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Planet Earth As You've Never Seen It Before
CatrelStevens
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
If you've been watching the Discovery Channel at all in the past week or two, you know about the Planet Earth mini-series starting on March 25th. Originally aired in the UK in March of last year, the series is finally being broadcast in America. Not only that, but it will also be shown in HD where available.
This series looks amazing. It is beautifully shot and containing some of the most stunning images I've seen of nature. The original series is narrated by legendary naturalist Sir David Attenborough, but the American broadcast has a new narrator: Sigourney Weaver of Aliens fame. The U.S. version will also see the episodes in a different order than the original UK release, although I'm not certain on what the new order will be. In late April the series will be released on DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-ray DVD. (The DVDs will be the original UK broadcast with Attenborough providing narration.)
Planet Earth shows us the first footage of a snow leopard every being filmed in the wild (after 5 days of searching through Pakistani mountains), the second ever filming of macaques swimming underwater, footage of the entire baikal teal population (300,000) migrating in a single flock, and many other never-before-seen shots. This series doesn't show you the nature that you always see in generic documentaries. It focuses on the parts of the world most people never even hear of, nevermind see. If you want to open your eyes to the vast diversity of life on this planet, this miniseries is a great place to start. You can visit the official website at http://www.planet-earth.com and view the trailer and several clips just to get an idea of what this broadcast will entail. I highly recommend you do because the above pictures do not do this documentary justice.
So, who's excited about this? Nature has continually had the ability to amaze me, no matter how much I learn about it. Let's use this thread to talk about the Planet Earth series, as well as nature in general. If there's a feature, animal, habitat, ecosystem, natural disaster, formation, or whatever in nature that you find interesting, POST IT! This thread will be for all things nature-related and wondrous. Feel free to debate and discuss all things nature.
I would like to present you all with the Lungfish
Found in Africa, South America, and Australia, this interesting fish has the ability to breathe through water AND air. I'm not sure about the South American or Australian varieties, but the African lungfish lives in ponds during the rainy season. In the dry season all the ponds dry up completely, so the lungfish burrows into the mud. There it secretes a mucous to coat and protect its skin. It lies in wait, buried in the dry soil, until the next rainy season. It breathes by gulping air into its stomach where a long pouch lined with red blood cells can absorb oxygen straight from the air like mammal lungs.
So, D&D, show us your nature!
Some clips of the series:
New Guinea Birds of Paradise
Great White Sharks Hunting Seals (Amazing slow-mo footage)
Giant Manta Rays
Colugo or "Flying Lemur"
Square-Headed Tibetan Fox Hunting Rabbit
Planet Earth Theme and Still Photos
Although, I still highly encourage watching the trailer and clips on the official website linked above. It will help you understand the grand scope of this program.
CatrelStevens on
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They should have kept David Attenborough.
Ya, it is a pretty big shame that they replaced Attenborough. While Weaver's voice definitely isn't bad, Attenborough is a great man and dedicated quite a bit of his time and life to organizing this documentary and it's kind of a kick in the teeth to replace his soothing voice. However, if you really want to hear him, you can buy the DVDs that have his original narration.
Whoops, used the wrong host. All fixed.
Attenborough is one of my heroes.
The series was very good, but I thought it lacked the focus of some of the BBC's other, better documentaries - such as Trials of Life. But absolutely beautiful all the same.
EDIT: That footage is completely different from what we saw here in Aus.
Giant underwater scorpions FTW
Sad fact: over a lunch hour at the office this week, I had a co-worker berate this type of viewing. I was fucking stunned--she suggested that watching something like this, or something on History Channel or just general Discovery viewing, was "boring" and "useless". Where do people like this come from? More importantly--why do we have to put up with these fuckers?
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That is completely awesome.
I definitely urge everyone to watch it.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
I think my favourite scenes are the mass gatherings of anything, like the trees from the taiga forests, or the flocks of birds. or giant hurds of animals. It's all incredible.
wtf Earth
I hope the American release is not fucked up somehow in the localization. They'll find some way to mess it up. I'm already concerned with the rearranged episode order.
I like Weaver but Attenborough sounds good too. Hmm.
That clip of the shark, around the 2:40 mark, he looks like he's swimming in the air. That slo-mo footage is amazing. And the music accompanying those mantas is just right. They're doing somersaults! I love these shows + history channel ones too.
Is this it? Doesn't say if it's Weaver or Attenborough.
Its Attenborough
That's meme worthy. Look at the fish. He's all like OH, SNAP!
That clip w/ the great white sharks eating the seals is totally rad.
>_> Nevermind.
Someone flip the lava switch, quick!
This is the best natural history programme I've ever seen. The shots that they capture are breathtaking, for example when the Snow Lepoards running near vertical down a mountain after some prey. Unreal.
They're making a Planet Earth feature length documentary, but Morgan Freeman will be narrating, mostly to appeal to American audiences more. It's a damn shame, Freeman's great and all, but David Attenborough deserves the recognition for his decades of work on BBC natural history shows.
Oh gosh.
Someone has got to make an animated GIF of this bird.
Have you guys ever seen that video of a shark barfing up its own stomach, popping inside-out out it's mouth.
I'm not, its stuff like this that makes up a huge part of their income isn't it? License fee pays to make them and then they sell this to other companies for bucketloads of cash. Plus DVD sales, though I wonder whether things like this will be on the free download service they want to do.
I'll be buying an HDDVD player or a PS3 for certain when it comes out.
Are you joking?
The BBC have been producing the best natural history documentaries for...well...forever, really.
The opening post seems...familiar. Hello fellow SA person.
These are screenshots harvested by hand from the first DVD episode:
Click for big!
The Blue Planet was just as critically acclaimed, however. I still need to watch that myself...
Blue Planet was good, but more narrowly focused (as were most of the previous Attenborough docs).
The deep sea episode of Blue Planet was so fucking awesome.