And so, Animal Planet has brought us another Monster Week,
which features the following pearls of bad television:
- “Man-Eating Zombie Cats”. The virus is turning wild cats,
from wildcats to Siberian tigers, into man-attacking zombies. Basically, this
is your typical lousy zombie flick, with a wildlife twist, where the ‘others’
(to use a genre term), are not just zombies, but also carnivorous mammals,
predators, and thus – doubly dangerous. This idea is an old one – mankind has
feared big predators – lions, wolves, tigers, bears, sharks, crocodiles, etc –
since it was represented by australopithecines that just came down from trees. Ok.
This idea got augmented by another old chestnut – that only mentally sick,
unstable animals will attack the humans, who are kings (and queens) of beasts.
Again, that is nothing new. But – where’s the educational angle in all of this?
“Man-Eating Zombie Cats” seeks to purely entertain, tuning in with humanity’s
oldest (and currently incorrect) fears. AP, can you hear me?
- “Man-Eating Super Wolves” or something along that line.
According to this idea, wolves are beginning to starve and are starting
to attack people. Again, this is an old idea, used by natives of Europe, North
America, and possibly Asia, to justify their killings of wolves. The wolves (including
werewolves) were some of the oldest villains in humanity’s history (and
villains’ minions – remember the original ‘Dracula’ novel, for example?) and
what AP does here is bring up an old literary/movie cliché yet again. Bravo!
But there is a twist:
Currently, the American (and also Canadian, and European) society
is divided into pro-wolf and anti-wolf camps. These camps are not all
encompassing, of course, but they are well-known and well-established, and they
are trying to recruit and influence people into their directions; AP’s special
on man-eating wolves plays into the anti-wolf camp, of course, a rather strange
site for a TV channel that is named Animal Planet.
Admittedly, this departure from the channel’s animal roots
has went on for the last years, when AP began to air less wild nature shows,
and more shows like “Tanked”, “My Cat from Hell” and “Too Cute”, which deal
with pets. History’s “Swamp People”, or now-gone “MonsterQuest”, have more wild
nature in them, than most of AP’s current shows, to say nothing of Discovery
Channel or BBC. There was a time when AP featured wildlife, not just domestic,
and some shows – like River Monsters – still do, but they are in minority: AP
is steadily moving away from the wild into domestic, from educational into
entertaining, and it shows no signs of stopping.
- The current peak of this trend became currently embodied by the film
about lampreys, “The Blood Lake”. Made by The Asylum, the same company that
made “Sharknado”, this is fiction, clearly and honestly: AP itself acknowledged
that it was fiction (the incident after the mermaid duology and “Megalodon: The
Monster Shark Lives”, where some misunderstanding about the docufiction nature
of those films occurred remained fresh in AP’s collective mind, it seems),
which means that it has basically abandoned the documentary genres and is
filming and airing fiction, and fiction alone.
Question: does AP think that it will be able to compete with
other purely fiction channels, such as SyFy and Spike successfully? They have
been in this field far longer than AP did, and pet- and pet-related shows are
poor aides in this endeavor further. At least “Lost Tapes” are gone, so that is
good...
Conclusion: AP has gone from documentary to
docufiction/fiction channel with an animal flavor. This is a dark day for all
wild animal lovers indeed!
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