Frederick the Great: A Most Lamentable History Breaching Space and Time.

Well, there’s 600 right there. And it being episode 600, it’s high time we talk about Frederick stuff. As our Twitter followers know, I recently had a chance to see Mein Name ist Bach, a German film purporting to be about the Musical Offering incident in which Bach visited Frederick’s Berlin back in 1747. Movies that feature Frederick the Great as a major character are few and far between, so I was pretty excited to see this one.
I will say that the filming and setting are very nice, and you get some lovely side glimpses of Sans Souci here and there. But historically it’s a train wreck. Frederick is made out to be a grotesque ape, the chronology is all mixed up to intentionally put him in a bad light, his sister is given this Romantic Heroine halo and all the awful stuff she did is quietly not mentioned, life in Frederick’s court is dismally portrayed, CPE Bach comes out without a scratch in spite of being a major player in the whole Musical Offering event, and on and on.
I mean, we make a comic that takes quite a few liberties with Frederick’s development, but (a) time travel makes stuff go weird, and (b) we take some pains to say exactly where we’re departing and why, while this film touts its “meticulous research” on the cover while consistently presenting us with the exact opposite of what actually happened. If it were an Abe Lincoln movie, I’d say OK – we’ve got quite a few Abes on film, and one utterly wrong one can’t hurt, but Frederick doesn’t show up but once every couple of decades, and for THIS guy to be who people call to mind when they think of our dear Fritz is a real shame.
A film to be avoided. But, you can always get your Frederick fix with us – six and a half years and 600 episodes later, we’re still here and intend to be so for some time yet!
– Count Dolby von Luckner