Getting back to AFO, let us remember one of the first
episodes of the show – crocodile vs. shark. Well, technically, it was the ‘saltwater crocodile vs. great white shark’ episode, but…the
truth is that it was really just crocodile vs. shark, period. Shark and
crocodile species do show different behaviors between each other (bull, great
white, and tiger sharks live different lives, for example), but it isn’t as
complex and well-defined (or well-studied) as that of the mammals. Humans scientists
have studied the lives of tigers, lions, leopards a lot and they know how they
act similarly, and how – differently, but crocodiles or sharks – not so much.
And it shows.
Let us be honest – any fight (I am talking about CGI,
on-screen, not real life) is
controversial in terms of an outcome. However,
while the fight between a lion and a tiger caused many arguments, and there is
an actual page on the Wikipedia dedicated to the matter of which of the two big
cats is the better fighter and/or killer, the fight between a crocodile and a
shark…did not. No Wiki page, no nothing.
And?
And nothing. Human beings are prejudiced – we are
always prejudiced. Either we want one of the combatants to win ‘for real’, or
we do not care either way. Our feelings influence our choices and our choices
color our feelings. The AFO episodes of ‘lion vs. tiger’ and ‘saltwater
crocodile vs. great white shark’ are not too different, yet audience’s
reactions to each of them, were.
Anything else? Yes, unlike crocodiles and sharks, the
great cats (and also bears, BTW), utilize not just teeth and jaws, but also
paws and claws. Unlike, say, DW, AFO usually has fairly limited material to
work with from the start, and the ‘saltwater crocodile vs. great white shark’
was an especially limited episode. Yes, it worked – to a point; it showed the
audience that the crocodile was a ‘crusher’, while the shark was a ‘slicer’,
but otherwise the two animals were equal, and if in case of the lion and the
tiger most of the audience’s sympathies were on the lion’s side, here they didn’t
really have any preference – so why did the shark win?
Because from a technical point of view it is a bigger
and a heavier combatant, and in AFO this is the winning champion. Sometimes
this is the proper P.O.V., (as it was in the brown bear and the Siberian tiger
face-off), but other times it is not. A great white shark might be heavier than
a crocodile, even the saltwater crocodile, but the crocodile actually has a
very powerful bite, and its death roll is much more energetic than it how was
depicted in this episode. On the other hand, the shark’s skeleton is made out
of cartilage, (just feel your nose or your ears), meaning that it is even more
vulnerable to a crocodile’s crushing bite than an antelope or a zebra is. In
real life, the saltwater crocodile would have hurt the great white shark much
more so than how it did on the show, to a point where it wouldn’t have continue
the fight once the crocodile broke off and went to the surface to breathe, but
just swam off to recover, (hopefully). But apparently this was not good enough
for AFO, (unlike JFC, all of its episodes resulted in one opponent dead and the
other – alive, while JFC was more flexible), and so the shark won – just because.
Well, good luck to it.
For the rest of us, things are not so rosy, and no, I
am not talking about the Marvel comics’ Civil War II for a change – that is actually shaping to be something
interesting. I am talking about the recent terrorist attack in France – and
even more recent attempt at a coup in Turkey. We are living in interesting
times – and I can only hope that we can survive them.
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