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The World at War (30th Anniversary Edition) |
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The World at War (30th Anniversary Edition)
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by A&E Home Video
Sales Rank: 282
Price: $49.99
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Sir Jeremy Isaacs highly deserves the numerous awards for documentaries he has earned: the Royal Television Society's Desmond Davis Award, l'Ordre National du Mérit, an Emmy, and a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II. His epic <I>The World at War</I> remains unsurpassed as the definitive visual history of World War II. <p> The Second World War was different from other wars in thousands of ways, one of which was the unparalleled scope of visual documents kept by the Axis and Allies of all their activities. As a result, this war is understood as much through written histories as it is through its powerful images. The Nazis were particularly thorough in documenting even the most abhorrent of the atrocities they were committing--in a surprising amount of color footage. <I>The World at War</I> was one of the first television documentaries that exploited these resources so completely, giving viewers an unbelievable visual guide to the greatest event in the 20th century. This is to say nothing of the excellent, comprehensible narrative. Some highlights:<p> <ul> <li><I>A New Germany 1933-39</I>: early German and Nazi documentation of Hitler's rise to power through the impending attack on Poland <li><I>Whirlwind</I>: the early British losses in the blitz in the skies over Britain and in North Africa <li><I>Stalingrad</I>: the turning point of the war and Germany's first defeat <li><I>Inside the Reich--Germany 1940-44</I>: one of the most fascinating documentaries that exists on life inside Nazi Germany, from <I>Lebensborn</I> to the Hitler Youth <li><I>Morning</I>: prior to <I>Saving Private Ryan</I>, one of the only unromanticized views of the Normandy invasion <li><I>Genocide</I>: this film is one of the most widely shown introductions to the Holocaust <li><I>Japan 1941-45</I>: although <I>The World at War</I> is decidedly focused more on the European theater, this is an important look into wartime Japan and its expansion--early 20th-century history that lead to Japan's role in World War II is superficial <li><I>The bomb</I>: another widely shown documentary of the Manhattan Project, the Enola Gay, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki</ul><p> <I>The World at War</I> will remain the definitive visual history of World War II, analogous to Gibbon's <I>Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire</I>. No serious historian should be missing <I>The World at War</I> in a collection, and no student should leave school without having seen at least some of its salient episodes. Rarely is film so essential. <I>--Erik J. Macki</I>
Viewer Reviews
I live in the USA now but spent the first 35 years of my life in the UK. I recall as a youngster this series airing on ITV on a Sunday morning. It is one of those memories engrained in my memory about what Sundays were all about.
Mom doing the laundry on a cold winters morning with the doors open and a freezing kitchen (for that is where most peoples washing machines are in Britain), the shouting and appealing of several pub soccer games being played out on the football fields behind our home, the smell of the Sunday joint slowly cooking on in the over, Jimmy Savile on BBC Radio 1 broadcasting his weekly Savile's Travels show , and the documentary series The World at War airing on the living room TV. As you can imagine, a series needed to pack a strong punch to be a part of someone's childhood memories and that is just what this series did.
From the script to the archive footage to the first class narration of Laurence Olivier, there is simply nothing to fault this show. Though some of the titling looks a little amateurish by modern standards, this only increases the feeling that you are taking part in a little piece of broadcasting history as you watch it.
The Second World War was the most important part of our history and helped define the world as it is now. There is no better way to study the events of 1939-1945 than to sit back and watch this documentary series. And if you want your children to have an unbiased and detailed education of the `last great war', I recommend you purchase this video set immediately.
I was something special to me to be able to sit and watch this series all over again and appreciate the horror sacrifice our forebears lived through and made in order for us to enjoy the freedoms we all take for granted today.
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The World at War (30th Anniversary Edition)
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