Weird Nature [VHS]

The series shows us how fabulous and wondrous the animals who share our world are. My husband and I watched the entire series last weekend, torn between needing to come up for air to process what we had seen in the previous episode and burning to see what more fantastic stuff was coming up. It did not disappoint. BBC is the standard by which all documentary makers should be held up to. In Weird Nature the British Broadcasting Company has triumphed again.

Animals do things even Disney's legions of animators can't come up with. Their bizarre behaviors - in mating, defense and hunting, self-medication, etc., are imaginatively presented in settings such as poisonous blowfish, camouflaging flounders and other sea creatures in a ghostly shipwreck replete with crystal chandeliers and overturned chessboards, and within likely contexts like Harley Davison riders out on a stretch of desert highway hilariously outrun by the North American roadrunner, who though can fly choses to run. This series is as far from dry, academic ponderings as possible, instead it is a carefully thought-out and executed project that was going to give action feature films a run for the money. And boy do they - like the roadrunner it leaves them all behind in the dust!

Animals only seem strange to us because we humans are so risibly ill-equipped for the rigors of the earth's elements, while they have evolved ingenuous ways to survive and reproduce. Animals inhabit the earth integrally linked to one another. We humans, in contrast, have come up (or down, depending on how you see things) the evolutionary ladder by din of our wits. Admirably as that may be we have assumed the arrogant view that the earth and its creatures are here for our sole domination and exploitation. The only thing our relatively hair-bared, scaleless, fat-cushioned bodies seems suited for is to be fodder for our bigger, faster and sharper-taloned neighbors, plus we can't sprout arms like certain reptiles when we get ours eaten up and we can't highroad outta here like the hippo, not to mention the cheetah, if our life depended on it and our tongues can't stretch triple the length of our bodies to catch preys and bring home the bacon - after watching this series I am left wondering how we got where we are today.

Weird Nature reminds us how much we (people and animals) need one another, how miraculous it is that we are sharing the planet with these fabulous creatures and that ultimately, and like us, animals just want to have a safe place to live and food to survive. Mankind may be the thinking ape but we are at the threshold of thinking ourselves out of an existence. And as we thoughtlessly turn pristine forests and waters into shopping malls and sanitized-versions of nature we are destroying the only habitats these awesome creatures know. There is so much we can learn from them but first we need to gain a sense of appreciation and bewonderment. Weird Nature shows us the way.