1955.
For those living in Brooklyn, it could
only mean the one thing that’s been drilled into their heads
well over 1,955 times.
It was during that fateful year that –
I’ll remind you in case you forgot – the Brooklyn Dodgers finally
brought a World Series pennant to their beloved Flatbush home.
And then, just two years later, the unthinkable
happened: the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, tearing the heart
out of the borough that had been a home to baseball seemingly
since the beginning of time.
Since then, those Dodgers have become the
stuff of legend – a myth passed down from Brooklyn father to
Brooklyn son for as long as most can remember.
So, for those of you who just moved here
(or if you’ve been living by yourself in Prospect Park forest
for 40 years), "Dem Bums: The Brooklyn Dodgers" airing
on PBS this weekend can fill you in. Just don’t expect much more.
Using footage from newsreels and talking-head
interviews with former Dodgers and their arch-rival New York
Yankees compiled over the past 20 years, "Dem Bums"
provides few new insights into the team that will forever be
known as "The Boys of Summer."
But it’s not as if producer-writer-director
Marino Amoruso didn’t give it the old college try. When he spoke
to GO Brooklyn about "Dem Bums," the Sheepshead Bay
native explained that he was trying to produce the "definitive
show on the Dodgers and their place in history" – but keep
it to a watchable length.
Clocking in at just under an hour, Amoruso,
who wrote and directed the 1991 doc "Of Moose and Men: The
Rocky and Bullwinkle Story," was able to accomplish half
his goal. As for producing the "definitive" program
on the Dodgers, well …
Over the years, there have been more than
a few Dodgers retrospectives. Back in 1985, local news anchor
Jim Jensen hosted an hour-long retrospective celebrating the
30th anniversary of Brooklyn’s World Championship on CBS TV –
which I still have on tape and enjoy watching over and over.
Then there’s "The Original America’s
Team" (available on video), a five-part mini-series dedicated
to the Dodgers that, while extremely long, covered all the bases,
so to speak.
If you want a great in-depth overview of
the Dodgers, simply check out Ken Burns’ "Baseball"
– and you don’t have to watch the nine "inning" epic.
Episode seven, "The Capitol of Baseball," features
much of the same time period covered by "Dem Bums"
and, even at about two hours, is much easier to watch than Amoruso’s
effort.
The main problem with "Dem Bums,"
is that one hour simply isn’t enough to do the team justice.
Narrator David Hartman (who also lent his
voice to the PBS documentary "A Walk Through Brooklyn"
last year) constantly speaks of all of the players’ "character,"
while never quite explaining what actually made them such good
people.
The first half of the documentary consists
of a retrospective of baseball in Brooklyn dating back to the
birth of professional franchises in the then-City of Brooklyn
in the late 1800s and leading up to the Dodgers’ 1955 championship
and the abandonment of Brooklyn after the 1957 season. It’s concise
and to the point, giving you a good idea as to how the Dodgers
became such a prized treasure of the borough – albeit leaving
out the reason behind their "Bums" nickname.
Then, the program goes on to talk about
the core players that made up the dominant Dodger teams of the
late ’40s through the ’50s, focusing, of course, on second baseman
Jackie Robinson’s breaking of major league baseball’s color barrier.
According to Amoruso, the integration of
baseball not only changed the course of the game itself, but
it also "changed forever the course of American history."
A good point, but not something that should
be said and forgotten. But the program doesn’t offer any interviews
with historians (or anyone outside of the baseball world) which
would corroborate, elaborate or reinforce Amoruso’s thesis.
Amoruso tries in vain to link the great
Dodgers, like center fielder Duke Snider, first baseman Gil Hodges
and right fielder Carl Furillo to this momentous event in Civil
Rights history. Instead, he ends up falling into the same nostalgic,
hero-worshipping trap that many Brooklynites slip into when speaking
of the Dodgers.
His assessment of Hodges, for instance,
as "a man of great character" is not backed up by anything
more than the fact that the first baseman was great at driving
in runs.
Also hard to swallow was the program’s
music, which seemed to be a constant loop of a big-band tune
that went on ad infinitum.
All told, the program is a good introduction
to the "Boys of Summer" who played here so many years
ago.
But who hasn’t heard that before?
"Dem Bums:the Brooklyn Dodgers"
will premiere on PBS’ Channel 13 on March 6 at 8 pm.
