And you can even set a non-TiVo brand Digital Video Recorder or even a VCR. Heck, if you're really primeval, you can just watch live…
The PBS series American Experience has produced a lengthy look at the life of Walt Disney and it airs in two parts beginning Monday night in most areas. Part One is Monday, Part Two is Tuesday.
I've only seen pieces but a few folks who've viewed the whole thing tell me it's kind of shallow and that it misses a lot of important details — as might be expected in a documentary about Disney that runs under around nine hours. One friend complained it perpetuates the "Walt did everything" myth.
One of the main problems with shows like this is often that they're made at least twenty years too late. The very first thing in this one is a brief snippet of a recent interview with Floyd Norman and this is followed by a brief recent comment by Richard Sherman. That's almost to be expected as Walt died almost a half-century ago…which yields a certain shortage of people who worked closely with him and are still around to be interviewed. The project still may be an enlightening endeavor but if and when they get into what kind of man Walt Disney was, my skepticism will go up with each analysis by someone who never met him.
As an intro to the show, Neal Gabler has a piece in The New York Times and Mr. Gabler was apparently involved a lot or consulted or was interviewed for American Experience. I thought his long biography of Disney some years back, though filled with useful historical information, tried a bit too hard to view him as a dark, troubled individual.
Having never gotten any closer to Walt than watching him introduce Davy Crockett episodes, I can't say that portrait was wrong but I'm also not sure there's enough evidence around to say that it was correct. Let's see what this take on Mr. Disney has to say.
Also debuting the same night on PBS is a new episode of the biographical series, In Their Own Words, this one about Jim Henson. This appears to be creative scheduling intended to make a statement or draw a parallel or something. I have my TiVo set for it, as well.