Cheesy Documentaries Make Me Smile

This weekend has been a very good and relaxing one for me. I hardly knew what to do with myself...so, as I usually do in such times, I spent several hours watching the History Channel. You can find some really great stuff on there (good example: a great documentary on Mission Control and NASA called Failure is not an Option), but sometimes you can also come across something really awful. I found myself watching one of these awful shows last night. It was called "Quest for Dragons," and the premise was that they were going to examine how dragons appear in the art and mythology of almost every ancient culture, all over the globe. It's an interesting and perfectly reasonable premise on which to make a documentary, but this one was absolutely ridiculous. The "experts" interviewed were:
a.) some really nerdy English prof
b.) a really sketchy-looking anthropologist (and I think anthropology is pretty sketchy overall anyway...it's a nebulous discipline)
c.) a random body-builder who has tattoos of dragons all over his body
d.) a couple of strange new-agey Druids who "feel" that dragons exist (this reminds me of one of my favorite Dilbert cartoons, in which Dilbert asks this new-agey girl, "Since when did ignorance become a point of view?")

Add to all this the really primitive computer animations of dragons zooming around (the same 3 clips shown over and over during the 2-hour show), the blaring, overly dramatic music, and the overall bad writing and organization...I felt like I was back in my sci-fi class from last year, where reality and logic apparently disappeared. Needless to say, I was not impressed, but I was highly amused. It was funnier than your average infomercial!

(Note to History Channel: Dragons are cool, but next time...Please hire me.)

Currently Listening: "Something Good" by Bic Runga from Beautiful Collision