He kept politics out of the documentry.
I have been waiting months for this.
I heard Burns being interviewed by Bob Costas. Both of them are Lefties. Burns bowed to the pressure from Latino groups and added two Latino vets to the series after it had been completed. That is being political.
Bump for publicity...am now into about 25 minutes of this first airing.
Fairly good so far.
Obviously it’s going to a collection of “the average Joe/Josephine”
recollections.
I think that if that’s the approach Burns took (as oppossed to a sweeping
chronicle with lots of “pre-during-post” analysis)...it might be
a decent documentary document.
“...so help us, God!”
Got to give FDR credit for that.
And to Dubya for being equally forthright about 9-11-01.
(pardon the ping...I don’t know any other thread for a good “real-time”
commentary on the first airing of this documentary)
Now Burn’s show has information about the Japanese onslaught
on The Phillipines.
My father worked in the oil industry with a Bataan Death March survivor...
“We didn’t realize until till later how really important it was.”
WWII soldier about his pre-service cynicism about going to fight
the Axis.
Life Magazine Feb 23, 1942...
Pictures of REAL suffering.
That today, even I would attribute to Photoshop.
Unspeakable.
Well done, Mr. Burns...
good mention of the U-Boat predations on US shipping from the US
East Coast all along the Gulf of Mexico.
Those were DANGEROUS places early on.
so far they’re it’s a deification of FDR and trashing Mcarthur. Typical liberslism.
He kept politics out of the documentry
Wanna bet?
My only complaint is a general one, that I think the old WWII documentary tradition of adding some kind of movie footage to illustrate each bit of narration, whether or not that footage is original to that battle, is getting a little dated.
Maybe the History Channel's Dogfights show has spoiled me, but old stock footage of things blowing up and planes falling from the sky shoehorned into a narrative doesn't add to the documentary film experience as it once did.
Let me know how that goes. I do not believe it is possible for those on the left to think apolitically. They may think they can and believe they do, but their perspective is obtusely warped to port.
I want to thank you for posting this earlier. Not trusting PBS, I was still undecided whether or not to watch until I saw the same interview (or a similar one) with Burns later on. When he made the point that in WWII, America was unified, I knew I had to watch.
There have been times during this show when I’ve had tears running down my cheeks. For many, many reasons. But mainly because our children are victims of the moral relativism that has become so pervasive in our schools.
Without unity, we cannot succeed in keeping human beings free from tyranny.
We thought it was pretty good.
(I liked the part where the guy was telling the story of being assigned to go out and collect the bodies of the Marines who had been decapitated and their bodies mutilated. He said the regiment never took a prisoner after that.)
It looks like an excellent series, so far. Of course it’s only the beginning, but I thoroughly enjoyed “The Civil War” series. Ken Burns is doing another wonderful job on this one. He truly has a way of bringing the personal into the story without making it maudlin.
Just started on the west coast a few minutes ago.
Based on the opening, I turned it off.
The Battle of Midway got only the briefest description, about 20 seconds. Although Burns has a general disclaimer that he can’t cover everything, it seems odd to leave that out.
So far, it doesn’t match the scope of “The World at War”, and doesn’t come close to WAW’s great score and Sir Lawrence Olivier’s narration.
There was an error in stating where the Sullivan Brothers were from in this show last night. The documentary stated last night they were from Fredericksburg Iowa, when it is very, very well known that they were from Waterloo Iowa. Waterloo is a city of 70,000 people; Fredericksburg has less than a thousand people.
This may not seem like a big mistake, but to the proud people of Waterloo Iowa and their most famous sons, this is an egregious error that is both disheartening and puzzling.
Just a bump to note:
Part 2 starts in a couple of minutes
at 7PM (Central) on Monday 9-24-07.
I’ll bump a few times as a reminder.
I’ve started a “Part 2” thread, in case posters find one thread to cover
all the comments/critiques on the whole series a bit insufficient.
If most folks stay here, this post will just be sure that any that post
to the second thread are easily found via this URL:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1901629/posts?page=1