Ken Burns' latest film that will surely be shown in high schools and colleges across our great country is called The National Parks: America's Best Idea. Way to rid the Grand Canyon and Old Faithful of all their magic by actually making us learn something about them.
America's Best Idea will air in September, and cost Burns $15 million to produce, more than any of his previous mega-docs, The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, or The War, all of which, we have to admit, were great, so long as we had our thinking caps on. Watching a Ken Burns documentary without putting on your thinking cap first is like watching a 3-D movie without your 3-D glasses. But a 12-hour, six-part, highly educational series about parks? Don't you go to the park when you're done with your homework? We're only half-kidding - there's a Parks-Department run show on New York local TV called It's My Park, and it is deadly boring. Of course, this is Ken Burns running the show, not the NYC Department Of Parks And Recreation. And the parks he's talking about are some of the most beautiful places on Earth.
Here's Burns talking about the new project, and the importance of our National Parks:
"Europe had the cathedrals. What did we have?" Burns asks during a
conversation near Yellowstone's Mammoth Hot Springs, where lava-heated
water bubbles into green, blue and orange mineral pools stacked like a
towering wedding cake.
"These are our temples. You can feel the ecstatic expansiveness Yellowstone provides. ... This is still the memory of creation."
All right, Ken, you got us. We may even take notes.
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Ken Burns Will Have Another Baseball Documentary, Covering Everything That's Happened Since 1994
