I watched this on Netflix last week and just knew the boys would love it, so last night Parker and Grayson and I watched it. And I was right - Parker in particular absolutely loved the computer-generated number 1 - and especially the first scene where a pterodactyl knocks itself out running into a prehistoric 1.
The documentary narrated by Terry Jones (and anything with a Python is a hit with my boys) is a tongue in cheek look at the history of the number 1, and really about the history of numbers. It starts with prehistoric man starting to count using marks on bones, and goes through Sumerian clay markers, Greek, Indian and Arabic mathematicians, the pros and cons of Roman numerals (did you know it would take eight minutes to write "billion" in Roman numerals?) and eventually ends up with 1 and his sidekick 0 taking over the world via the binary system (with an assist from clever CGI). Honors go to the explanation of what the word "decimate" really means and to Archimedes' cameo as a soap-sudsed streaker interrupting Terry's narration about weird Greek scholars.