TV Reviews : Hot Dog! ‘Coney Island’ Lives Again on PBS

History is coming around again, bigger than ever. It wasn’t always fun the first time, as in the War Between the States, replayed in the rousing documentary series, “The Civil War.” But a new production on an old amazement, “Coney Island,” revives a more delicious era.

Airing at 9 tonight on Channels 28 and 15 as an episode of “The American Experience” series, it’s another achievement by one of the newly lionized Burns boys, in this case Ric Burns, brother of Ken of “Civil War” celebrity.

In its time at the turn of this century, the island at the bottom of Brooklyn was the gaudy playground of America, “controlled chaos,” a Magic Mountain-Disneyland-Knott’s Berry Farm all rolled together, with a lot of Venice Beach on Sundays thrown in, too. It was known, among various dismissive references, as Sodom by the Sea.

In its mutations over its too-few glory years, including the time of Luna Park, Dreamland and Steeplechase Park, it presented the latest, the wildest, the oddest--wild rides, freaks and girlie shows, the devilish Hellgate, a continuing exhibition of premature babies, even a reenactment of a sprawling tenement fire, as in later years Universal Tours would find joy in a Southern California earthquake.

Burns uses the usual archival photos, scratchy newsreels and winsome melodies. Too bad that history has to come and go so fast.