Magnificent series

I've spent the last couple days watching this and I just finished it. I think it's far superior to the 2014 Netflix series about Marco Polo. That one had good aspects too, but I think this 1982 series was far better all around. It's a shame how it seems to be so little-known. Almost every thread here is just people asking how to find it on DVD.

Pretty much everything about it is perfect. The music, the settings, the costumes, the acting. The characters feel a lot more genuine than I thought they were in the Netflix series. Not so much pointless drama for its own sake. Nor the exploitation scenes which I felt kind of treated East Asian women as sex objects in the Netflix series. The cinematography is gorgeous. The settings are beautiful, especially the ones in Venice and China, and make you almost feel like you're there. Lacking the special effects of the Netflix series, this one felt a lot more authentic to me. Ying Ruocheng was a great Kublai Khan, and his farewell scene with Marco was really moving. The background music of the whole series was perfect, and has a certain haunting quality to it.

If I could think of just one criticism, I did feel that using white actors for Middle Eastern characters was a bit odd, but perhaps it was just harder to find Middle Eastern actors in Western film industries in the 1980s. Anyway the actors they used weren't bad. I always like Ian McShane in anything, and his character's origin story as a European slave who became a Muslim general was plausible; that was the whole story of the Mamluks in Egypt.

To sum up, the 1982 Marco Polo is just about perfect in my opinion. It's a beautifully crafted series. I loved it and feel that it deserves to be much better-known than it is. It's a shame how it's been so neglected and nobody seems to have heard of it.

If anyone wonders, I found it on DVD here:
https://www.amazon.com/Minutes-Marshall-Denholm-Bancroft-Lancaster/dp/B001190SGK/