the future is wild, review

["Nick Gardner" <ratites637@hotmail.com>]

Last night, I tuned into Animal Planet to watch the pseudo-documentary "THE 
FUTURE IS WILD".  TFIW rehashes a great deal of imagery from older 
documentaries (i.e. WALKING WITH DINOSAURS, WHEN DINOSAURS ROAMED AMERICA, 
LAND OF THE MAMMOTH) often to its disadvantage.  Consider the segment with 
the large Amazonian carakillers, when the data feature comes up.  It states 
that birds are the descendants of dinosaurs which is not wrong, however the 
"dinosaur" they show is in fact... A PTEROSAUR!  A similar error (but not as 
damaging) occurs when they discuss the giant tortoises.  They show a clip of 
Camarasaurus from WDRA and call it Brachiosaurus.  And quite often, instead 
of creating a new shot, they rehash an old shot and show it again as a 
mirror image.

The concept of TFIW, is that humans have left the planet and 5,000,000 years 
later, they send a probe back to Earth to see what new creatures have 
emerged.  My major problem is, what prompted the death of most of the taxa 
beloved and familiar to us?  It seems there are several taxa better fitted 
to survive than some of those which are suggested to have survived and 
spawned the new species.

Often, Dixon's creatures are based on something we've seen previously 
(consider carakillers = phorusrhacids, snowstalkers = wolverines, shagrats = 
capybaras) or are rather ridiculous in general (torotans, graet blue 
windrunners, sharkopaths)...

Ex. Carakillers.  Considering these flightless birds are hunting something 
like primates, I'm surprised that they can ever catch them since they scream 
and display insanely when they have found something.  It's fairly obvious 
that these were loosely modelled after phorusrhacids despite that they are 
claimed to have descended from caracaras.

My other problem is how definite the script seems to make it sound that 
these creatures will arise.  It isn't like we know what's going to happen or 
anything, we can make predictions but they are just predictions in the 
end...  I remember a show called the Extinction Files.  It was probably one 
of the best documentaries I have ever seen at any one time.  The end 
suggested, and made sure the audience understood that it was a suggestion, 
that if humans suddenly disappeared, that rodents, weed-like plants, and 
insects seemed the most likely conquerors.  Out of curiousity, why are 
rodents often suggested...?

Oh well... I guess that's TV for you...

Nick Gardner

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