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Where's The Remote?
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Putting Our Planet in the Pole Position
In advance of Earth Day, a number of programs aim to remind viewers that there are more pertinent issues than shaving your head and dropping in and out of rehab.
Friday, March 23, 2007 at 4:15 PM
By Shelley Gabert
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Discovery
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Top of the world ma
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I don't know about you, but I'm sick of hearing about Britney Spears' escapades, Angelina Jolie’s latest adoption or Mel Gibson’s latest tirade. Thankfully, none of these creatures make an appearance in Planet Earth, an 11-part Discovery television series beginning this Sunday, March 25th, at 8:00 p.m. ET/PT.
Co-produced with the BBC and narrated by Sigourney Weaver, who also arrives shortly in theaters in The TV Set, Planet Earth is notable first and foremost for the fact that it was shot over a five-year period in more than 200 different locations. In other words, if you have HD TV, make sure you watch this on the Discovery HD Theater channel.
Sunday’s inaugural episode “Pole to Pole” shows how the sun, ‘the engine of life,’ figures in some amazing discoveries while acting as a time clock for the birth and death of all life cycles. The program is a feast for the eyes and spirit, capturing scenes of extraordinary beauty mixed with the violence of nature's hierarchy.
“Pole to Pole” opens with the head of a polar bear emerging out of hibernation in March and then sliding down a snow bank. This mom is followed by her two cubs, who take their first few steps, motivated by hunger. Then we go to Northern Canada, where helicopter photography shows three million caribou as they migrate across the tundra, to Amore leopards in Eastern Russia, to the mating dance of the Blue Bird of Paradise in the rain forest of New Guinea, to elephants swimming.
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Discovery
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Narrator Sigourney Weaver
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For those of you who couldn't handle watching baby penguins perish in The March of the Penguins, be warned that a portion of "Pole to Pole" covers similar territory with the aforementioned caribou, elephants and more. This episode is followed on Sunday night by “Mountains” (9:00 p.m.) and “Deep Ocean” (10:00 p.m.); subsequent Sunday episodes include “Deserts,” “Ice Worlds,” “Shallow Seas,” “Jungles” and “ Forests and Caves.”
All in all, it’s a remarkable undertaking, as groundbreaking in its own way as such signature Sir David Attenborough offerings as Life on Earth and The Living Planet. So it seems only natural that Attenborough not only narrated the British version, but also wrote five of the episodes.
But that’s not all that is being shared in advance of the April 22nd celebration known as Earth Day. Next Wednesday, March 28th, at 8:00 pm, actor Matt Damon narrates PBS' “State of the Ocean's Animals,” the 10th installment of the award winning Journey to Earth series. The one-hour episode explores why half of all marine creatures could be extinct within the next 25 years.
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PBS
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We're voraciously emptying them out
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National Geographic Channel has A Man Among Wolves, a one-hour special on researcher Shaun Ellis, who lives among the wolves at Wolf Pack Management in Combe Martin Wildlife Park in North Devon, England. And finally, the Sundance Channel will launch its 13-part series The Green on April 17th at 9:00 p.m. Presented by Robert Redford and hosted by Simran Sethi and Majora Carter, this program showcases individuals and communities who are taking steps to live “green.”
Expect to learn about things like Veg Powered Systems, which use second-hand vegetable oil to run diesel trucks, and Luxury Eco, a line of environmentally conscious men's, women's and children's clothes made from seaweed, bamboo, organic wool, cotton, corn, wood pulp and stretch bamboo. The series is part of a bigger three-hour block of programming that also includes the documentary A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash.
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