I recently viewed Cities of the Underworld: The Complete Season Three. (I am not being paid to review these videos.) It is on sale in the History Channel Store for $31.96.The first DVD includes: City of Blood (London), Tunnels of Hell (Okinawa), Real Mafia Underground (Sicily), and Secret Sin City (Las Vegas).
The second DVD I watched included Tomb of the Lost Mummies, Gods of War, and Alcatraz Down Under.
The third DVD included Hitler’s Trenches, Barbarians’ Lair, and Land of Manson.
The fourth DVD included Gladiators: Blood Sport, Secrets of the Holy Land, and Under the Rock.
I started out with the City of Blood that talks about London. With their talks of orgies, I would not show these to students below high school level. In fact, the background music was so loud that it was extremely distracting and I had a hard time focusing on the content shared in the video. The visuals were wonderful and if you can get past the background noise to hear what the speaker is saying, it was very interesting. I just felt it took a lot of energy to pay attention to this. The next video I watched was much better. The music was not overwhelming and I actually could hear the person talking. I was relieved to know that the overwhelming music was not on every video.
I did like the information that these videos gave and I think it would hold the interest of older students. It was very fast paced and moved from one scene to another. Of course I enjoyed the videos where the music didn’t drown out the speaker. The wide variety of topics is also great because you could use this when teaching about different periods of time and events. Each topic is also broken down into smaller parts so you could even have the class watch certain segments if you don’t want to watch the whole thing. I think this would be a good addition to a school library as long as the teacher previewed the stories first to make sure it is appropriate for the students in the class.
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