Too lazy to look for something else on TV, Mysteries At The Monument is playing.
In a segment about Black U.S. soldiers in France in WWI, the re-enactors are armed with flintlock rifles. Also, the image is reversed so that the locks are on the left side and the soldiers are all left-handed.
Another segment takes place in Connecticut in the 1750s. When bringing up the fear of Indians, they show Sioux warriors galloping across the Great Plains.
Come on. Don’t you even care enough to hire a technical advisor? :smack:
I hear you. I can’t count the number of docs I’ve seen where they talk about a particular piece of hardware and show a different one. “The F-86 was America’s prime fighter jet in the Korean War” while showing a Phantom or some such. :smack:
My WAG is they figure the folks that know will know the diff and not care and the ones that don’t won’t care anyway. Helping to bring Henry Ford’s “History is bunk” statement to life I guess.
Well, ta be honest, the problem is in your first few words. Maybe it would be more productive to arse yourself out and pick some more blackberries.
The problem with wall-to-wall cable is that something has to fill that vast amazon of content, and 24 hours a day times 365 days a year times… 200 channels becomes one of those “whole Library of Congress in 6 hours” sort of thing. So the drivel factor goes up and up, and viewers who care enough to even change the channel get rarer and rarer, and pretty soon it’s hard to tell if we’re in the middle of Idiocracy, Network or a Max Headroom episode.
I know from first-hand experience that some documentary producers, even those who churn out an episode a week, do their best to get the details right. Nearly all of them, again IME, are from the UK.
Blow Up Your TV, as John Denver said. Go make some berry wine instead.
Having worked on documentaries myself, I can assure you that most producers have no particular expertise in any field of history, and will go with whatever footage they can afford. In other words, documentaries are often done on the cheap.
The quality of writing often leaves something to be desired, whether the writers know anything about history or not. I was watching something not too long ago where the narration made it sound like the Americans, not the Japanese, were losing in the Pacific in 1944, or something like that (I switched off the set at that point).
Even if a technical advisor points out an error, there’s no guarantee he or she will be listened to. Or the advisor may not even be asked about something, and a howler results (like the Soviet Union collapsing in 1989 instead of 1991 :smack: ).
That’s dovetailed with what I said - when did documentaries turn from things crafted with some expertise and validation (I’m thinking of all the original NatGeo documentaries, for example) to something to be as casually thrown together by drones as an episode of Oprah or a sitcom? When did simply having a production team become enough to turn out “factual” material?
The need for vastly increased amounts of it, and to make it as remote-bait and eye-candy as possible to draw eyeballs is only part of the answer, IMHO. When did we stop caring if our “factual” viewing was anything of the kind?
One is perforce led to concur with another noted pundit and savant C. P. Snow, when he concluded of the newly invented device which the true Anglophile is wont to call the “gogglebox”, ahaha, “No good will come of it; the word is half Greek and half Latin”. It would churlish of me to note, ahaha, that Snow’s trenchant observation was not wholly unapropos of a notable address I made at at a convention which was, if one may reminsisce, rapturously received. No doubt Snow’s quip was meant as a doff of the cap towards your humble obedient; nevertheless, it was perhaps a trifle jejune of the great man to assume that one’s legion of Argus-eyed disciples would not be swift to sound the alert, ahaha. No harm done, and the old boy rather gracefully conceded the set with a brace of Tokay that Michaelmas.
Most of the WWII video clips on Youtube are cheaply made. I saw one on the Battle of Kursk (fought July 1943)-showed the German soldiers wearing inter uniforms-it as 95 in the shade.
Oh, sure, and the Disney documentary showing lemmings marching to their deaths.
But these tend to be the exception (pseudo-documentaries that often have racist or political bends aside) among the major documentary efforts of the pre-DiscoveryTV era. Even ten or so years ago you could tune into History Channel or one of its kin and be pretty much assured of something interesting, reliable and as accurate as tee-vee allows anything to be. Not half-hour fluff pieces on Nazi ghost hunters.
I’ve been watching The Making of the Mob: New York on AMC. A really good docudrama, but all of those damned fifty-star flags irritate the hell out of me! :mad:
Producers, hellooooooo! Have you ever heard of something called “silk screening”? You can use it for ALL SORTS OF THINGS, including FLAGS!!! :dubious:
Also, I’m pretty sure 5th Army MPs did NOT carry lever-action Winchesters while in Italy in 1943! D’OH!!! :smack:
Not a documentary but I recall in Goodfellas they showed a 747 in 1963 which was before it was put into service. However in that scene they did correctly call the airport Idlewild and not JFK.
In one docudrama about the Aloha Airlines incident, they showed a “Vietnam-era” airbase full of F-15s with “74” (the year of their manufacture) in the serial numbers on their tails.
