Ah yes, the History Channel. As much as I talk up the Discovery Channel, it’s easy to forget about the documentary-heavy television channel.  It’s even easy to mock it for its sheer love of Hitler.  And they sent me a copy of their show package Ancients Behaving Badly to review; as it turns out, it’s really very impressive.

Ancients Behaving Badly follows several major leaders–Cleopatra, Hannibal, Genghis Khan and Caligula, among others–and explain their behavior, using modern scientific methods, considering chemical analysis and historical analysis.  They’ll consider the technology around them, and the nature of their lives, their pastimes, and even their responses on the battlefield.  Eventually, the evidence will be compiled and they will be compared to each other, as well as more contemporary evil, like History Channel favorites Hitler and company.

What’s really interesting about this show is the basic concept–they’ll run these people’s lives through both figurative and literal microscopes, yielding incredible piles of information, which they’ll then use to define an entire life. And in the process, you will learn incredible amounts of material about people.  Caligula was a minor military genius, for one.  The Huns disfigured their children by binding their SKULLS as infants.  And it continues in this vein for the entire DVD, teaching piles and piles of information

I can’t overemphasize this particular point–there are just massive heaps of things to learn here.  I could list them but it would take forever.  And as a result, Ancients Behaving Badly provides a vast and fully-realized picture of some of history’s greatest horrors.

I was truly amazed by the sheer amount of content stacked into Ancients Behaving Badly.  It was phenomenal how much I had walked away with, and perhaps the best part was that, as a result of the constant string of new things to learn, it wasn’t at all hard to stick with it just to find out what would come next.  What indeed?  Who knew what would pour forth from History’s endless font of knowledge?  And so you stick around to watch.  It doesn’t get dull.

The end result is a truly entertaining series of constant surprises that keeps you hopping merrily along from one episode to the next. And the Screenhead Ten Scale cannot help but hand out the accolades to a DVD that keeps the entertainment coming in such rapid fashion.  Thus, the History Channel’s Ancients Behaving Badly gets a full ten out of ten for nonstop entertainment and variety.