History Channel looks at early G. Washington

George Washington has one of the most recognizable mugs on the planet. But what was inside that head?

The History Channel documentary “Washington The Warrior” explores the formative years of America’s first president in a two-hour Memorial Day special.

“We all know the Washington on the dollar bill and Mount Rushmore, and we know him as the president. But the more we started thinking about it, the more we realized that there is a vast undiscovered territory about Washington’s early life,” says the History Channel’s Dolores Gavin.

The program follows “America’s first action hero” through his transformation from a brash young officer, nearly killed during the French and Indian War in the mid-1750s into the wiser Revolutionary War hero of Yorktown in 1781.

The production is narrated by Stacy Keach, with Shea Patrick and Jackson Bolt portraying the tall, imposing Washington at two stages of his military career.

Gavin believes viewers no longer want their history “filtered from a dry textbook” that offers only one-dimensional portraits of historic figures and events.

“I think now we want to pull heroes close,” she says. “We want to see their humanness and their mistakes, and most importantly, how they learned from their mistakes, because then it feels like we know them.”