Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.
Honolulu Lite
The changing nature
of nature shows
NATURE programming has undergone amazing changes in the past 30 years. Today they consist mainly of cameras catching animals in the wild doing their wild animal things while in the past they consisted mainly of people shooting different animals and posing for pictures next to the carcasses.Viewers today would be shocked at the old nature shows. One I remember watching as a kid involved a man whose claim to fame was that he killed a different animal in a different way each week. His life's ambition was to kill an elephant with a handgun.
So one week there he is standing in the bush about 15 feet from an elephant. The elephant looked up casually, apparently thinking, "Whoa. What's this all about?"
Then the fearless hunter held up the biggest handgun you'd ever seen, a cannon with a handgrip. Bam, bam, bam, ... the guy empties the gun into the elephant's forehead. For a split second, the elephant stood there stunned, as if it couldn't believe what the little jerk had just done. Then he toppled over, dead.
Eventually, conservation became the main theme in nature programming.
It seemed like just about everyone was out on the African plain shooting animals with tranquilizer darts and tagging them. One animal could have five or six tags, a large red number painted on its flank and a satellite radio beeper stapled to its tail. They were the laughing stock of the animal kingdom.
Other animals were tagged so many times, they became addicted to the animal tranquilizers. On one show, a cheetah kept following Marlin Perkins around saying, "Hey, man, how 'bout a little fix? I'm going cold turkey next week. I promise. I just need a little taste to get me through next week. The 'Born Free' people are here and I'm trying to get on as an extra."
Perkins was the best known of the nature show guys back then. He didn't kill animals; he just sort of hassled them. He and his sidekick Jim Fowler would tromp around in the wild until they came across an animal. Then Perkins would say something like, "Look, Jim, a vicious kinkajou. Pick it up."
That was Jim's job, picking up wild animals for Marlin.
It was around that time that nature shows also "recreated" natural events. The TV people apparently carried animals with them to stage scenes. If they came across, say, a large boa constrictor in the wild, someone would yell, "Quick! Throw him the pig!" Then they'd chuck a pig out of the back of the truck.
It wasn't a wild pig. It was the kind of pig you'd find on an American farm. Viewers never asked what an American farm pig was doing in the Congo being eaten by a 10-foot long snake.
Today, nature programmers hunker down by a water hole and film whatever the animals naturally do there. The problem is that the only things animals naturally do is eat each other or have sex. It's so graphic, kids can't watch it. Try to explain to a 5 year old why the two giant rhinos are dancing.
And who wants to watch a hyena rip off a zebra ear and munch on it while the zebra clings to life?
And as bad as it was to see that guy kill the elephant with a handgun, at least it was over fast. In nature, there seems to be very few quick kills.
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
or send E-mail to cmemminger@starbulletin.com.
The Honolulu Lite online archive is at:
https://archives.starbulletin.com/lite