LCShackley I was captivated by Moog synthesizers at age 12, when "Switched On Bach" was released. I've read many things by and about Bob Moog over the years, and was looking forward to seeing this documentary. But sadly, it's a missed opportunity. First of all, the video quality looks like an 8mm home movie from the 1970s, rather than a 2004 production. Secondly, it's very amateurishly done. For instance, when you have Bernie Worrell, Rick Wakeman, and Moog together to talk about synths, do you think you could possibly pull them into a quiet room, instead of holding a 10-minute interview in a busy hallway with so much background noise that the voices are hardly audible? There are interesting bits here, including archive footage of the Moog assembly line and Gershon "Popcorn" Kingsley with his Moog Quartet. But there's a lot of BAD synth music too, and poor visuals. If you're a die-hard Moog fan like myself, you'll put up with it. If you're not, skip it.

anchovyd This film calls itself a documentary but it documents nothing. Look I play keys and have a Moog. I love the old modular recordings with W. Carlos and D. Hyman and of course all the stuff that was done with the Minimoog. I wanted to learn more about how Moog came about, the competition, how the company went out of business, what he did from the late 70's when he left Moog to when he started Big Briar and the new Moog Music in the late 90's, etc. It also would've been cool to have interviews with some iconic Moog players, like Bernie Worrell, Chick Corea, Dick Hyman, Wendy Carlos, Wakeman, Emerson and the like.Instead it looks like we get a director who just ran his camera for a hour or so at Moog's factory, Moog's victory garden, and backstage at a Moogfest concert picking up banter between Moog, WOO, and Wakeman, a reminiscing with Emerson and a few whacked out bay area groups making weird noises with there Moogs.Even though it runs about an hour, I had to break it up into two viewing sessions because it was so boring. What sucks is that Moog is an interesting guy, the history of his company is a great story and the iconic Moog artists all mostly colorful characters. This director had a goldmine on his hands and could've made a fantastic, compelling, awesome, movie where you are entertained and actually learned something. Instead, he squandered his opportunity and made a real snoozer of a film.Someone from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences needs to confiscate this director's camera. They must have a hyperactive hall monitor over there who'd be willing to do it for mankind. I mean this doesn't need to be The King of Kong or a long drawn out Ken Burns doc, just somewhere in between.If you love synths and Moogs, this is of some interest as it shows Moog as a down to earth nice guy and it is worth a viewing. If you aren't to interested in the subject though don't even bother, it is a boring stinker.

aliaswade This must rank among the worst documentaries ever made, and that's truly a shame. The subject could have been endlessly interesting, not because of the man himself, but because of the musical revolution he instigated. Sadly this doc largely leaves it up to Moog to tell the story, producing a diffuse, woefully inadequate film. The man is pleasant enough, and tells one or two amusing anecdotes, but he's terrible at explaining his inventions, and worse at contextualizing them. Interviews with the likes of Bernie Worrell and Money Mark are equally uninformative and uninteresting. Only Rick Wakeman was worth talking to. There's a lesson in here for doc makers-- you actually have to WRITE your film. You can't just slop together a bunch of interview footage, as is done here. (Oral history doesn't work unless the event revisited is familiar to all in most of its details.) This footage should have been placed into the hands of a good general-interest magazine writer and a decent film editor-- from this raw material they might have made a decent film. All in all, a really frustrating watch.

piechart2000 I enjoyed watching this homage to the synthesizer inventor and all round nice guy Bob Moog but spent hours afterward discussing ways this documentary could have been better. That's not to say there's all that much wrong with it except that it suffers from a genuine lack of archive footage. Bob was building his Synths from the early 60s, before that he was making Theremins. There's no footage of any of this. 'Why not use stills and rostrum?' was my immediate thought.It was great to hear Moog Synths being played well. Rick Wakemen (who provides the film's one big laugh) made them sound good. In fact, just to hear people messing about on them was interesting. I wanted more of this and perhaps some insights into how they were used in the studio (the film concentrates mainly on live performance).Perhaps just a bit too much time was spent allowing Bob to share his rather vague (and, sorry to say this, slightly boring) view of the universe. Not that the Doc as a whole is boring, it is not. It is very watchable and only 70 minutes long. Though I wanted something more from it, it did do what it set out to do without sagging.