TV: A Dumb Duo on the History Channel

Sometimes it's nice to while away an evening looking at the wasteland that is weekend television (particularly good for students who've just finished long assignments and are trying to decompress). One of the drawbacks to this approach is that sometimes you get stuck watching fairly pointless documentaries. The History Channel sometimes runs stuff that's interesting (Band of Brothers, Wild West Tech, etc.), but what I saw a few nights ago warrants a further explanation.

The first "documentary" was about the mythic hero's journey as interpreted in the "Star Wars" saga. I start to question the sanity of any talking head I see on TV, no matter how edu-macated, when they start comparing Luke Skywalker's adventures to great literature, especially when the first movie is only thirty years old. Let's wait another 100 years and see if anyone still even remembers the "Star Wars" movies. And let's hope they don't remember this part, where George Lucas reduced perhaps the most menacing villain in cinema to an emo kid:



The second nonfiction piece was a bit more palatable - "The Universe: Secrets of the Sun." Unfortunately, it was apparently aimed at people who know little or nothing about the sun (yeah, I know it's powered by nuclear fusion, I know how it probably formed, yada yada yada). This makes for tedious watching - it's tough to assimilate information by watching and listening to someone spout facts when reading the damn book is so much faster.