CENTENNIAL

"What brought you to St. Louis?" "The river"--CENTENNIAL

This evening I was going to a Karaoke Meetup at Chalker's.  But when I got there it turned out they didn't have karaoke there!  Oh well, at least it got me out of the house.  On the way back I was wondering what I'd post about today, but I stopped at 2Q Video and rented the 1978 miniseries CENTENNIAL.

CENTENNIAL is a maxi-miniseries, over 20 hours long, from James Michener's meganovel about the development of a Colorado community, starting with the formation of the land millions of years ago.  It's fairly middlebrow, but I enjoyed the first episode, "Only the Rocks Live Forever."  That takes place near the end of the eighteenth century and involves the sometimes violent interactions between a fur-buying French-Canadian coureur de bois (Robert Conrad) and the local First Nations.  There's also Conrad's Scottish partner (Richard Chamberlain), who falls in love with an Arapaho hero's daughter (Barbara Carrera, who's easy on the eyes), but her father gives her to Conrad... (The title comes from an Arapaho proverb.)

The later episodes take the story through the frontier era into the twentieth century.  I got the whole set for a week, but it may take longer to see.