Big Bend: America's Last Primitive Frontier; San Francisco: The City Of Grandeur And Exhilaration/Muir Woods

An old Apache legend has it that when the Creator was finished making the Earth, he took the leftover rocks and dumped them in Texas, thereby giving us Big Bend. Designated a national park in 1944, Big Bend is a picturesque area filled with a large variety of wildlife, natural landforms, and disparate climate zones. Big Bend: America's Last Primitive Frontier uses excellent cinematography, wide-ranging narration, and charming interviews with park rangers to paint an interesting portrait of the park and its history. Viewers will gain insights into the area's complicated ecosystem while also hearing marvelous tales of the Old West, when the lust for gold and relative lack of law and order conspired to make the Chisos Mountains, Rio Grande river territory, and Mariscal Canyons a popular site for frontier entrepreneurs and outlaws. San Francisco: The City of Grandeur and Exhilaration/Muir Woods, on the other hand, though copyrighted in 1987, appears to be made up of footage from the Seventies--if the ubiquitous sight of bellbottoms is any indication. While the historical overview of San Francisco which chronicles the rise of the missions, the gold fever days, the great earthquake of 1906, and the building of the Golden Gate Bridge, is nicely done, the faded and dated "contemporary" footage bears no relation to the San Francisco of today. In addition to San Francisco, the tape also covers the story of Alcatraz, and takes a look at Muir Woods. Big Bend: America's Last Primitive Frontier is highly recommended. San Francisco: The City of Grandeur and Exhilaration/Muir Woods because of its dated modern material is not a necessary purchase. (Available from: Panorama International Productions, P.O. Box 1255, Beverly Hills, CA 90213.)