Omari's Blog

Playing now on my MythTV is Modern Marvels, the wonderful documentary series on cable television.

This particular episode is titled simply Camouflauge. My favorite thing about Modern Marvels is how the program extracts over forty minutes of interesting material from seemingly minor topics such as camouflage, or carbon, or insulation. I had no idea that entire factory complexes were camouflaged during World War II, or that water filters are made of activated carbon.

Of course, putting together all these programs can't be easy. The producers do an exceptional job at taking the material and presenting it in an engaging way. There's always a history segment, during which you can learn about the way ancient cultures did (or did not!) use camouflage. Interviews are also abundant, during which the viewer learns from the experts. The program also makes great use of computer graphics to illustrate industrial processes. There are little touches that work well too, such as the frequent use of short on-screen titles to show hard-to-pronounce words or to give little snippets of supplemental information. They make the program more informative without making the narrator's script too dense.

All this is wrapped together in a well-edited package that moves along very quickly, complete with background music to add an appropriate flavor (staccato drums during segments about World War I camouflage, for instance) and perfect segues. A competing cable network has a program called How Stuff Works that is an obvious Modern Marvels knockoff, but it just isn't produced with the same panache.

Each Modern Marvels episode always concludes with a tidy couple of sentences--maybe something like "on subjects ranging from the momentous to the seemingly arcane, Modern Marvels always entertains and informs."

posted at: 18:21 | path: / | permanent link to this entry