseball's golden age through grainy black-and-white newsreels, flickering images that make legends like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig feel impossibly far away. "When It Was A Game: The Complete Collection" changes all that. Bringing together all three of the acclaimed "When It Was A Game" documentaries, this collection celebrates the joy of the game, its players, its ballparks and its fans from the 1930s through the 1960s, and it does so in a way you've never seen before. The films are built entirely from home movies shot by fans and by the players themselves, rare, intimate footage that lets the stars of the past step out of black and white and into living, breathing color. You'll see Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ty Cobb, Joe DiMaggio and many more, along with beloved ballparks like Ebbets Field, Briggs Stadium, Crosley Field and Griffith Stadium. Much of this footage had never been seen by the public before, including what's believed to be the oldest surviving color film of a World Series, the 1938 Fall Classic at Chicago's Wrigley Field. The effect is magical. Suddenly these legends feel like real people, smiling, joking and playing the game they loved under bright blue skies. It's baseball the way you always imagined it, and as you've never seen it. Time has changed the game, and many of the clubs, parks and players are gone now. But their memory lives on, and this collection brings the magic of those days vividly back to life. Some treasures sit forgotten in attics and closets for decades, and we're lucky someone took the time to find these.