Mysterious China - Marco Polo's Silk Road DVD

 You wont find anything better!
I own 2 Silk Road Documentaries. The first I bought was the 'Silk Road Collection' followed by the 'Marco Polo Trilogy' which consists of these three films: Marco Polo's Shangri-La Marco Polo's Silk Road Marco Polo's Roof of the World Below I compared the SILK ROAD COLLECTION to the MARCO POLO TRILOGY and a follow-up film by the same production company, called SECRETS OF THE SILK ROAD. FOOTAGE: The Marco Polo Trilogy has better footage altogether, but the Silk Road Collection does have its fair share of interesting shots too. Definitely not a horse falling 50 feet from a bridge into a turbulent river and somehow surviving unscathed, which the Marco Polos do have, but interesting. Silk Road Collection pulls a lot of its content from old Chinese television footage and pieces it together, which is fairly similar to how Marco Polo was made. Marco Polo is just a newer version with better camera work and much higher quality video - the government had commissioned a lot of new video archiving ever since the late 90's. LENGTH: The difference in length between the two is significant (Silk Road Collection being 630 minutes compared to Marco's 270) but unless you have a need for an obscene amount of footage I think that you would be very pleased with the concise, but not too concise, nature of the Monarex trilogy. Not to mention, Monarex has a fourth film about the Silk Road (Secrets of the Silk Road) which is not a part of the Trilogy, but might as well be given its subject matter. So assume if you buy those four together, you have 360 minutes. CONTENT: The Silk Road Collection is a collection of episodes, each covering its own little topic given the information at hand (which wasn't very much back in the late 70's). The Marco Polo Trilogy and Secrets of the Silk Road are definitely broader in spectrum, which can be both positive and negative. The interesting aspect is that even though they are broader, they still provide more details given many recent discoveries in China since the 70's and 80's, not to mention the release of information from the government itself. So even in its generality, I found that the Marco Polos gave a wide array of new information not found in the Silk Road Collection. CONCLUSION: The Silk Road Collection is like a full blown Greek Dictionary, where the Marco Polo Trilogy is like a book of Commonly Used Greek Phrases. Personally, I enjoy the Marco Polo version more because I am not looking for the smaller details regarding the Silk Road. I wanted a great overview and got it with the Marco Polos. If you are a professor about to teach a course on the Silk Road, I would recommend BOTH. Watch Marco Polo first, then Silk Road Collection. If you are like me and looking to build your knowledge because you are interested and would like to be further educated on the "Sleeping Giant", Marco Polo all the way.
Submitted by JJ (Los Angeles)
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