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This TV-on-DVD box set allows us to return to the scenes of the crimes of some of history's most notorious battles to gain new insights....
Acorn Media / 432 Minutes / 2003-2006 / Unrated / Street Date: February 14, 2012
The crux of Battlefield Detectives lies in the idea that history and myth have more in common than history and fact-checking. Aiming to not only revert to textual bases of various wartime scenarios but a recreation and analysis of particular events themselves, Battlefield Detectives attempts to separate truth from fiction by asking questions both big and small about various historical occurrences to get to the nuts and bolts of their realities.
Whether it's the truth behind Waterloo or figuring out just how screwed Custer was at his last stand, Battlefield Detectives doesn't recreate these violent matchups to celebrate their place within the hallowed halls of dusty textbooks: Like other modern docu-reality fare, Battlefield Detectives has a desire to perhaps uncover heretofore unrecognized information about its subject matter - by dressing people up in ridiculous clothes and going back to 3D models of the things more often than necessary, the show's producers want to shed light on these events in new ways.
Yet as potentially exciting as this setup might seem, it's unfortunate just how often Battlefield Detectives descends into silliness. For a show that has such an esteemed and scholarly shape, the show never rests on these laurels: The science and history presented here are proven about as thoroughly as they are on Ghost Hunters. It's fun to grasp onto wild and nutty concepts and gauge them side-by-side with the information we've heard a million times from high school history teachers, but as diverting as this show can get, it ends up being nowhere near as profound or factually reliable as we deserve.
Episodes included: Who Got Lucky at Hastings?, Agincourt's Dark Secrets, What Sank the Armada?, Trafalgar's Fatal Flaw, Massacre at Waterloo, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Custer's Last Stand, The Gallipoli Disaster, and Vietnam's Bloody Secret.