A weekly series of short documentary segments funded by the National Geographic Society and done in the style of the National Geographic Specials. In 2003, the show was re-branded National Geographic Ultimate Explorer. A news-style journal format is now used instead of the more traditional format of the specials.
This film examines the masterwork album by the Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, released in 1967, with its creation, themes and impact explored in turn. In addition, this film explores the summer of that year with the rise of the counter-culture and hippies for instance, and the whole notion that love and music could change the world.
The surreal nightmare of internationally-acclaimed artist and professor Steve Kurtz began when his wife Hope died in her sleep of heart failure. Police who responded to Kurtz’s 911 call deemed Kurtz’s art suspicious and called the FBI. Within hours the artist was detained as a suspected "bioterrorist" as dozens of federal agents in Hazmat suits sifted through his work and impou...
Jack Kerouac was a Beat Generation writer who took the nation by storm upon the publication of his novel On the Road. Kerouac's legacy and influence are explained via interviews with Kerouac's friends and contemporaries such as William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, and Edie Parker. Narrator Peter Coyote reads sections of Kerouac's (mostly autobiographical) books...
National Geographic explores centuries of vampire lore and legend—unearthing new science and insights on superstition and psychology. Did vampires roam the earth in the time of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci Historical records indicate that people thought so and even describe how to safely bury them. Now, more than 400 years later, a 16th-century mass grave is unearthed ne...
In the summer of 1967, thousands of young people from across the country flocked to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district to join in the hippie experience, only to discover that what they had come for was already disappearing. By 1968 the celebration of free love and music had descended into a maelstrom of drug abuse, broken dreams, and violence. American Experience offers a ...
Fog City Mavericks: The Filmmakers of San Francisco is a compelling exploration of the legendary filmmakers who call the San Francisco Bay Area home including George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Clint Eastwood, Chris Columbus and producer Saul Zaentz. The special weaves interviews, commentaries and unforgettable moments from some of the most visionary movies ever created such a...
A look at the rise of illicit drug use and its cultural influence in the second half of the last century.
This National Geographic documentary explores the physical and psychological changes experienced by the human body in the moments before and after death. When does a person really die, and what happens at that precise second when life ends While the subject both frightens and fascinates, understanding both the science of death and the ways in which our bodies hold it off are k...
