European documentaries usually simply follow the process and neutrally explain what is happening.
There are still a lot of great YouTube channels - Applied Science, Tech Ingredients and such. Nationality has nothing to do with this. 1970’s American television was amazing. Watch some Bell Labs videos or how Saul Bass did branding.
Technology Connections, Numberphile, 3blue1brown, NativLang, Ben Eater, VSauce, Tom Scott etc.
As a teenager I could watch NatGeo and perhaps another similar channel with 2 hour dragged out documentaries with talking heads edited and narrated by people who don't love the topic the way these YouTubers do.
I think the Internet is still great if you curate what you watch and read, it's better than ever. But perhaps it's worse on the average. The junk is more potent and the intellectual poison is dosed higher than even the worst reality shows used to be on TV.
Both of these can be true at the same time.
Also, you're watching this 1937 docu on YouTube, not on Discovery Channel on TV.
Not sure if there is any disagreement, you're resonating with what I said. Both are true - there is some shitty stuff and there are some great channels. Cherry picking examples doesn't actually drive my point so let me try again - It's not so much about specific channels/documentaries, but whether nationality has anything to do with it. I just don't think Americans produce content that's any different than Europeans. That was the point I was trying to convey.
Those productions are often actually really boring though. For all the bad stuff we say about History Channel and alien documentaries, it was torture to watch some boring history docus in school history class about some medieval battles with a dry voice detailing the dates and the names etc.
Sure there's a space in between, I just mean that the very commercial-focused documentaries are more an American thing and arrived along with American style cable TV to Europe.
It's just like in sports now where someone has to be rambling about something the entire game, even though you're watching it. It's still useful, often to find out which player shot or for the added excitement with the crowd. But they ALL feel the need to fill dead space the entire show which I personally would experiment with if I ran the show. There's plenty going on always already. Humans are weird like that.
I'm sure this has applications in Youtube and other educational videos or whatever.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a8/21/10/a82110b6d53e4089a33e...
I think that's because the older movie is an actual educational movie, while the video you linked is really pseudo-educational entertainment. An educational video has the goal of leaving the viewer with actual understanding of something, while the pseudo-educational video only cares to vaguely tickle the viewer's curiosity, and is fine to leave them nearly as ignorant as when they started. While the two movies may have a "similar level of detail," the educational video focuses on fully explaining a specific problem and solution, while the pseudo-educational video only vaguely skims through the high-level steps of some manufacturing process and barely even explains what the product is for.
http://www.engineerguy.com/ makes educational videos similar to this 1937 movie on a lot of similar topics.
[1] https://giansegato.com/essays/edutainment-is-not-learning/
Instead of running through all the parameters in ten minutes and one second, the dude keeps twiddling the knobs and lets you hear what they do. He spends ten minutes on dialing just one sound.
As a bonus, since the vid is from the early eighties, you can occupy yourself by guessing exactly how high the man is.