Recent DVDs

The other day I saw the first episode of the DVD of the series LEGACY, where Michael Wood visits the sites of ancient civilizations and draws lessons for the present world.  I've always enjoyed Wood's documentaries, on subjects ranging from Dark-Age England to the Trojan War to India to western art. (Last year I saw a show on Netflix where he retraced Alexander the Great's routes of conquest.) This is another vivid one.

For a while I've been watching DVDs of MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATRE 3000, where they show cheesy movies and insert snarky comments.  I recently saw their masterful treatment of JACK FROST, an awkwardly-dubbed English version of a colorful but surreal Russian fairy tale production, from back in the 1960s.

I've also seen another DVD of short avant-garde films from the pre-1950 era, a collection of 1979 pop music clips from THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL, some more episodes of MISSION:  IMPOSSIBLE and GUNSMOKE, one of the musical specials Barbra Streisand made for TV in the mid-'60s, and a couple of documentaries from PBS' THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE about the 19th-century laying of the first telegraph cables across the Atlantic Ocean, and the World War II construction of the Alaska Highway through the Yukon. (Canadians only got mentioned briefly.)

We've received the last of our 16 monthly discs from zip.ca and the next ones won't arrive for a couple of weeks.  But I still have three left to see:  an episode of the 1950s country-music variety show TOWN HALL PARTY, an expressionist German silent movie of OTHELLO starring the great Emil Jannings, and SHORT INFINITY, a National Film Board documentary about a community on of the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.