"The March of Time" — tonight on Turner Classic Movies

Long story short: to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the newsreel, Turner Classic Movie channel tonight broadcasts a four-hour cavalcade of restored installments.

Wrote Tom Shales in a laudatory review in yesterday's Washington Post, "Fascinating, enthralling, enlightening — many a superlative applies to these documentary shorts, which have gathered value with the march of time itself and have been rescued from the ravages of time by New York's Museum of Modern Art and the HBO Archive...."

If the trailer up top is any indication of the quality of the restoration, it'll be like watching for the first time.

As I remember these shorts, they were mostly very poor quality video, which somehow made them seem that much more authentic.

Four hours of "The March of Time" air on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) starting at 8 p.m. ET tonight.

DirecTV channel 256; Dish 132.