(22) What's Up, Doc?

I got hooked on documentaries of the nature variety when I was about eight; my great-grandmother bought me a two-part VHS series called “Life in the Wild” (which you too can buy on eBay for just $3.25). It wasn’t exactly the greatest nature doc ever, and I’m pretty sure the filmmakers used unethical tactics in it at some points, but before I watched that, I’d never heard of Kakadu, or Kruger, or the Camargue. PLUS, one of the sequences was shot in the Everglades, and as a kiddie Floridian (Flor-kid-ian! Ha! (please don’t judge me)), I was very happy to see my state represented (even though I still think they threw a rat into the water for a gator to eat).

In 2000, when I was thirteen, a Boston affiliate produced a series called “Wild Europe,” which I found equally fascinating, for the simple reason that nobody ever talks about European wildlife, except to mention hedgehogs in England and wolves in Romania. All good documentaries should shed light on the unknown or unexplored; that’s just good journalism. The program (sadly) never been released on DVD, but, again, if you’re interested, you can buy the complete six-VHS set on Amazon. Note that the quality of this one is, shall we say, a step up from the previous one, as denoted by its pricetag.

When I got to high school, I was introduced to the BBC, which takes nature documentaries right up to eleven on the Nigel Tufnel scale. I’d say that The Blue Planet, which I first watched in my Marine Bio class, is the best of the bunch…except that David Attenborough, narrator extraordinaire, and his team have also produced the fantastic “Life…” series. I haven’t seen all of this series, unfortunately, but if they’re all anything like “Life of Mammals,” which I own, I assume they must be pretty groundbreaking and excellent (that’s the best thing about BBC pieces—they’re not content to just go out, sit in a blind and film…they have to get new material that nobody has EVER filmed before. Hence, the feature on the inside of a platypus’ den, and the one about cave elephants. CAVE ELEPHANTS!)

The whole point of this long discussion was that I discovered over the weekend that putting nature documentaries on while I work on my thesis makes for excellent background noise. Maybe it’s the British accents, or the simple fact that I’ve seen them before, so I don’t get distracted trying to follow along with a plot. The only problem with this plan is that I don’t have my own copy of Planet Earth, which is also a strong contender for the title of BBC’s Best. This is a serious oversight on my part. I’ve seen all of the segments, thanks to borrowing friends’ copies, so it fit my ‘not-too-distracting’ criteria…but I didn’t have the actual set. Ugh.

Fortunately, 9th Street Video (which awesomely kept its name despite moving to Hitt Street) came through for me.

My living room table is messy.

And when I do have time to invest in watching a NEW documentary series…I’m turning towards everybody’s favorite photo pan-and-zoom man, Ken Burns.

Yes, he seriously set back multimedia production, but his Civil War piece alone makes up for this problem. I’ll let you know more about the Baseball one when I finally finish it. Then I can start on the National Parks set, and by then, well, hopefully the BBC will have something new out.