Experience the Captivating History of a Series That Brought Geek Culture to the Mainstream

Read Time:3 Minute, 34 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Attack of the Doc!
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Genre: Documentary
Year Released: 2023
Runtime: 1h 27m
Director(s): Chris Gore
Where To Watch: available through Indie Rights on all TVOD/Digital platforms and Video On Demand throughout North America on April 24th, the 21st Anniversary of the launch of G4TV www.attackofthedoc.com

RAVING REVIEW: Diving headfirst into geek culture, ATTACK OF THE DOC! explores the legacy of the series "Attack of the Show!" – a groundbreaking series that celebrates the spectrum of pop culture, spanning comic books, films, and video games (and covers, to a lesser extent, the history of the cable channel G4). This documentary, directed by Chris Gore, is a tribute that captures the spirit of the show and the G4 network while emphasizing their profound influence on the global geek community. The documentary team's biases were a little explicit towards the end, but I can understand why; it was a personal project.

Featuring conversations with various cast members, ATTACK OF THE DOC! offers unique insights into the show's creation and its impact on the entertainment world. I do wish that they would have gotten more one on one interviews with those involved. Although without inside knowledge, I don’t know how those relationships ended. With Gore being on the series, they could have had deeper personal issues (or they just flat out may not have been available.)

"Attack of the Show!" was a beacon for geek culture in all its forms. Hosts Olivia Munn and Kevin Pereira were pop culture ambassadors, championing geekdom when it was still a fringe interest. This show and the team behind it normalized the world of geekdom and tech we enjoy today. Before this show, it wasn’t cool to like STAR WARS or play video games (of course, that’s stereotyping, but to an extent, that was very true.) Growing up as a “geek,” my lifestyle wasn’t nearly as accepted as it is today.

ATTACK OF THE DOC! revisits a time in history that was unique. The internet was still in its infancy; streaming wasn’t even a twinkle in people’s eyes yet. They managed to make programming that you would now see on YouTube and TikTok while engaging the audience in a way that made them feel seen.

The documentary's nostalgic charm takes viewers back to the golden age of G4TV and "Attack of the Show!" delighting fans who savored the show's prime. Although the factors behind G4's decline and the show's performance are widely known, the story presented in ATTACK OF THE DOC! deserves to be shared with a broader audience. This felt like a time capsule, but one that we could interact with and one that, if you got to experience the original content, was almost nostalgia overload.

Sadly, they lacked interviews with Kevin Pereira, Olivia Munn, or Candace Bailey (Munn’s eventual replacement.) Again, as I mentioned above, I don’t know the circumstances as to why they weren’t present, so I don’t want to guess. Despite lacking this, ATTACK OF THE DOC! was still a captivating retrospective of the era when television was king. You could feel the roots of the internet and social media growing alongside.

In summary, ATTACK OF THE DOC! is a fun, engaging trip down memory lane, revisiting the history of "Attack of the Show!" and the G4 network. This well-produced documentary stands as a testament to the power of television in shaping pop culture and offers an entertaining exploration of a bygone era. Ultimately, Gore was the perfect person to direct this; despite the slight bias, his hands-on experience with the show made him the ideal lens to explore its history.

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[photo courtesy of INDIE RIGHTS]