Hannibal: The Pubic Wars

Battles B.C., Season 1, Ep. 1. Hannibal: The Annihilator (2008)
Directed by David Padrusch, Written by David Padrusch

If I wrote this review the way Battles BC runs each episode I’d be starting somewhere in the middle and then incoherently going back and forth chronologically to make sure that the audience (who I think are a bunch of idiots) can’t get a grasp on anything other than the two or three points that I want to repeat over and over again with the help of some repetitive scenes of violent stabbing and screaming and the even more violently edited words from my resident scholars and summed up by some stupid narration. Cue the circus music. On to the next show about Hitler and UFOs and the Rapture or Armageddon or whatever new apocalypse some nutjob with a calculator has decided will be occurring in the next six months because they think the manager of the Piggly Wiggly down the street is evil incarnate. I’m sorry, was that too incoherent and rambling? Do you get a sense of what watching the History Channel is like? I apologize again. They don’t call themselves The History Channel anymore, they’ve dropped the The and the Channel and now they’re just plain History because presumably someone in charge decided that their subliterate audience has gotten even more stupid watching their shows so they can’t handle all those extra letters and words.
Hannibal....Alexander Castro (from the new American Gladiators, which is about as historically accurate as this show)
Hamilcar...Jaye Razor (http://jayerazor.com/ )
Publius Scipio...Kevin Moran
Hannibal’s #2...Kristopher Blount (Come on, admit it. You giggled when you saw that someone was cast in the role of Hannibal’s #2.)
Flaminius...Orion Barnes (Orion Barnes has come here from the future to be a stuntman in this awful show.)
Geminus...David John Wilson
Sempronius...Ken MacFarlane
Varro....Justin Spanko (Justin Spanko isn’t a real name, it’s some sort of London fetish club code for something horrible)
Paulus....Daniel R. Wolfe
General...Bryan Kent
Elephanteer....Nik Sharma (Oh, sure, get an Indian guy and put him on an elephant. It’s meta-historical.)
Elephant...Susie (Why do they bother telling us the names of the animals when it’s just a common first name? It’s not like I saw this in the credits and said “Oh, of course, it was Susie. You could really see her intent in the role.”)
The “Scholars”
I think it really says something about this show that this is the only place on the entire World Wide Web where you will see a complete list of the shame-faced scholars who appeared on this show. Could it be that they wanted their names to never appear in the credits because they figured nobody watching the show would reach over for a pad of paper to take down their names so they could make sport of them for looking like idiots spouting gibberish for people who can barely comprehend complete sentences.)
Richard Gabriel (Royal Military College of Canada)
The sheer number of misstatements, inaccuracies and misinterpretations this guy comes up with in every episode is mind-boggling. It scares me to think that this guy has been responsible for teaching history to the US and Canadian military. Those who learn history wrong are condemned to making spectacular mistakes.
David George (Director, Institute of Mediterranean Archaeology, Saint Anselm College)
This guy seems reasonable enough.
Matthew Gonzales (Assistant Prof. of Classics, Saint Anselm College)
Another relatively reasonable guy.
Mark Schwartz (Dept.of Anthropology, Grand Valley State University)
I don’t think this guy is an idiot like Gabriel, but I swear the editors do a number on him in how they cut things to make him sound like he’s wrong.
Steven Weingartner (Chariots Like a Whirlwind)
Every show needs a resident chariot expert. Of course, Hannibal didn’t have chariots, but he also didn’t have alien technology or access to uranium enrichment technology and chances are good the History channel will find a way of working those things in.

So, where was I? Oh, right, Hannibal Barca. So, the producers saved some money on this episode by not trying to hire Vin Diesel himself (though, really, I can’t believe he was all that busy filming Fast and Furious 22.7 or whatever) and instead getting themselves a Vin Diesel clone to stand without a shirt and wield a couple of swords.
Did the Carthaginians forget to pack shirts when they crossed the Alps? I seriously doubt it. And if you really think that was the case then you might as well have changed the story to have Queen Dido crossing the Alps with some elephants and without a shirt on.

And what is up with Hannibal’s dad, Hamilcar? Not only is a giant black guy (you can imagine the kind of racist crap that’s popped up in discussion forums with regard to that--though when you put him next to who they’ve got playing Hannibal the question does arise as to what the casting people thought Hannibal’s mother looked like.) but he’s also just about the same age as the guy they’ve got playing Hannibal, which is frankly much more disconcerting than the bizarre ethno-racial casting choices. (It would be one thing if they cast a Chinese actor to play Fabius Maximus.) Seriously, is Hamilcar Barca supposed to be really spry for an old guy, or are we to believe he fathered a child when he was 3?

So, the gist of this episode is that Hannibal was fighting a personal war of revenge against Rome and all things Roman. We don’t get anything useful in the way of background about Carthaginian politics and factionalism, but hey we don’t get much of an intro to Roman politics and factionalism either. The writers almost seem to get their Scipios confused. I’m pretty sure someone on the program implied that it was Scipio Africanus who eventually destroyed Carthage in the Third Punic War but this is the History Channel so maybe they think Zombie Scipio ate the inhabitants and that Roman historians subsequently covered it up. The coverage of the battles of The Trebbia, Lake Trasimene and Cannae is decent if full of innacuracies. They don’t even bother to cover Scipio’s campaign in Spain which eventually cut off and eliminated Hannibal’s power base thus sealing the deal on his inability to finish off Rome. And the episode finishes off without ever mentioning Hannibal’s defeat at Zama.

As you can expect there is a lot to say about the elephants that Hannibal took with him across the Alps. The talking heads are cut in such a way to make it sound as if nobody had ever even heard of elephants until Hannibal’s time.
Really? Don’t be surprised if they make similar claims for the Indian elephants Alexander runs into.

Did the Romans really ban the word "peace" in the middle of this war? I think not.
This is the kind of inanity that only people in this show could spout.
And Mr. Narrator-man, the word you're trying to pronounce is CAVALRY. You see how there's no L before the V? That means that it's not the same as CALVARY. There's no silent L before the V. Idiot.

As for this "annihilation" business, it is the kind of nonsense that you would expect from this show. Before Hannibal there was no such thing as annihilation? Really? He invented modern warfare, except when he didn't? Take a look at what happened to the Romans earlier in their history. Annihilation wasn't a new concept. Losing wasn't even a new concept for them.
Idiots.

And why do we have to see Hannibal fighting with two swords doing all sorts of fancy moves? Is it that hard to believe that he wasn't a muscle-man without a shirt?
Idiots.

And what's the deal with the bizarre animal-like roaring that Hannibal does? What the hell is that?
Idiots.

And another thing. And this applies to the whole series, and to 300 and to any of a number of recreations of ancient combat. YOU JUST SPENT AN INORDINATE AMOUNT OF TIME TELLING US ABOUT HOW IMPORTANT IT WAS TO KEEP ORDER IN A LINE OR PHALANX. SO WHY DO YOU INSIST ON SHOWING US SINGLE COMBAT HOMERIC STYLE? ISN'T THE WHOLE POINT TO AVOID THIS KIND OF FREE FOR ALL? I UNDERSTAND IF THAT DOESN'T MAKE FOR SPECTACULAR VISUALS, BUT CAN SOMEONE PLEASE DO A BETTER JOB OF SHOWING THIS? BECAUSE IT MIGHT BE USEFUL TO SEE JUST HOW BORING AND TIRING ANCIENT COMBAT WAS.
Seriously folks. I don't need to believe that Hannibal was a big bald bad-ass.
He was a brilliant commander. I don't need to imagine that he could also bench 300lbs and had great hip-hop dance moves.
Idiots.

Having expressed all these complaints, I’ll admit that this is not the worst episode in the bag. They make a lot of errors in this episode, but they are mostly errors of omission. Errors which, I might add, could be easily corrected if they cut the sensationalist crap and all the dumb repetitions. Seriously. They could include twice or three times the information in the same time limit if they actually tried. This isn’t the worst introduction to Hannibal and the Punic Wars you could get, but be prepared to take some serious supplemental information to go along with this episode if you want to actually know anything about the Punic Wars.

Battles: Wizard of Id

Battles B.C.: The Complete Season One (2009)

Four-in-Hand Entertainment Group/History Channel

How the hell did it come to this? The Hitler Channel/UFO Channel decided to take on ancient history. This was a great idea that appealed to me. I knew they’d screw it up somehow, but I was still naive enough that I just couldn’t believe they’d make such a colossal failure of it. I was wrong. I will learn from this history, that is if I remember the history of this more accurately than the History Channel and its cousins on cable are doing. I used to think other channels were better, but they’re now getting worse in an escalation of stupidity that can only be explained by the increasing lead content in snack-cakes.

I wanted to like this series, because I’d like to see more shows about ancient history, but if they’re going to be like this they’re just going to cause my brain to explode in anger and it’s just not worth the frustration. If you know nothing about history then this show will more often than not make you more ignorant, especially if you decide this will be your first and last exposure to this material. Here’s the thing, something like 300 (which this series tries to emulate visually and tonally) is useful as a learning tool if it arouses enough interest in a subject to make you want to learn more. In the course of that, you can unlearn much of what is wrong about these films. As such, it can be a great tool to spark an interest and a subsequent discussion. But let’s face it, a show like Battles B.C. is so full of crap that it would be easier in most cases to just not have people attempt to know this history than to have to re-teach them to correct for the horrific errors represented in a series like this.

The real surprising thing is that they even have time to put errors into a show that is so sparse in information in the first place. I swear, they just repeat the same point ten times and re-run promos asking questions like “will Hannibal crush the Romans and what kind of surprise does he have for them?” In the DVD format you really get to see the full effect of the “something in your kitchen will kill you” style of documentary television that pretty much every non-fiction show has now turned into as each very brief segment of this show opens with a summary of everything you’ve covered so far (because people will forget everything over the commercial break) and then work the way over to another silly mystery that is supposed to astound you. The shame of it is that history is weird enough without having to spice it up in such an uninformative way. Jeez, I remember watching William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich when I was a kid and I was glued to it because it was fascinating and it didn’t condescend to its audience the way these super redacted history shows do nowadays. Here’s a thought, how about instead of making crap like this you slow down the pace a little and force your audience to change the way they think, sort of the way MTV did, but in reverse. The fact of the matter is that people will adapt their tastes to what you do if you bother to try it. And if it makes your test audience say “it makes my head hurt” give your test audience a candy bar and throw their results in the trash heap, along with the “scripts” for Battles B.C.

Seriously, I could make a better more interesting version of this show using some stick figure drawings and it would be more entertaining and informative than this show which is more like trivia printed on the back of a napkin than a serious documentary about ancient warfare.

Coming up next time: Battles BC Episode 1