Drunk History and Great and Telling Tales Review
Drunk History features everyday people getting drunk and then telling their versions of such stories as Aaron Burr’s duel with Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin discovering electricity. The footage of the intoxicated narrator is then mixed with actual re-enactments that feature such celebrities as Michael Cera from Arrested Development, Jack Black and Danny McBride from HBO’s Eastbound & Down.
“I was with a good pal, Jake Johnson,” creator Derek Waters told Tubefilter in October 2008 of how Drunk History came to be. “It was a good night of drinking and Jake was telling me about Otis Redding. I love Otis and know his music very well, but Jake was telling me that Otis knew he was gonna die on that plane right before he got on. I didn’t really believe the story, and kept picturing him next to Jake saying, ‘Shut the fuck up.’ I wanted to shoot that, and have Otis Redding stuck having to do everything Jake said he did.”
Waters in turn took that idea and decided to apply it to history. The narrators are indeed drunk while they film—the episodes begin along the lines of “On August 6, 2007, Mark Gagliardi drank a bottle of Scotch and then discussed a famous historical event”—and the actors in the re-enactments are forced to follow the drunken storyline while also lip-synching the words spoken by the narrators. Although many of the historical presentations are more-or-less as they indeed happened, others are either embellished or outright erroneous.
“This isn’t historically accurate, but it’s what I think happened,” a vodka and cranberry doused Eric Falconer explains in one episode. “I don’t believe that Ben Franklin would be reckless enough to throw a kite out into a lightning storm. I think he would have his kid who he didn’t give a shit about because he was born from a prostitute, I think he would have him go out in the lightning storm with him. And I think William was the one who flew the kite in a lightning storm.”
Great and Telling Tales, meanwhile, is the polar opposite of Derek Waters’ creation. A former historian, the sixty-plus-year-old Timothy Dickinson comes across as your disheveled grandfather who has a penchant for storytelling. A lifetime of reading and curiosity has given him an encyclopedia-like memory when it comes to historical events—both the major and the trivial—which he recites in a simplistic fashion that is filled with charm and wonder.
“I first heard of Timothy Dickinson through his lifelong friend Matt Stinchcomb,” the producer of the webseries writes on the History Channel website. “Matt had longed imagined a television show hosted by Timothy, and felt History to be the obvious home for it. After wrestling with knotty issues such as Timothy’s penchant for sitting down all the time as well as his tendency to spend an hour telling a single story, Matt and I decided that the best thing was for Timothy to do what he does best, then edit him down a bit and illustrate the fevered results with the splendid animation of Benjamin Goldman.”
The resulting project is the highly entertaining Great and Telling Tales with Timothy Dickinson, a series of one-minute episodes that feature Dickinson pontificating on a number of historical event that range from the Kennedy/Nixon Debates to President Jimmy Carter being attacked by a “killer rabbit” in 1979. “People or President of the United States are usually pretty formidable,” Dickinson recites in the latter episode. “And while we will not say that Mr. Jimmy Carter is not, the Commander-In-Chief drew a certain unwelcome attention when he claimed (that) out fishing one day to have had a rabbit swimming directly at him, like the Loch Ness monster.”
Dickinson’s folksy charm is coupled with dramatic music and an emphatic introduction—“We call these great and telling tales because they are”—while Benjamin Goldman’s animation compliments the storytelling as well as adds to its eccentric nature. In “Jimmy Carter vs. ‘Killer Rabbit,’” for instance, the animation depicts a fanged and rabid rabbit literally attacking the President, forcing the two over the side of Carter’s fishing boat and into the lake, teeth clenched on his arm with blood spewing everywhere. In “Rasputin,” meanwhile, the early Twentieth Century Russian is illustrated with a big nose and covered with body hair, and the retelling of his death is equally bloody and graphic.
Drunk History and Great and Telling Tales with Timothy Dickinson are imaginative narratives that take an old discipline and make it fresh again. History may have seemed boring in high school, but thanks to the likes of Derek Waters and Timothy Dickinson, it has become both entertaining and amusing during this era of online video production.
Anthony Letizia (February 22, 2010)
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