I was pretty beat after returning from Boston yesterday, so I ended up watching bits and pieces of the much-ballyhooed Planet Earth tv show on the Discovery Channel. I can’t really assess it in detail, as I was flipping back and forth to the Dresden Files, but they certainly had some impressive footage of various animals doing interesting animal things.
They did one thing that bugged me, though: The voice-over in the actual program talkked explicitly about how unique the footage was. There were numerous mentions of the fact that nobody had ever filmed this or that thing before, or that some technological widget made it possible to film some thing in unprecedented detail. And, really, that struck me as kind of tacky.
I mean, it’s great material for some making-of features on the inevitable DVD, and it’s fascinating to see what they needed to do to get footage of unique animal behavior, but I don’t need to hear that during the animal footage. When you’re showing nifty pictures of cool animals, talk about the animals. The footage was amazing, and the quality spoke for itself– I didn’t need Sigourney Weaver’s voice to clue me into the fact that they had some really impressive footage there.
Again, I didn’t watch the whole thing, so it’s possible that I just got unlucky and the few bits where they were aggressively touting their technical prowess happened to line up with commercial breaks on the SciFi channel. But it was a mildly annoying note in what was otherwise a very impressive presentation.