Home Theater & Sound -- Coney Island

Coney
Island

July 2006

Format: DVD

(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment	Picture Quality
Packaged Extras	Sound Quality

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Narrated by: Philip Bosco Directed by: Ric Burns	Original Broadcast Date: 1991 DVD Release: 2006 Released by: PBS Home Video Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo Fullscreen

Coney Island was named for the wild rabbits that inhabited the five-mile-long stretch of sand and sea below Brooklyn. What this Ric Burns movie shows is that Coney Island had a rabbit-like ability to adapt, which caused its patrons to multiply.

Another American Institution

Route 66: The Ultimate DVD Collection (***) gathers three separate features into a single package. Hosted by author and Route 66 authority Michael Wallis, the three DVDs cover America's highway from end to end -- Chicago to the Pacific Ocean -- and show many of 66's best-known landmarks. The first DVD was shot in 1994 and the last in 2000, Route 66's 75th anniversary, so we see what has been fixed up and torn down in the interim. You'll be happy to discover that the Blue Whale, the fixture of a Catoosa, Oklahoma, swimming hole, which looks so shabby in the first DVD, receives some spiffing up, while Coral Court, the gleaming art deco motel in St. Louis, was torn down to make way for condominiums. Oddly missing is Delgadillo's Snow Cap in Seligman, Arizona, a kitschy drive-in where food has been served with a side order of silliness for decades. The Interstate may have bypassed Route 66 long ago, but traveling "the mother road" has become a hobby for many and the impetus for preservation societies in every state through which it passes. These DVDs romanticize the past as much as revel in the present -- capturing the mixture of nostalgia and living in the moment that Route 66 travelers feel today.

...Marc Mickelson
marc@hometheatersound.com

"The poor man's Riviera" survived fires and wars, becoming the place where New Yorkers went to "encounter the unencounterable." On busy summer weekends, it hosted a million people a day. It is where the roller coaster and the hot dog were born. A natural playground because of its confluence of water and sand -- and the hoards who surrounded it -- Coney Island had a complex identity. It straddled the staid Victorian and bustling industrial ages. Luna Park, one of its three large parks, boasted of 250,000 lights in the first decade of the 20th century; Dreamland had a million before it burned down in 1910. Coney Island was called both "Sodom by the Sea," because of the corruption that created it and the crime that flourished around its attractions, and "Electric Eden," because it marked the beginning of the modern amusement industry.

Ric Burns is the brother of Ken Burns, the documentary filmmaker whose cinematic language has influenced the way historical information is presented, and he has made a movie no less significant than his brother's many great films, some of which he co-produced. It mixes photographs, film footage, dramatic narration, and commentary from experts in a way that both informs and entertains. The video image is infested with a soft graininess; however, because so much of the film consists of historical materials, many of which are of poor quality, it is not really an issue. There are no extra features on the DVD -- no photographs of sailors and their girls strolling along Surf Avenue, no interviews with sideshow barkers or geeks, no Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading from A Coney Island of the Mind. A pity.

Oh, to visit Coney Island in 1905, that incandescent dream, and fall in love with its unreality. This documentary arouses such desire.

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