Unless it's a title I recognize, I usually ignore most of the random history documentaries on Amazon Prime Video because I've never heard of the people or companies responsible for making them. Plus, many of them look to be so cheaply produced that I sometimes think they got made accidentally -- as if someone literally just filmed a Wikipedia page with a flip phone and posted it as a "documentary."
However, while skimming through the Prime Video dashboard earlier, I couldn't help but notice this documentary about William Tecumseh Sherman:
Now, Sherman was a genuinely fascinating figure and one of the great Union Generals of the Civil War, so a documentary about him could potentially be very interesting. I have read several books about Sherman and especially enjoy his Memoirs. But what really caught my eye about this particular documentary is the simple fact that...
...THAT'S NOT WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN!!!
It's Zachary Taylor! How is that a mistake that someone makes? How is that a mistake that even a goofy AI algorithm makes? It's not as if nobody has ever heard of these guys. And I don't think anybody can argue that General Sherman and Zachary Taylor ever looked the slightest bit alike:
They didn't even have much connection to one another! Taylor was the 12th President of the United States and one of the Generals who won popular acclaim during the Mexican-American War. But Sherman didn't serve under him. In fact, Sherman didn't even see any combat against Mexico -- he spent the majority of that war bored out of his mind on the frontier in California.
Their only real connection was the fact that Taylor's Interior Secretary, Thomas Ewing Jr. of Ohio, was Sherman's foster father and eventual father-in-law (yes, you read that correctly).
I mean...the documentary is probably not elite-level work as it is, but at the very least a biographical documentary about a historic figure should have the correct thumbnail photo of the subject. If they can't even get THAT part right maybe it doesn't need to be featured on a streaming service.
