Television host Jann Scott of Boulder, Colo., has placed all 22 episodes of his whimsical 30-minute programs about historic Route 66 on Travel Channel 1 Web site here. They’re available as podcasts, too.

Steered by an article by the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat & Chronicle, I’ve found a decent way to search for information about towns on Route 66 — or just about any town in the United States, for that matter.

It’s called ePodunk.com. It does a fairly good job consolidating search-engine data about a town into one place. The site has been around for seven years, but this is the first time I’ve heard about it.

It does have its holes. In the Tulsa listing, I saw a typo in its dates for the Tulsa State Fair. In Tucumcari, N.M., the ancestory listing for some reason doesn’t include Hispanic, which is by far the largest ethnic segment in the city and has been for many, many years.

And don’t look for really small burgs, either. I found no listings for Devils Elbow, Mo., or Glenrio, Texas or New Mexico. It does have a scant listing, however, for the Mojave Desert settlement of Amboy, Calif.

But the folks at ePodunk.com say they are adding stuff alll the time. So I may check into the site regularly.

The filmmakers should rename it, “Route 66: A (bad)Movie.”

An “open-source” film-making company, Veb Film Leipzig, made a “Route 66: An American (bad)Dream” and posted it on Google Video in the past week or so.

The premise: three young German men drive an old rented Cadillac across the country and document their experiences on film. As Route 66 documentaries go, it seems fairly typical at first blush. But one twist is that the Cadillac seems to constantly break down during their journey. So there is doubt about whether the guys will deliver the car to the rental place at the appointed time.

Despite its modest promise, it’s not a good film. Its pacing frequently veers from ponderous to tedious. “Route 66: An American (bad)Dream” is 1 hour, 43 minutes. One could easily slash it to 80 minutes or less.

It’s pretentious. The film contains sequences of out-of-focus collages, digital special effects and other artsy images that are either too long or pointless.

The narrator sounds so disengaged that one thinks he’s going to nod off.

The characters are uninvolving. Very little is known about the three men at the beginning, and you don’t get the feeling of knowing anything more about them 103 minutes later.

The movie isn’t even terribly interesting for roadies. The boys don’t even reach Route 66 until an hour into the film. Even then, you don’t see much of the Mother Road — save for one sequence that’s the most interesting part of the movie.

The trio drives into the Texas-New Mexico border ghost-town of Glenrio (which is where this scene is shot above, near the long-closed Little Juarez restaurant). They decide to head down the gravel stretch of old Route 66 that leads to San Jon. Out in the middle of nowhere, the Cadillac dies.

A couple with a pickup truck tows the Cadillac to an auto-repair shop just off the gravel road. While the mechanic works on the car for the next three days, he and his wife feed them, give them cold beer and provide a place to sleep. The three chat with the mechanic’s friends. The three have a chance to unwind from their frenetic pace. In the middle of a nearby junkyard, the three Germans lounge around on an abandoned boat and admire the beauty of the New Mexico countryside. When the car is fixed, not only does the mechanic accept no money, but he tops off their gas tank.

It’s too bad the three Germans didn’t have more encounters with people like this. It would have made a more intriguing movie than this otherwise boring, self-absorbed project.

(Note: “Route 66: An American (bad) Dream” isn’t rated. But I would give it a PG-13 for language and brief scenes of nudity.)