Drunk
History and 'Great and Telling Tales' Webseries Review
While history is often remembered as a boring subject
from high school, the popularity of the discipline is remarkably immense.
Historical biographies often top the New York Times’
best-seller list, while History Channel documentaries attract large
amounts of viewers. It should be no surprise then that a number of historical
webseries have sprung up on the Internet. In keeping with the inventive
nature of the medium, however, at least two World Wide Web endeavors—Drunk
History and Great
and Telling Tales with Timothy Dickinson—have
found new and entertaining ways of recalling historical events.
Drunk
History—which is showcased on the video website Funny or
Die—features everyday people getting drunk and then telling their
versions of such stories as Aaron Burr’s duel with Alexander Hamilton
and Benjamin Franklin discovering electricity. The footage of the intoxicated
narrator is then mixed with actual re-enactments that feature such celebrities
as Michael Cera from Arrested Development, Jack Black and Danny
McBride from HBO’s Eastbound & Down.
“I
was with a good pal, Jake Johnson,” creator Derek Waters told
Tubefilter
in October 2008 of how Drunk History came to be. “It
was a good night of drinking and Jake was telling me about Otis Redding.
I love Otis and know his music very well, but Jake was telling me that
Otis knew he was gonna die on that plane right before he got on. I didn’t
really believe the story, and kept picturing him next to Jake, saying
‘shut the f**k up.’ I wanted to shoot that, and have Otis
Redding stuck having to do everything Jake said he did.”
Waters
in turn took that idea and decided to apply it to history. The narrators
are indeed drunk while they film—the episodes begin along the
lines of “On August 6, 2007, Mark Gagliardi drank a bottle of
Scotch and then discussed a famous historical event”—and
the actors in the re-enactments are forced to follow the drunken storyline
while also lip-synching the words spoken by the narrators. Although
many of the historical presentations are more-or-less as they indeed
happened, others are either embellished or outright erroneous.
“This
isn’t historically accurate, but it’s what I think happened,”
a vodka and cranberry doused Eric Falconer explains in one episode.
“I don’t believe that Ben Franklin would be reckless enough
to throw a kite out into a lightning storm. I think he would have his
kid who he didn’t give a s**t about because he was born from a
prostitute… I think he would have him go out in the lightning
storm with him, and I think William was the one who flew the kite in
a lightning storm.”
Great
and Telling Tales, meanwhile, is the polar opposite of Derek Waters’
creation. A former historian, the sixty-plus-year-old Timothy Dickinson
comes across as your disheveled grandfather who has a penchant for storytelling.
A lifetime of reading and curiosity has given him an encyclopedia-like
memory when it comes to historical events—both the major and the
trivial—which he recites in a simplistic fashion that is filled
with charm and wonder.
“I
first heard of Timothy Dickinson through his lifelong friend Matt Stinchcomb,”
the producer of the webseries writes on the History Channel website.
“Matt had longed imagined a television show hosted by Timothy,
and felt History to be the obvious home for it. After wrestling with
knotty issues such as Timothy’s penchant for sitting down all
the time as well as his tendency to spend an hour telling a single story,
Matt and I decided that the best thing was for Timothy to do what he
does best, then edit him down a bit and illustrate the fevered results
with the splendid animation of Benjamin Goldman.”
The resulting
project is the highly entertaining Great and Telling Tales with
Timothy Dickinson, a series of one-minute episodes that feature
Dickinson pontificating on a number of historical event that range from
the Kennedy/Nixon Debates to President Jimmy Carter being attacked by
a “killer rabbit” in 1979. “People or President of
the United States are usually pretty formidable,” Dickinson recites
in the latter episode. “And while we will not say that Mr. Jimmy
Carter is not, the Commander-In-Chief drew a certain unwelcome attention
when he claimed (that) out fishing one day to have had a rabbit swimming
directly at him, like the Loch Ness monster.”
Dickinson’s
folksy charm is coupled with dramatic music and an emphatic introduction—“We
call these great and telling tales because they are”—while
Benjamin Goldman’s animation compliments the storytelling as well
as adds to its eccentric nature. In “Jimmy Carter vs. ‘Killer
Rabbit,’” for instance, the animation depicts a fanged and
rabid rabbit literally attacking the president, forcing the two over
the side of Carter’s fishing boat and into the lake, teeth clenched
on his arm with blood spewing everywhere. In “Rasputin,”
meanwhile, the early Twentieth Century Russian is drawn with a big nose
and covered with hair, and the retelling of his death is equally bloody
and graphic.
Drunk
History and Great and Telling Tales with Timothy Dickinson
are imaginative narratives that take an old discipline and make it fresh
again. History may have seemed boring in high school, but thanks to
the likes of Derek Waters and Timothy Dickinson, it has become both
entertaining and amusing during this era of online video production.
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