joe_538

A general summary of his life and career, details a lot of his fans are already familiar with. It gets strange at Chato's Land when opinions start being thrown in, the narrator calling Charles Bronson a hypocrite for not wanting to appear onscreen with a nude woman when he wore a loincloth for most of the movie. They're not the same thing. Lamenting that some of the muggers in Death Wish were black (some muggers are), calling Bronson a poster boy for "the gun lobby" and immediately cutting to a clip of Donald Trump. It becomes unfocused for a few minutes and is undeniably a product of the time it was produced; false equivalencies, identity politics, and "orange man bad." It would have been nice if they could have included clips from Raid on Entebbe, Act of Vengeance, and Yes Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus to highlight some of the departures from his action vehicles.

I finally gave up on the series after watching the first few minutes of this episode. It seemed like a chore for the past few weeks, and the claim that everything from the Civil Rights movement to Watergate wouldn't have occurred without rock and roll (which, in turn wouldn't exist without Robert Johnson) was too silly, short-sighted, and pretentious to continue with. Johnson had one minor hit in his lifetime with Terraplane Blues, and was virtually unknown to black blues fans until the 1961 release of a compilation album. You can't influence people if they've never heard your music. As music historian Elijah Wald plainly put it, "Very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note."

The Civil Rights movement wasn't dependent on a style of music, (even then, gospel is the one most associate with it) nor did R&R have anything to do with Watergate or an Asian civil war. The series was just trying to promote another falsehood (while undeniably accomplished, Bass Reeves wasn't the inspiration for The Lone Ranger, either). There had been well-founded complaints on the now-defunct message boards about the lack of historical accuracy, inconsistencies in the show's rules of time travel, and shoehorned agendas, but the series had promise, so I kept giving it another try.

I've finally had enough.