The Commodore Story

Dry, that's probably the best explanation of what's wrong with this documentary.

While the stories are interesting and let you into another time of computers, when there was an almost hippy ethic to getting products to market, the interviews get a little boring after a while, major figures are introduced without fanfare so it's hard to keep a track on who was important and who's not. But the worst part is there is very little in the respect of showing off the hardware or the software, just a lot of talking heads.

example: "People are still programming games for the Commodore 64 and Amiga" - then show you no examples or even box art.

It suffers from the Star Trek Paradox. We must get to point A, the whole fleet is there ready to engae the big ship that's chasing us. Big ship disables the Enterprise and we never get the (hopefully) special effect laden space battle we were promised.

The film maker appears at the start introducing and narrating but he is not skilled in front of camera and it starts off on the wrong foot. Then we get choppy cuts on interviews, accidental shaky cam on constantly annoying slider shots and strange zooms on static photos. A lot of recent Commodore films have been made so this is too little too late and unfortunately badly executed.

I was so excited about this. Worth watching, but could have been so much more. Poor script and lack of narration.

A lot of content included that does not add value to the Commodore story.

How could you get so many great Commodore personnel and make such a dreadful hash of it. I backed the kickstarter for this and it was a real lesson for me. Could have been done better over Skype.... I remember sitting at a paid-for viewing and half way through there is footage of the whole clueless team riding around the States laughing...i'd helped them to buy expensive equipment and have a massive holiday... they were laughing at me. At some point I really hope that somebody takes the History of Commodore while there are still some key players left to tell it and not leave it to scenesters like this who understand nothing of the significance of the company. Commodore have often been written out of history due to revisionism and Apple/Microsoft success. This low grade crud only helps cement them being considered an historical triviality which couldn't be further from the actual truth.

As stated, this is a good documentary, but many of the stories have already been told in "From Bedrooms To Billions - The Amiga Years". Still definitely worth a watch though.