Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

It's a golden age for planet hunters: recently, they've discovered more than 750 planets orbiting stars beyond our sun. Some of them, like a planet called Kepler-22b, might even be able to harbor life. What would that life look like? Combining startling animation with input from expert astrobiologists, Alien Planets Revealed takes viewers on a journey of the imagination as we 'build' aliens from the ground up. What chemical building blocks will make up their genetic code? How will life get started and how will the exotic environment on a planet like Kepler-22b drive evolution? Bringing the creative power of veteran animators together with the latest discoveries in astrobiology, Alien Planets Revealed provides a glimpse of the creatures we might one day encounter beyond our solar system.

Washington, D.C. is in many ways a city of extremes. Starland Vocal Band, Marvin Gaye, Duke Ellington, Nils Lofgren, Chuck Brown, Henry Rollins, Fugazi and Trouble Funk all hail from D.C. In the early '70s, the music style go-go originated here, and has remained a local craze ever since. Dave Grohl sits down with Trouble Funk's Big Tony Fisher to talk about go-go, and explores its origins with Chuck Brown, the genre's undisputed godfather.
He also chats with Don Zientara, owner of Inner Ear Studios, which the Virginia-raised Grohl says 'produced the entire soundtrack of my youth,' as well as with members of the harDCore band Bad Brains and Ian MacKaye of Teen Idles, Minor Threat and Fugazi, who all recorded at Inner Ear over the decades. The song 'The Feast and the Famine' is recorded during this episode.

'Crude Awakening'- To combat the worst environmental disaster in American history, BP and the Coast Guard dumped nearly 2 million gallons of a chemical dispersant called Corexit into the Gulf. But instead of helping clean up the spill, Corexit made things worse. Shane Smith heads to Louisiana to report on the lasting effects of the BP oil spill. 'The Enemy of My Enemy' - Yemen, the fractured state in the Arabian peninsula, is at the top of the worry list for President Obama's national security team, and the rise of Al Qaeda there is only half the reason why. The real trouble is a current threat posed by the little-known Houthi rebel movement in the north of the country - a grassroots army, allegedly funded by Iran, that has never granted access to any other Western film crew before. Ben Anderson goes deep into Houthi-controlled territory to learn about the group that's fighting, and beating, Al Qaeda in the east, Saudi Arabia in the north, and Yemen's central government in the south.

Someone once observed: 'America is great because she is good; if she ever ceases to be good she will cease to be great.' Today that notion of the essential goodness of America is under attack, replaced by another story in which theft and plunder are seen as the defining features of American history-from the theft of Native American and Mexican lands and the exploitation of African labor to a contemporary foreign policy said to be based on stealing oil and a capitalist system that robs people of their "fair share"

The documentary chronicles the fall of the Atari Corporation through the lens of one of the biggest mysteries of all time, dubbed 'The Great Video Game Burial of 1983'. As the story goes, the Atari Corporation, faced with an overwhelmingly negative response to 'E.T.', the video game for the Atari 2600, disposed of hundreds of thousands of unsold game cartridges by burying them in the small town of Alamogordo, New Mexico.

In the spring of 1984, a strange new comic book sat beside cash registers in select shops, too big to fit in the racks, and too weird to ignore. Eastman and Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles presented a completely original breed of super hero. It was too bizarre, too crazy. It broke all the rules and should never have worked. Until it sold out. Again and again and again. For 30 years. Now, peek under the shell and see how this so-called 'happy accident' defied every naysayer to become one of the most popular and beloved franchises in the world.