Some three years ago, I watched the first season of the Netflix documentary series "The Movies That Made Us". I always meant to come back to it, but for one reason or another it didn't happen - Until Now !
Season two of "The Movies That Made Us" offers behind the scenes stories about the production of four more movies. Those movies are "Back To The Future", "Pretty Woman", "Jurassic Park" and "Forrest Gump". The information comes in mix of interviews with key cast and crew, a mix of animation and film footage and a narration, now provided by Danny Wallace.
I have a slight problem with this season that, for a man who likes movies enough to have written a couple of thousand reviews for this website, I've never actually seen two of the movies that were covered in this run. Those movies, "Pretty Woman" and "Forrest Gump" are so iconic that I feel now I don't actually need to see them to have an understanding of what those movies are about, they're memed and homaged enough and it didn't affect my enjoyment of the episodes.
I did feel (looking back on my review) that the first run was a bit too chaotic and zany for its own good. Danny Wallace, who is the new narrator, provides a much more solid and grounded tone to the series - though it is still fun and the animated gags and flights of fancy still remain, it's just that little bit more sensible than it was, and benefits from that. Again, there are a rake of entertaining stories about the productions and interviews with staff that worked on them. Usually, it's not the real big names, which is fine because we've heard from Spielberg and Julia Roberts about the films, but we get stories you might not have heard, such as lunatic animator Steve Williams, who actively ignored instructions given to him and instead produced ground breaking CGI plans for "Jurassic Park".
I don't retain everything from each one, but there's lots of interesting stories from these productions that provide a valuable insight into just how chaotic film production can be. My time before the third season will be an awful shorter than this gap was.