A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 2015 PBS Home Video This review focuses exclusively on the techie features of the 25th Anniversary Edition. For a review of Ken Burns' documentary, please see: 'The Civil War: A Film by Ken Burns - DVD Review.' On October 13, 2015, PBS Distribution and American Documentaries, Inc. released “The Civil War: A Ken Burns Film – 25 th Anniversary Edition,” a six-Blu-ray disc (BD) set that presents the widely-acclaimed 1990 series on high definition video for the first time. To commemorate both the series’ Silver Anniversary and the 150 th commemoration of the Civil War’s bittersweet end, Burns’ Florentine Films and PBS digitally remastered the series’ nine episodes and its assorted extra features from standard definition (SD) to the state-of-the-art Ultra-High Definition 4K format. This remastering project was carried out as a joint effort between Florentine Films and the George Eastman House, the repository where “The Civil War’s” original 16 mm negative

Pros:  Fine (if sometimes inaccurate) script, great narrator, and always-interesting presentation "We have felt the incommunicable experience of war. We felt - we still feel - the passion of life to its top. In our youths our hearts were touched with fire."   - Oliver Wendell Holmes. On September 23, 1990, just as units of the XVIII Airborne Corps were taking up defensive positions in the desert kingdom of Saudi Arabia as part of Operation Desert Shield in the wake of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the Public Broadcasting Service aired "The Cause," the first of nine episodes of director Ken Burns’  The Civil War . It was an odd juxtaposition - as an almost unbelieving nation was sending the vanguard of what eventually became a 350,000-troop force to war against Saddam Hussein, millions of television viewers were watching what was to become the defining documentary about America’s bloodiest conflict. Although Burns wasn’t an unknown filmmaker

After the cancellation by ABC of his ambitious and expensive television series,  The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles,  executive producer George Lucas tried several methods to save the show and give viewers - especially pre-teen kids and young adults - its trademark mix of education and entertainment. For instance, after ABC axed  Young Indy  from its lineup (citing the show's lavish budgets as its primary reason), Lucasfilm Limited produced four made-for-TV movies which aired on cable's Family Channel over a two-year period (1994-1996).  Another life-saving measure was the hiring of film editor T.M. Christopher, who not only had worked with Lucas as an editor on the Classic  Star Wars  Trilogy, but also with Milos Forman in cutting 1984's  Amadeus. Christopher (who also was involved in the 1997 updating of the original  Star Wars  films into their still controversial Special Edition versions)  was assigned to  re-edit 44 episodes of  The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles  and

After the cancellation by ABC of his ambitious and expensive television series,  The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles,  executive producer George Lucas tried several methods to save the show and give viewers - especially pre-teen kids and young adults - its trademark mix of education and entertainment. For instance, after ABC axed  Young Indy  from its lineup (citing the show's lavish budgets as its primary reason), Lucasfilm Limited produced four made-for-TV movies which aired on cable's Family Channel over a two-year period (1994-1996).   Another life-saving measure was the hiring of film editor T.M. Christopher, who not only had worked with Lucas as an editor on the Classic  Star Wars  Trilogy, but also with Milos Forman in cutting 1984's  Amadeus. Christopher was tasked with re-editing 44 episodes of  The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles  and fashioning 22 "movies" out of them by marrying chronologically-close stories together into a (hopefully) seamless na