This Memorial Day, the History channel will debut a new four-part, eight-hour version of Roots, the groundbreaking and massively popular “event that made television history” in 1977 by pulling the largest audience up to that point in small-screen history.
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Mark serves as its executive producer, following in the footsteps of his late father, the legendary film producer David Wolper, who was responsible for the original version in 1977.
But while Geordi LaForge is blind, LaVar Burton is not, and he and executive producer Mark Wolper saw that the original was unknown to today’s younger generations and too dated for them to care.
One of the lead stars Anika Noni Rose in a chat with E! The 2012 History miniseries “Hatfields & McCoys”, which starred Bill Paxton and Kevin Costner, got incredibly positive ratings, as did History’s 2013 series “The Bible”.
Kirby said that through the experience of filming “Roots” and conversations with actors and staffers on set, he learned the importance of self-knowledge and knowing where you come from. You need to know how to deal with those things. “We have so much more information about the journey; the life that was lived in Africa is much more full and complete than it was in the original because we now know that the place where Kunta Kinte’s people were from was not some tiny village”.
As the great literary and cultural critic Leslie Fiedler noted time and again, Americans only valorize the Other when we know he or she is thoroughly vanquished; The Last of the Mohicans could only be written after the Indians were thoroughly contained in or effectively banished from upstate NY. “If we don’t continue to talk about it and tell the truth about it, it will continue to be smudged and softened, and rounded at the edges, and I think we as Americans owe ourselves the truth of who we are”. She, in turn, fights to keep the Mandinka spirit alive in her son, Chicken George (Rege Jean-Page); his son, Tom (Sedale Threatt Jr.) lives to see emancipation and to pass on the story of Kunta Kinte. It’s been 40 years since the original book was written by Alex Haley, and because of the success of that book and that miniseries, the academic and historical, archaeological, sociological work that’s been done since then is vast …
More than 21,500 costumes were rented for the series, and some 950-plus costumes were specially crafted to mimic garments worn by 18th-century slaves. That was really the first time this story had been told in dramatic form. A surprise hit that enthralled the nation, “Roots” defined the notion of a “television event”, with more than 100 million people watching the final episode. “I’d never seen anything like that before”.
On June 7, Warner Bros.
“I was 16 years old, the same age as my son when I showed him”.
“A little bit of the history is wrong in the first Roots”.
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Though sleeker and more graphically brutal than its ancestor, “Roots” remains a celebration of resistance through survival. Sweeps just ended on network TV, and the majority of the summer shows haven’t started yet.
