In the 1960s and 1970s there was no mass cable television. There were no channels devoted to one lone subject, like nature documentaries. Thus, the fix for lovers of animals and adventures came down to a foreign import, the underwater television specials of Jacques Cousteau, and the weekly television series, Mutual Of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. It was a nature show for the family, and did not feature computer graphics and slow motion shots of animals killing each other.
It was hosted by the retired director of the St. Louis Zoo, Marlin Perkins, and co-hosted by naturalist Jim Fowler and several others over the years. Each episode focused on the peculiarities of an animal, and ended with Perkins stating that this or that was important to ‘the Wild Kingdom.’ While I loved watching the show as a child, over the years, I had let it slip through the crannies of my aging. Then, a while back, while selling some old books and DVDs to a Half Price Books store, I noticed two DVDs containing 10 half-hour episodes each of the old show. One was on The African Wild and the other was on Mammals Of North America.
Both packages contain three disks. The African Wild has three episodes on Dian Fossey and her gorillas on Disk 1. Disk 2 has three episodes on elephants, and the third disk has three episodes on capturing African game, and a fourth featuring memorable moments from the show. Mammals Of North America has three episodes on polar bears and seals. Disk 2 has an episode on arctic mammals, one on otters, and one on training seals. The final disk has four episodes: one on desert life in southern Arizona, another on bighorn sheep in Utah, another on a roundup of ponies on an island on the Delmarva peninsula, and the final one an episode on why conservation is a key. In many ways, this episode and the whole series were years, if not decades, ahead of the curve.
Often lampooned by comedians, one of the favorite moments in many episodes came when Perkins would speak to the camera (or in voiceover) in a monotone, while observing Fowler engaged in some dangerous activity, often with a dangerous animal like an alligator. This would be phrased in a manner like, "While I survey the area with Park Ranger Smith, Jim has his hands full with an angry grizzly bear. Attaboy, Jim, you show him who’s boss." But, the show was always family friendly. It almost always avoided showing the moment of a kill.
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