Customer Reviews

EXPO - Magic of the White City DVD

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Having grown up in the Chicagoland area, I always heard passing references to the great Columbia Exposition, the 1893 World's Fair. This two hour documentary, narrated by Gene Wilder(!), tells the story of the Columbia Exposition from its conception down to final closing and aftermath. Chockfull of interesting pictures, it gives the modern day viewer something quite close to a guided tour of that great event of more than a century ago!

Overall, I must say that I loved this DVD. It gave a very interesting and highly informative look at the Fair, and I do not hesitate to recommend it to everyone! The one thing I must say is that the documentary did make me a little sad. Living in the early 21st century, it's hard to believe that people once dreamed so big. I have never before realized what a smaller, meaner world we now live in.

This is a great DVD, and I give it my highest recommendations!

If you have only read "The Devil in the White City" by Erik Larson and want to see and know more about the fair you will be happy with this documentary. If you have read many books about the fair and taken advantage of all the resources at the Paul V. Galvin Library Digital History Collection online you may find yourself wanting more.

The focus of this documentary was mostly a tour of the fair. In recent books on the fair there seems to be either a "horray for progress/wasn't the fair pretty?" or a "damn American imperialism, racism, and sexism" route. The tone of this documentary was neutral/celebratory as it largely omitted discussion of racism and sexism (with only a few passing mentions). There were photos I hadn't seen before, and the narration (Gene Wilder) was superlative.

I do have quibbles with the film, which are most likey not the fault of the creators. See, what I really want is a bigger-budget version of this, full of computer reproductions of the fair so that we can "walk through" it instead of just scenes of a camera panning over a still photograph or painting. The live reinactments were limited to a belly dancer, beer drinking, and the murder of Mayor Harrison. There was also some live footage of fish and animals that the fair goers would have seen, which I am ambivalent about. But don't just tell me that the great pyramid would fit inside the Palace of Manufactures and Liberal Arts, drive the idea home with a little graphic, even a simple one, of the pyramid sitting inside it.

All that said, this was worth every penny and contained a lot of great material which I am bound to watch over and over again.

The Columbian Exposition was vast in every way - from the sheer size of its physical location to the number of its visitors to the diversity of its exhibits - yet this film covers it all using a historically responsible and entertaining approach. "EXPO" treats its viewers to a detailed "behind-the-scenes" look into the Exposition with Gene Wilder as a guide. The tour is chock-full of fascinating tidbits, and the period photographs add a whole other dimension that is often absent from texts on the subject. The film truly drops the viewer smack in the middle of the Fair. The quality of the high-definition transfer is stunning, and the picture looks as clear and crisp as a high-definition broadcast. The sound is enveloping and adds depth to the documentary; you actually feel as if you're surrounded by the Fair's bustling crowds. The film is without a doubt satisfying for everyone from the amateur history buff to the well-read historian.

Thinking that this film would be a documentary that I could use in teaching economics and U.S. History, I bought it. Well . . . I found it very detailed in terms of explaining the various exhibits and structures, this part of the video I'd give 5 stars to. The rest however, left me hoping the video would come to an end. Gene Wilder, while a fun actor is not the best narrator, he would put a class of teenagers to sleep. The film is very static in that it only uses old photos and artist portrayals with panning in and out of them to tell this story. Then there is the cheesy belly dancer that is put in the video and is about the only thing that moves. This documentary would have been better interviewing Chicago historical society folks, some professors and maybe bringing in the present day site before the end. I was dissappointed in the way this story was presented. Great info for informations sake, but not very good in terms of being watchable.

I received this DVD as a gift last year and have since recommended it to every Chicagoan I know.

Despite having lived in Chicago some years ago, my knowledge of the World's Fair of 1893 was quite limited. I had seen the occassional photo of "Big Mary" and Court of Honor, but was not familiar with the scale and history of the Exposition.

I was advised that my whole family would enjoy this DVD, but my 8- and 11-year olds weren't interested. That is, they weren't until they walked into the room where the documentary was playing. Perhaps it's something about Gene Wilder's voice, or perhaps it's those incredible images, or simply the mystery and romance of a time when electric lights were a magical new phenomenon; but once engaged, they were completely transfixed.

I can't recommend this DVD enough. We all loved it, and it inspired each of us to seek out age-appropriate books related to the 1893 fair (I'm now reading "Devil in the White City" and the kids are reading "Fair Weather").

I found the DVD of the Chicago World's Columbian Expo, 1893, an excellent record of the exposition. I am from Chicago and my great grandfather came to Chicago, from Germany. He was a brick layer in Berlin. Chicago was where the jobs were. I know he was in Chicago when the Columbian Expo was going on. There was very little written about family backgrounds.
My wife's maiden name is Ferris. For generations her family believed they were related to George Washington Ferris, inventor of the Ferris wheel, which was first exhibited at the Chicago Columbian Expo.
Further investigations revealed that the family myths were just that, myths. The DVD gave us a lot of information on the inventions of the day, why the Expo was so popular. As a youth, growing up in Chicago, one of my favorite places was the Museum of Science and Industry. The only building still standing, from the fair. I think that museum may have had a lot of influence on my career. I'm an engineer. Great DVD.
Bob Kozlowski

The Columbian Exposition of 1893 was certainly the progenitor of fairs that followed in the United States. Attempting to re-create that comes along "Expo", designed to give the viewer a comprehensive look at that fair. To a degree, it succeeds.

"Expo" outlines the history of the fair in detail and Gene Wilder's narrative is sufficient, if not overly compelling. The DVD takes way too much time to tell its story, evidenced by the cheesy updates in artists' renderings and suggestion. (If I saw one more belly dancer appear in this offering, I was ready to hit the "stop" button on my remote) Given the fact that this was a great historic event... and the documentary does many things well....why resort to cheap new age stuff when the history, itself, would suffice? Ken Burns knew how to do it in his "Civil War" series....these guys did not.

If the viewer can remove the lesser, innocuous bits of "Expo", it's worth a look. But I wonder how much better this story could have been told, with the right temperature and persuasion. Clearly, Chicago in 1893 had a great more to be written about and viewed upon and I hope the next rendition of this fair can be told within a better reference.

Like so many other viewers, I came round to viewing EXPO - The Magic of the White City ("EXPO") because I read The Devil in the White City (The White City) first. Sort of. Actually, my wife read The White City years after I did and, her curiosity piqued, rented the DVD.

EXPO is about the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, an exposition of such majesty, scope, corruption, and expense that it is a feat unparalleled in America today. The closest we have to the Fair is Disney World, a lineage most explicitly drawn in The White City; Walt Disney's father, Elias, was a construction worker on some of the buildings at the fair.

EXPO is narrated by Gene Wilder. I'm admit to a bias - I'm a big fan of Young Frankenstein and he's the only "celebrity sighting" I've ever encountered in real life. Wilder's getting on in age (the DVD was produced in 2005), so there's now a bit of a whistle to his speech. Still, his lilting voice has enough emotion and wry humor to make his narration enjoyable. And there is a lot of narration.

We tend to think of previous American centuries as quaintly backward, where such modern notions as political correctness and global unity didn't exist. And while EXPO is careful to point out that American culture still had its own foibles and intolerance endemic to the time, the World's Fair put all those to shame. It was a global unification of wealth, prosperity, and cultural exchange in a way that's inconceivable in today's contentious world. We can learn a lot from the Chicago World's Fair.

EXPO uses old maps and photographs to detail events at the fair whenever possible, with few computer graphics or animation. There are occasional shots of live actors, none whom particularly add anything of value to the narrative. In fact, it's clear that the producers felt that the medium was a little dry, because there are copious live action shots of a belly dancer interspersed with discussion of the Midway.

Minor quibbles aside, EXPO works overtime to try to encompass the grandeur of such a huge undertaking without losing sight of the details. As a result, it necessarily glosses over some pieces (rampant corruption, the aforementioned Devil himself who is the subject of The White City book) and emphasizes others (global diversity, architecture, and the first appearances of American staples). That's okay though; EXPO is a huge undertaking with such a sweepingly broad subject that it's better served as a companion piece to a book. Like The Devil in the White City.

I cannot believe that anyone who is interested in this period of history ( as I am) would not love this video. First of all it covers virtually everything about the Fair, from beginning to end. Second, Gene Wilder does a great job of narration. Third, being recorded in HD makes it visually beautiful. Finally, how many such programs like this get made these days anyway? For the producers to take on a project like this shows they have great fondness for the subject. Minor complaints like too much belly dancing is irrelevant to the overall excellence of the program. You simply get lost in the whole visual experience of what the Fair must have been like to tourists of 1893. It was a wonderland. I've always wished I could have lived back then and this program just confirms it.

As a long-time fan of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, I was eagerly looking forward to seeing this film. In spite of a well-researched script, an abundance of historical photos and visuals of the Fair, and Gene Wilder's excellent narration, I was disappointed by it. Other reviewers have mentioned the "cheesy" and distracting modern-day footage of the dancing girl, zoo animals, fish in an aquarium, beer being poured into a glass, etc. I'd like to add some poor choices in the music heard on the soundtrack. Rather than limiting themselves to music that was actually played at the Fair or at least that was in existence in 1893, the producers chose to include music from a much later period. Two examples are "Dill Pickles Rag" from 1906, and "Swanee" from 1919. On the other hand, they failed to include the one piece of music that is closely associated with the Chicago World's Fair Midway, the famous "hootchy-cootchy" dance (aka "Dance of the Snake Charmer"), the music for which appears in both Stanley Applebaum's "The Chicago World's Fair of 1893," and Erik Larson's "The Devil in the White City." Lapses such as these ruined what might otherwise have been a production in the same class as one of the Ken Burns films.