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Slapped together with a boring narrator and lots of stock shots you've seen before, this copycat series won't tell you anything you don't already know. It begins, oddly enough, with the Boston Tea Party and you will see a few scenes that appeared in Mysteries at the Museum, the one with the original Tea Party crate! They justify this padding by pointing out that a "mob" was involved. And to make matters worse ALL the old stock shots and clips from '30's movies are STRETCHED to fill the wide screen ratio making the old-time gangsters look like obese little people. Shots of WWI...which have little or nothing to do with "the mob" are stretched as well and vintage troops fight with mobile artillery on egg-shaped wheels. Some of the stuff looks lifted from VHS tapes, low-res, blurry fuzzy shots, some shown at the wrong speed, a real mess. There have been so many good series about gangsters, prohibition etc that this one is simply unnecessary. Strictly for those viewers who want to see every last gangster themed show.

This series pretends to inform us of strange and sinister groups and persons of which we would be ignorant but for this show. Thus the title. In fact the revelations are much more mundane. A show on "The Mormons" tells little that has not been revealed by previous documentaries or even the South Park show. A show about a scary "outlaw motorcycle gang" consists of a few fuzzy clips, an interview with the clubs alleged president's brother and some still photos. The few clips are shown again and again until the repetition becomes annoying. The photo of the evil scary biker is zoomed in and out, panned right and left, up and down until he becomes so familiar that he doesn't look frightening anymore. We are treated to the old "voice and appearance disguised" bit as a fuzzy blur tells us of the crimes of the cyclists in a gurgling altered audio track. Of course this out of focus blob could be anybody, perhaps the shows producer and it could be anybody reading....anything. In one ridiculous scene eight or ten people are seated in an office discussing the evil bikers. All but two have their heads fuzzed out and one person, seated in front of a window, is obscured by a large rectangle making him appear to have a carton over his head. I suppose there was a recognizable object visible in the window. Much is made of three "brave" cops, also blurred out, who infiltrate the gang and participate in their mayhem for three years, all to gather evidence to punish the bikers. But despite the narrators frantic rant we learn that all they have discovered is that the bikers fight and stab one another from time to time. Virtually no drugs, guns, WMDs, pornography, slaves or anything else is revealed. It's quite a letdown.

All the episodes I saw suffered from overly dramatic narration, use of inserts culled from Hollywood movies, blurring of details or even entire scenes, perhaps to hide the fact that they are using video clips of a totally different subject and endless repeats of the few minutes or seconds of actual relevant video. This show is on par with the "Gangland" shows and suffers from the same music video style editing. Every visual cliché is used to the limit; inserts with the edges out of focus, phony "scratches" to make digital video look like beat-up movie film, flicker-frame montages and more "Dutch-angle" shots than "Battlefield Earth"! Unless you are bored stiff and will watch just about anything that moves, forget about this series.

It is ironic that this documentary about preserving films is itself almost lost. Today Amazon has for sale a single videotape of the show and I saw it only because someone put it on Youtube. While the show is clearly made by people who love film, they are sometimes wrong about the subject. Alan Alda opens the discourse and tells us about nitrate film. "First it turns green and then it turns to powder." Well, it doesn't turn green. And there are many stages of deterioration before the powder phase. We have film stock shown to us, supposedly old silent rarities that is clearly sound film. Old lost silent prints are presented wound on modern plastic cores. And the original camera negative of "The Great Train Robbery" is obviously a modern positive print, and it is about 400 feet shorter than the film it pretends to be. The very idea that something so rare as the original negative of such a landmark film would be rattling around in a METAL can without tissue or plastic wrap and wound in such a sloppy fashion is absurd.

OK, I'll concede some of these anachronisms would not register with the majority of viewers. What should not be ignored is the fact that the loss of so many titles and the deterioration of so many prints is due, not to fate or unstable film base or the ravages of time but to the carelessness and appalling policies of the film copyright owners. Roddy MacDowell begins to speak of this in one segment and is almost immediately cut off.

Leonard Maltin introduces us to a fellow who set up a Cinerama system in his home. Mr. Maltin thinks it's wonderful that this individual cared enough about the films to preserve them. What he doesn't mention is that film collectors were systematically hounded and harassed by the film studios and the FBI in the years before DVDs and videotape. Many had their collections confiscated and destroyed and some were sued just as so-called "film pirates" are today. Yet it was the collectors who saved the "one last print" of so many films that would otherwise be lost. The Cinerama guy probably paid somebody to give him the print that was destined for destruction and technically he stole it! Another segment describes how a silent film lover set up a silent theater and lovingly accumulated a library of rare silent prints. What they don't tell you is that the copyright owner of "The Covered Wagon" sued this man for showing the film.....even though they cared so little about it that they junked the negatives for their silver content decades earlier.

And one thing you might not notice until the show is over; where can you and I see these wonderful treasures that have been preserved and restored? Well in many cases, you can't. Unless there is a DVD release such as "Metropolis" received recently, you and I must depend on somebody leaking a copy when they get their hands on a DVD at a film festival. Films must be preserved for the future generations, but not for the likes of us. Well, at least we know they still exist. Better than nothing.

On the bright side, this is a fascinating show. Check it out on Youtube and hope that an updated edition might someday find its way to a DVD and maybe get packaged with a few of those restored treasures as well.