The good: nice to have some older footage of Santana since there is nothing else available from the 70's and it's cool to see Gregg Rolie and Neal Schon in the pre-Journey days. Some of the footage is really crisp and clear and some nice black and white footage of the early stuff.

The bad: Why does there have to be audio commentary over the music? I want to see the song in it's entirety, not with a bunch of pointless talking over it. You want an audio commentary? Fine. Offer it as an option to be turned on or off through the menu, but don't ruin the songs and performances with it. In this case, it's the first version of Black Magic Woman/Gypsy Queen (and this is the "classic" band lineup). There is hardly any footage out there of this era of Santana and to ruin it by cutting in with audio is sacrilegious. What's worse is the copy of the DVD I have has some audio dropouts. I can't tell if it's inherent to the original recording (could be since this is old footage) or if it is a defect with the DVD. Finally, the worst thing is that they take footage of Santana from different shows and splice it into one video of BMW/GQ and the editing is horrible. They don't even try to smooth the edits and the mix jumps from acceptable to bad depending on the show plus it's jarring to see clean footage followed by rawer footage. I could have lived with that IF they had used one audio take of the songs instead of different ones. This alone is enough to take away two stars.

Maybe one day the record companies will try and do a better job of restoring old footage (it can be done, look at the Led Zep DVD)and presenting a better quality product. This is not one of those times and once again, they have slapped something together and rushed it out with no forethought to quality. I had to give it three stars though just because there is no other old footage commercially available. Just be warned that there are problems with the DVD.

If you are an old Santana fan(since 1969) you will wear this tape out. I have sent it to many friends who play a variety of instruments and they all loved it. I hope they do VIVA SANTANA PART 2!! As a matter of fact it's on the TV now. I left it playing while I checked the web to see if he had any other tapes. GET THIS. 6 stars..

This is the most disappointing music DVD I've ever had the misfortune to purchase. If you want 2 second segments of Black Magic Woman spliced together into one mish-mash of a song then this might be for you. A total waste of time. I would have preferred one full version of the song or even a few different versions of the 'entire' song. As for Carlos talking over the top of the songs - what a joke. They should have indicated on the back cover that this wasn't a music DVD. Totally hopeless. I can't even bring myself to sit through the whole thing.

Viva Santana is an excellant way to view the many different time periods and group members of Santana. The video covers Santana's earlier days in Wood stock and on the Ed Sullivan show, and from those early days the video does a pretty good job of including at least on performance of Santana for every couple of years. The bad thing about this video is that the creators of this video decided to run their interview with Carlos over the music portion, which makes the music a lot harder to hear. (Couldn't they have saved to interview portion for its own little area on the video?) Aside from that glaring flaw, the music on the video is fun to watch, and this video serves as an okay summary of Santana's career.

Didn't think it was possible to produce a terrible Santana DVD but they sure enough delivered garbage here. Not one song in its entirety -- every song ruined by obnoxious talking over the music. Who does this tuff??? Don't waste your time or money on this crapola.