As seen in this amusing Washington Post video imagining how Ken Burns would tell the story of the original Star Wars trilogy.
The spot on stylistic tics—the slow drawling narrator, the talking heads, the reading of a letter from a dead soldier—shouldn’t keep us from recognizing the sharp jab of this satire. One of the problems with Ken Burns’s Civil War documentary was that it devolved into Confederate apologia by having Shelby Foote drone on about military tactics. With his charming Southern manners, Foote was all too inclined to make the Civil War into a military epic and defend the honor of military men like Robert E. Lee, while avoiding the evil of the cause they served in. In the Washington Post mash-up, the Shelby Foote role is played by neo-conservative journalist Sonny Bunch, who is in fact an apologist for the war crimes of Darth Vader and the Emperor Palpatine.