Sorry but I have to ventilate this!

Just saw a Documentary from the History Channel called "Barbarians - the Huns".

I could almost stand the "On the bloodstained lands of Ancient Europe a new tidalwave of violence was brought forward bla bla bla yada yada yada" narrative of the dokumentary! The thing that realy annyed me was the kit the extras had!

The Huns = fur, more fur and then a little fur ontop of the fur to ephazise that they had... fur. Looked like they was hired directly on the set of Conan the Barbarian! The swords was some chunks of metal seemingly found at the local scrapyard and vagule shaped in a swordlike manner. Belts and straps made out of hempstrings. To summerize, not even the most winesoaked-17 year old-firsttime-larper would get away with that kit.

The Romans= Plastic scutums vaugly in the correct shape but clearly made out of plastic and in a shade of sunbleached lollypop red. Nitted hemata. And all if the romans had had plastic in a kind of 50 to 150 AD design.

Nice formations af ten romans before the battlescene but then scattred fighting in a way that makes a soccergame more intensive and crowded. Handbagging and strikes at plastic shields, soundtracked by somebody hitting a fork to a pot.

The dates and campaines and stuff was probally correct but that I missed out of shear anger at the view tis gave the audience. It´s like doing a dokumentary on the Battle of El Alamein with the brittish troops in redcoats and the German soldiers in Landsknecht kit.

Sorry again for the rambling! But isn´t this sad. I hope I did not offend somebody by this.

Martin

Wow.
I haven't seen that episode, but it sounds pretty bad.

Personally, I've always noticed that the "swordfights" in documentaries tend to fall into two categories:
1)Both persons stand apart and swing their weapons at eachother so that the opponent's sword is the only thing they could possibly hit besides air,
2) the camera shot is behind the "victim" as the "victor" powerfully swings his sword, obviously missing. The "victim" then flings up his arms and throws himself to the ground.

Well most of documents I've seen were poor...and I understand your anger...It reminds me when I saw a test preparing for the High School Diploma examinations
of history. There were two warriors on the picture.And the task was to show which one of them is from X cent and which from XIII cent. The problem was that none of them were from XIII cent.The X cent warrior looked quite good to me(Its not my period of interest) but the second one was from the second half of XV century-full plate milanese italian style armour,asimetrical,with armet,lance and....infantry pavise!What a wonderfull set! And then a question-basing on the picture describe the changes in the military strategy from X-XIII century.Very funny.Of course 99%of students won't see that terrible mistakes..but what about that 1%?Should they write incorrectly or risk lost of points during educating 'specialists' from the commission?