Quote Originally Posted by shifty157
I doubt it. I dont think the show did very well. In my opinion its because they didnt do the show correctly. Really only the last ten minutes or elss were about the actual battle and what happened. All the rest of the show was just random filler stuff that kind of dealt with the battle but not really. Had they actually delved more into the workings of the battle i think the show would have done much better. I would have liked it alot more at least. As it was, five minutes just couldnt do the intricacy (and often times genius) of those battles justice. In fact five minutes really couldnt even do a general overview of the battle any justice.

I felt the show had alot more potential and i was really let down after watching the first few episodes and realizing they just werent going to tap into that potential.
Agreed. Decisive Battles started from a bad position anyway because of the stigma of computer games in general, and it never really got the chance to prove itself on an increasingly competitive channel like THC. It was, at least, vastly superior to the abysmal Command Decisions...

I own the series (except for Cynoscephalae, sadly) and I have to also agree that while the idea was absolutely brilliant, the execution was a bit lackluster, starting with Matthew Settle. Now, he may have made a great "hard***" in Band of Brothers, but he was hardly a very good narrator; his voice is monotonous, he said the wrong facts on occassion, and there were very obvious redubs that were just tacky ("And so, MILTIADES, wait, ed, hoping to..." "Crassus sent his son, PUBLIUS, to attack...").

The presentation was awkward also; you have Matthew Settle explain how hoplites fought with their spears overhand with a shield wall, you see reenactors doing it - and then the RTW hoplites are fighting in the Macedonian style. At times it was done superbly - the "Chalons" episode still gets my blood pumping and shivers to run down my spine as the massive cavalry armies began to charge at each other... - and at other times it was done rather poorly - like the "Adrianople" episode where they keep showing the "old" legionaries even as they describe the new ones.

I don't think they had too much talking and too little fighting, but it was mostly that the show was too short to begin with; the ratio was reasonable, but it would have been vastly greater as an hour-long program where you could have had more of both. Instead, everything seemed too rushed.

That said, it is still an extremely fascinating series to watch, because you really don't get it until you actually see it for yourself, and in a format that is vastly more accurate than anything Hollywood does (even Alexander's Battle of Gaugamela [about the only decent part of the movie], which is actually very well done, completely ignores the second-line phalanx and the reality that Alexander really did pursue the Persian army), mostly minor niggles notwithstanding. I'd highly recommend it to anyone (my mom admitted that she though it was pretty cool), and especially any TW fans.

As for a M2TW version, I highly doubt it; first off, Decisive Battles never had a second season, so it never explored the scads of other ancient battles, like Zama or Raphia - suggesting that no one cared enough to learn about any more battles. Secondly, while admittedly my medieval history is hardly as good as my ancient history, I can't think of too many actual medieval battles of interest that you could cover; you might have enough for, barely, a season, if you only look at doing the battles explored in M2TW, with a few other battles thrown in for good measure (Constantinople 1453, for example, or Ain Jalut or Hattin), but I can't really think of too many more really important battles, because it seems that there really weren't too many big full-scale set-piece battles, but rather massive wars of attrition that never really seemed to be decisively concluded, but mostly just drifted away...

As opposed to the ancient world, where once-and-for-all battles really decided fighting - after all, Caesar might have fought many battles in Gaul, but Alesia was arguably the only really important one. Heck, you could have an entire season on just the Greek battles alone...

While I of course would be thrilled to see Decisive Battles return, whether with RTW or with M2TW powering it, the odds seem very strongly against it...