National Parks: America's Best Idea -- The new Ken Burns miniseries

Is anyone else looking forward to this one? I kind of tired of Burns and his style a while ago, but PBS is one of the few stations I get in HD and I think it's going to be cool to see all the High Def nature footage.

At my job, we've been handing out promotional little pieces of paper for this film. The paper? IMPRINTED WITH SEEDS! Have you ever heard of anything so crazy? Soak it in water and grow wild flowers. That really caught my attention


Starts Sunday at 7 or 8 PM or so.

, unfortunately this is not turning out to be the program I'd hoped it would be. I think I'm going to change the channel in a few minutes. Started out strong but is really going down hill fast. I wanted to see HD nature footage of our National Parks. But now it seems to be entirely HD footage of.... blurry old 19th century photographs. Why show those when the whole point is that the land has been preserved so that it should look just the same today as it did back then? Watching a waterfall in HD is alot more fun that staring at a blurry black and white photo of one.


Oh well,this one had potential.

EDIT: Well I ended up watching all the way through. It was so pretentious though. the narrator says something like "The park included a valley John Muir described as the most beautiful he'd ever seen", and then instead of showing us a HD shot of the park, so, you know, we could see what John was talking about, he shows us a blurry black and white post card taken at the time. Why do that? When Muir was talking about it being so beautiful, that wasn't based on his reaction to looking at a post card.

Just a pointless "Look at how historical this all is!" style rather than trying to connect with the audience in a meaningful emotional way.

I love the parks too. I just wish the show was less black and white photo heavy. Night 2 was better, but only barely.

I mean, do not get me wrong, I find the info fascinating. Unfortunately as film I'd have to say it is utterly dull. The effect of watching it is like listening to a book on tape about the Parks, while a slide show plays on your TV.

I was hoping this would be a bit more "Planet Earth: National Parks Edition"

Ok, just to quickly update my thoughts:

I ended up liking it alot more than I did at first. Watched the first four episodes, and I feel they really picked up in quality.

With that said, I felt that some of what they chose to focus on was a little dull, and some of the history was rushed or unexplained.

Over all though, I do agree with the films premise: The National Parks are an amazing idea, and it's even more amazing they exist at all. Looking at our current health care "debate", it's astounding that we ever set aside millions of square miles for non commercial purposes. As a big fan of nature and endangered animals (my avatar is an extinct animal), I'm glad the parks exist.