User Reviews

I happened to catch this show, oddly enough, in the emergency room of our local hospital where I was waiting for the outcome of a family emergency. As we waited we watched Istanbul unfold before us. Host Eric Geller is quite good at his job. His enthusiasm for history and discovering what lies under the modern city is very contagious. And, his disappointment at not being able to go further into the ruins of the Hippodrome made me feel disappointed, too.

The only off note is that the meetings with various city officials and archeologists seemed a bit contrived, as I suppose they were. No one is going to let a camera crew go somewhere and get hurt and show it on TV, at least in a program of this sort.

On the whole, Mr. Geller made me want to go off to Istanbul and find the sites he went to and talk to the people who live in the houses and work in the shops, especially the rug market over the cistern.

Although it misses so many historical monuments in Istanbul, I think it is one of the best documentaries made for Istanbul. It was broadcasted more than a decade ago, but, I still have not seen an enjoyable and informative Istanbul documentary as much as this one. Hope, there can be more informative ones in the future like this one.

Ancient Marvels: Cities of the Underworld

What a cool name and a great concept! I, for one loved the history and story telling aspects of this production. However, as a professional composer, the music struck me immediately as being low quality and confused.

A little further investigation reveals that there wasn't anyone credited for the music of this production. Naturally, I would assume that the show was powered by library music. If that was indeed the case, then I wonder why better quality library music wasn't selected?

The dungeons and underworld are supposed to be creepy and atmospheric. Instead, we were served up an anachronistic smattering of plasticized late 90's flavors of drum and bass peppered with synthetic orchestral gladiator tracks. Stylistically, none of this music was appropriate and it certainly won't age any better for future airings of this program.

There were cultural musical missteps as well. For instance, a scene from Vlad's the Impaler's episode featured a Chinese temple flute tune cued just outside of his castle. Were we supposed to accept this music as being Romanian? Even if someone doesn't understand the subtle differences between Romania and China, the tune did absolutely nothing to push the scene forward.

Bottom line; this was an international and heavily promoted broadcast that should have afforded better production value in music. This is especially the case as the exotic environments that this production featured would have been far better placed into an emotional context through music. Somehow, drum and bass just didn't match up well with "The Empire of the Dead" and six million skeletons. History Channel, I plead with you to get a better grip on the quality of your music. As music is a literal language, your ratings will improve with better musical communications to your audience. Or to put it simply, your shows will become more effective.

-Jeremy Soule Composer 2003 BAFTA winner

The footage and locations in this show are great, but I wish they'd moved a bit of their CGI budget over to the "Host" line item. Eric Geller sure is enthusiastic, but everything appealing about him stops there.It is a full hour of this man walking into dark places and saying "Wow! Gosh! It's like we're right back there! It's all underground! Wow!"

Hosts should either be knowledgeable about their topic or be able to bring out the best in the experts who accompany them. In this show, however, an expert will say something about a site, Geller will pause, sometimes repeat something the expert just said, and then add an exclamation:

Expert: "So this would have been an ordinary shop selling wine, and this is the door, so people would have entered right here."

-pause-

Geller: "So people would have entered! Right here! Wow!"

Even the experts looked like they wanted out after a while.

Too bad too, it could have been good.