The Road to the White House

It was such a dog of a year that these two video retrospectives about 1992 should be narrated by Millie, the dog of the year. Here, we get CNN's Susan Rook on the former, and Bernard Shaw and Catherine Crier on the latter, practiced announcers able to take the sting out of a year that saw man and nature gang up to beat us silly.

All the most memorable horrors are here: bloodshed in Bosnia, starvation in Somalia, cannibalism in Milwaukee, rioting and recession, TB and AIDS, Mike Tyson on trial for rape and the U.S. Navy on trial for grope, Bush throwing up, Perot bailing out.

Rook's big-picture Year in Review: 1992 divides the year into clever visual essays (such as ''Law and Disorder,'' ''Freedom and Free-for-Alls''), broken by quick looks at some less momentous events (such as Madonna's Sex), while the Shaw-Crier The Road to the White House show enlivens its doggedly chronological framework with political cartoons and incisive sidebars. The two 90-minute tapes' common denominator is executive producer Stacy Jolna, an experienced journalist who transforms stale headlines into fresh video full of spice and substance. If we must remember 1992, this is the way to do it. Both tapes: B+