12 Days of Dappered: Day 11 – A Ken Burns Film

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It’ll be here before you know it.  So if you’re in need of a few ideas on what to give (or in some cases, what to put on your own list) this year, this is the place to be for the next couple weeks.  Our annual 12 days of Dappered covers one item each week-day between now and December 20th.  That’ll leave some time for shipping if you’re the last minute type.  All will be reasonably affordable.  See the growing archive here.

A Ken Burns Documentary can speak to adults like The Princess Bride spoke to Fred Savage.  Only instead of Columbo, it’s the masterful talents of Ken Burns that tells the story.  His ability to excel with the pictures + narration + music + interviews formula is amazingly impressive in our age of 3D/HD/IMAX.  He’s made a documentary for almost any type on your list:

The Outdoorsman:  The National Parks: America’s Best Idea – $57.99 and Lewis & Clark – $19.99
The Sports Fan:  Baseball – $71.49 and Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson – $22.99
The Musician:  Jazz – $71.49
The Historian: The War – $43.99  and The Civil War – $69.99
The Reader: Mark Twain – $14.99
The Drinker: Prohibition – $29.99

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For his latest, Prohibition, those opening notes are just a small sample of how Ken Burns and Lynn Novick nail every last little detail in their films.  Throw in voices from the likes of Samuel L. Jackson, Tom Hanks, Oliver Platt as Al Capone and Sam Watterson as the voice of newspaper articles, and Prohibition will go head to head with most Hollywood movies when it comes to pure entertainment.  The fact that it’s a documentary is almost bizarre.  A Ken Burns film is nothing like those dusty film strips you were shown in middle school.

Affordable too.  $30 gets you all six hours.  Of course his other films can get spendy, but when you consider Baseball is 18.5 hours long… the price makes sense.