The Pacific
We watched the first episode of The Pacific on HBO. It was great, as I expected. Except that I am familiar with the history, which makes the story somewhat less mysterious since I already know from the first episode who is going to die.
This doesn’t make the series any less interesting to me. But the element of suspense that Band of Brothers had for me, where I had heard of a few of the battles and locations, but had never heard of the characters, is not the same.
I worked at the Naval Hospital at Camp Pendleton in the 90s. So I absorbed some historical information without actually intending to do so. This is not to say that I didn’t find military history interesting at the time. I was just working and going to school and didn’t really have time to pay it a whole lot of attention. I don’t think I had cable; because I didn’t have time to watch tv.
In any event, I managed to learn who Basilone, Leckie and Sledge are. Though given my location at the time, it probably would have been hard not to learn those names. That and the fact that I am a warehouse of useless information, that occasionally turns out to be useful.
And so continues my obsession with made for HBO series. I used to rent all the HBO series. Then we got them on Netflix. And now we have HBO with Comcast, free. Free from Comcast of course, means that they’ll be charging us for it any minute.
I am jealous! I was looking into ordering HBO, thinking it would be like, $5.99/month or so. Nope, 14.99. I’m just going to have to wait and get it on DVD from Netflix.
We own the entire Band of Brothers collection. We may buy this one eventually too.