Saturday, June 21, 2008

Sherman set the way back machine!

As mentioned in the last major post Connections.

I remember watching these when I was younger and loving them. A friend recently had a university class that the teacher literally had the class sit and watch 1 a week. Then had them write about a section of that show for the next week. It got me interested again.

Now work and a infinite amount of time to sit and do nothing has presented itself. I stumbled in my random clicking across a interview with Burke about Carl Sagan. Bamm I found a fellow who had posted EVERY connections in excelent quality on Youtube and away I went.

But by now I am sure my fellow co-workers are gonna kill me soon. For the last 2-3 weeks i have been watching non stop connections, connections 2, and connections 3. I have now started on The day the universe changed.

Connections 1 was 1 hour episodes that Burke exhaustively follows a single concept through time and links them up in a nice tidy chain. It is In my opinion the best of the three.

Connections 2 they moved to a shorter 1/2 hour format and in consequence they were fast, informative, but lacking that detail of the first one that made it special.

Connections 3 was back to the hour format. Like the first two I found it informative, but I didn't like the way it was setup. In the first and second it was "this happened and it affected this person, then that person did this, and it affected so and so..." In #3 many of the jumps are not effects, or direct connections. Many are more of a "well the maker of the first steam engine lived in Scotland... and so did this chap." Aside from a location, or attending the same school or such trivial coincidence a chunk of the links are kinda wishy washy. Still a very good series but I think it was stretching at this point.

Also if you watch them back to back (1&2&3) you get a lot of repetition. They made each show to be watch totally independent of each other. Which of course means you can't take for granted the viewer has watched the previous one. But i found by #3 I could actually guess where the next step would go. More importantly guess the name or event it led to.

If your interested in watch these, here is the link to Jamesburkefan so you can find them easier.

After this i'll probably start watch the Cosmos series by Carl Sagan.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good call. Think I'll pass a few evenings at home on that.

Is there an earphone jack on the computer that'll prevent employee homicide?

Mugwug said...

With Mike on this... I remember Connections well, and I remember the sense of disappointment with Connections2 when 31 minutes passed and the show had ended....WTF? Don't we have another 29 of this?