Education made fun
When I was a kid in school all we had to work with was 8mm projection and books with pictures (and words, of course). For a kid or college student nowadays the ability to acquire media that shows you how things went down instead of you actually reading it is something miraculous. The problem with that type of media today is that sometimes it doesn’t do a great job in completing the full story because Hollywood generally likes to ‘leave things out’.
With that said, A&E Home Entertainment and Lightworks Producing have produced a wonderful documentary that tells you about the following:
– Zeus
– Hercules
– Hades
– The Minotaur
– Medusa
– Beowulf
– Tolkien’s Monsters (LOTR fans rejoice!)
– Thor
– Odysseus
Each one is around an hour long and each one provides intricate, accurate details on the subject at hand. For example, the history of Zeus (which is the first episode) is positively fascinating. You get a full description of his family, his birthing, his defeat of his father (and the Titans) and every aspect of his personality. It’s presented with some pretty intense acting and also accompanied by expert opinion and realistic settings. So, when they’re discussing how Zeus’s father vomited a rock the production team has footage of what many Greeks believe is the rock that he threw-up. Each episode that Lightworks and A&E have brought you brings this exact formula with it. So, you’ll be entertained at the mythological set-up, but also become educated from experts and historical facts.
One of the more interesting episodes on this set is the story of Odysseus (Homer wrote about him). The story is broken into two episodes (there’s a lot of content in the Odyssey) and compares fact to myth and is played out quite smoothly.
What is remarkable about all of these stories is that they don’t get boring. The combination of acting with 2D/3D modeling makes the episodes all the more interesting. Of course, adding great audio and visuals to the Blu-ray (which look superb in 1080p) helps quite a bit. This makes it worth the price of admission when it comes to snagging the Blu-ray copy instead of the DVD.
Are there any downers to this? Well, I wish they had attached special features to the disc. You only get the episodes and nothing else, which is kind of disappointing.