The Civil War (1990)
Film:
DVD:

Directed by Ken Burns
Written by Ken Burns, Ric Burns, Geoffrey C. Ward
Narrated by David McCullough

Features:

• Behind the Scenes: The Civil War Reconstruction
  
• Additional interviews with Ken Burns, Shelby Foote, George Will, Stanley Crouch, and musicians Jay Ungar & Molly Mason
  
• Ken Burns: Making History
  
• A Conversation with Ken Burns
  
• Running audio commentary for the first episode by Ken Burns
  
• Battlefield Maps
  
• Civil War Challenge - 1861 Trivia Game
  
• Biographies of key figures from the series
  

Anamorphic: N/A; appears in its original 1.33:1 format.

My Advice: Own it.

Eleven hours in length and spanning the entirety of its titular subject, The Civil War was a tremendous undertaking for the people who created it and a tremendous undertaking to sit down and watch. Aired on PBS back in 1990 to much acclaim, it now returns to the fore with a PBS DVD Gold edition that takes up five discs. Remastered and redone, both in audio and video, it's even more impressive than it was when it first hit television. Using mostly still images and narration--taken from documents and letters of the day and read by a host of recognizable voices, from Sam Waterston to Studs Terkel--along with a peppering of insight from historians, it manages to both inform and engage on an emotional level like few things of such girth can.

Everything about the film grabs the viewer and does not relent. It's such a subtle matter of engaging the audience, though, that it's smooth--and it's very easy to find that you've lost a few hours in a timesuck. Once you start watching the thing, you want to play it through to the end. Helping this is a wonderful musical score and very capable narration from David McCullough.

Just on its own, the series would be worth owning. This is made evident by one of the most interesting of the special features--the Reconstruction featurette. There's nothing quite like a split screen to show you just how cool recent film technology is, not to mention the DVD format. I myself did not see the series when it originally aired, so it's nice that the comparison is there to make me appreciate what I missed. The information on how they restored the film and amped up the audio is very nice as well.

Also nicely done are the interviews with Burns, Shelby Foote and others. They provide some nice insight twelve years after the initial splash of the series. Also telling are the comments made by those they spoke with--I was interested to see that Foote, like me, thought that too much emphasis had been placed on slavery as the key point of the war. All of the information provided here is very helpful--and there's a ton of it.

There's also the commentary by Burns on the first episode to contend with as well as the two Burns featurettes which appear on other PBS Burns DVDs. But regardless, there is a lot of extra bang for your buck.

The Civil War is really an astounding documentary feat and the DVD set that PBS has put out is fortunately quite worthy. The series and set are so good that I'd really recommend that everyone own a copy, but given the fact it's not cheap--and the fact that so many Americans are unforunately of the "Ick! History!" school of thought--you should for pity's sake at least rent the thing. You might learn something. And it won't kill you.