Horse racing, now a fairly minor sport in the mind of the U.S. public, was once a national pastime, with the lean, blazingly fast Thoroughbred horses and their tiny, daring jockeys filling the roles of sports superstars. In Depression-era, pre-World War II United States, a racehorse named Seabiscuit was one of those heroes: Seabiscuit: America's Legendary Racehorse sets out to tell his story.

Alas, while the material is certainly promising, the documentary fumbles it badly. Seabiscuit is an example of a documentary without a purpose or structure, an odd mish-mash of elements that don't seem to have been put together with any particular structural plan. We are told repeatedly that Seabiscuit was a "working man's horse," a hero for the downtrodden Depression era, a figure more famous than the President. But it's never made clear why he was so famous or so beloved; in fact, we learn remarkably little about this equine athlete or his accomplishments.

At the beginning of the program, we're told a little bit about Seabiscuit's origins, although in a rather cursory manner, and about his purchase and transfer to the West Coast. But even right at the start, the lack of focus of the program is clear. Instead of telling us about Seabiscuit, the subject of the documentary, it seems like we're given piles of irrelevant facts about various people who worked with Seabiscuit, or knew of him, or knew of people who worked with him... Names are bandied about in a very casual way, to the point that it's really not clear who's who. In fact, it's not even particularly clear who the modern-day interview subjects are, or what their relation is to Seabiscuit's story; some of them appear to be reminiscing about things they've actually experienced with relation to the famous horse, while others recount events that they've only heard or read about, without much distinction between the two.

Seabiscuit never really recovers from its muddled start and overall lack of structure. The middle of the program is devoted to an extended tangent about the two jockeys who rode Seabiscuit. Some interesting material is casually slipped in, such as the working conditions of jockeys of that time, but it's outweighed by the irrelevant. And I do mean irrelevant: for instance, quite a while is spent talking about a restaurant that one of the jockeys bought for his retirement, and the fact that various people have heard strange ghost-like noises in the building. Don't ask me how this is relevant to Seabiscuit, because I don't know.

The last third of the program is slightly more interesting, because it takes on a bit more focus: Seabiscuit's attempts to win the prestigious Santa Anita Handicap, a race with an astonishingly large prize. After that, the 51-minute program winds up with recounting Seabiscuit's retirement and last days.

This was a rather frustrating viewing experience, on several levels. I used to be very interested in the world of Thoroughbred breeding, racing, and training, but while I'd heard of Seabiscuit, I didn't know much about him. I was hoping to learn a lot more about one of the "greats" of racing, but at the end of this documentary, I had learned almost nothing. It was interesting to actually see clips of the famous horse in his races, such as his match race against the great War Admiral, but the potential in this program to be really informative was lost, frittered away in pointless digressions and uninformative comments from the interviewees.

Neither is Seabiscuit a good "introductory" documentary on horse racing; the entire program is absolutely rife with horse-racing terms like "claiming races," "handicaps," and "Triple Crown" that are used without any sort of context or explanation. Furthermore, there's really no context provided for the events described in the documentary; for instance, a conflict between "East Coast" and "West Coast" racing is mentioned, but without any indication of why, or which one was considered superior at the time. It's really a shame, because the documentary does have a lot of potential to be interesting and informative to both horse-racing fans and new viewers... but it's largely wasted.

The DVD

Seabiscuit is a region 0 (all regions) DVD, in the NTSC format.

Video

The image quality for Seabiscuit clocks in at about average. The color portions of the program, filmed in the present day, show some edge enhancement but are adequate, with colors looking reasonably bright and the picture reasonably clean. The archival footage from the 1930s is, not surprisingly, extremely worn, to the point of the black-and-white image looking very fuzzy and blobby. It would have been nice to see the older footage a bit more restored, but it's acceptable as it is.

Audio

The soundtrack for Seabiscuit is presented in the non-lossy LPCM format (48k 16b), rather than a compressed format as is more typical of DVDs. This was probably chosen because of its ability to present the 1930s radio broadcasts with acceptable clarity, despite the high level of noise and static of the old recordings. It was probably a wise choice; the radio segments are difficult enough to understand as it is, without compression issues causing even more problems.

In the rest of the documentary, the audio for Seabiscuit offers a fairly ordinary listening experience. The voices of the various interviewees are generally reasonably clear, though some of the more mumble-prone individuals were a bit hard to understand.

Extras

The most interesting special feature on the DVD is the inclusion of the actual radio broadcasts for two of Seabiscuit's famous races: the San Antonio Handicap (3 minutes) and the Santa Anita Handicap (4 minutes). These are obviously audio-only, with a still image being presented in the background while the audio plays. A slideshow and an interactive Seabiscuit trivia game are also included.

Final thoughts

Despite my low score for this film, I'm suggesting Seabiscuit: America's Legendary Racehorse as a rental rather than a "skip it," because it does offer a few nuggets of worthwhile material for those viewers who are fans of horse racing. Given that the documentary is quite short (only 51 minutes) and that it has the two bonus race broadcasts, I'd consider this DVD worth renting just for the chance to glimpse one of horse racing's "greats" from a time when racing was a passion in the United States.