The greatest thing that the Discovery Channel ever did for us, and they’ve done a lot of truly awesome stuff (just ask any geek if you don’t believe me), is the creation of the “Boom-de-yada” song.  And that will play before the start of Hunting the Lost Symbol, which the folks at Discovery (thanks to the folks at Gaiam) sent me a copy to review, but Boom-de-yada is only a prelude to the sheer pile of awesome that Hunting the Lost Symbol will push in our collective direction.

Hunting the Lost Symbol takes the new Dan Brown book, The Lost Symbol, and breaks it down, comparing and contrasting the pages of the book with reality, and discovering that a shockingly large amount of it is correct.  But naturally, as is to be expected with any work of fiction, large parts of it are not historically accurate.  Hunting the Lost Symbol will tell you just which is which.

This is a hugely interesting production, and gives you plenty of interviews, voice-overs and historical re-enactments in that grand Discovery Channel style, that detail for you a huge amount of information that you probably never knew–and in some cases like the Hand of Mysteries–never really wanted to know.

It’s riveting, in that normal Discovery Channel way, too.  There’s so much to it–not just things like the Masons, but the design of Washington D.C., the design of the Capitol Building, ECHELON–all sorts of crazy stuff is literally jam-packed into this presentation.  And, as if that weren’t already plenty, you’ll also get a selection of bonus features on this disc that will give you even more bizarre information.

Oh, and just for a further bonus?  You do NOT need to have previously read The Lost Symbol in order to get plenty out of Hunting the Lost Symbol.  It will help, no mistake–it’ll make several references to the book–but at the end of the day, you’ll get plenty enough out of it without reading the book.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, in turn, gives Hunting The Lost Symbol an eight out of ten for being entertaining enough, but for packing a whole bunch of information and a careful comparison between a popular bit of fiction and the reality it correlates to.