History -- Wild West Tech Freak Shows II

For over 100 years, the "freak show" was one of America's most popular and acceptable forms of entertainment. The whole family would venture out to these early museums to see "once in a lifetime" spectacles. Animal curiosities and strangely shaped vegetables quickly gave way to human serpents, savages, simian women, snake eaters, and even the supernatural. Sideshow denizens were the biggest, the smallest, and the strangest people ever to inhabit the West. But there was more! Cowboys and farmhands got a chance to see some freaky technologies, too, at these "cavalcades of perversion." Hosted by David Carradine.

• documentary