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