Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, and sometimes you
have no idea as to how to fix it. On the other hand, maybe you do, but not
entirely sure if it will be worth it, especially in the long run. Sometimes
things are just stacked in your favor, though you do not know it, and your
actions, possibly, are making it worse. Now onto the movies!
…No, we are not talking about the ‘Frozen 2’ film; it has
not come out yet, so we will talk about it later. What we are talking about
here is the trailer for 2020’s version of ‘Call of the Wild’ film, made by Fox,
(cough Disney cough). Based on Jack London’s novel of the same name, the movie again
features real life dogs (and wolves?), albeit augmented by CGI.
…Yes, it clearly seems to be influenced by 2019’s version of
‘Lady and the Tramp’, but even from this initial trailer it can be seen that
this movie will be much more original content than the adaption of L&T has
been. How so and why?
Firstly, what is
the original novel about? Jack London wrote two great novels about people and
dogs in the north: ‘Call of the Wild’ and ‘White Fang’. ‘White Fang’ tells the
story of a dog, or a dog-wolf hybrid, which is born in a wild, gets captured
(alongside his mother) and raised by Native Americans, has a lot of adventures
of a savage kind, and eventually is brought to the mainland U.S. by his last
and kindly Anglo-American owner, where he lives the rest of his life. ‘Call of
the Wild’ goes precisely in the opposite direction: we have a Saint Bernard dog
that gets kidnapped and brought to the Yukon, where he goes through a slew of
owners, good and bad, until he gets adopted by a kindly old hermit, who likes
dogs much more so than he does people, (and who apparently will be played by
Harrison Ford in the 2020 film), and who… eventually gets murdered, alongside
his dogs, (except for the Saint Bernard in question), by Native American
savages, cough. And what does the Saint Bernard do? He takes over a local wolf
pack and wages war against the Native Americans in question for the rest of his
life.
…Now, a question about just how much Saint Bernard dogs are
compatible with wolves, both in behavior, (that’s malleable, true), and in
anatomy – humans have modified dogs from their initial wolf, jackal, coyote and
wild dog stock a lot. That said, we must keep in mind that human knowledge and attitude
regarding wolves, dogs, and wolf-dog hybrids has changed a lot between the
times of Jack London (and his works) and the modern times on one hand, and on
the other? In the upcoming 2020 film, the titular dog will actually not be a
pureblood Saint Bernard, but rather a Saint-Bernard/Scotch Collie mixed breed
instead. Is it because it will also be revealed to be a rescued (from a
shelter) dog? It is anyone’s guess. Between this revelation and the glimpses of
Buck the dog and Harrison Ford’s character rescuing a Native American woman,
(something that didn’t happen in the novel), odds are that the 2020 film will
be very different from the original novel, because reasons. Anything else?
On the plus side, I watched a NatGeo special, ‘America’s Greatest
Animals’, where NatGeo and four of its hosts oversaw twelve of North America’s
best-known iconic animals and selected the top five out of them – the gray
wolf, the grizzly, the polar bear, the moose and the bison. It was nicely done,
(though the hosts’ comments subtracted rather than added to the show’s
enjoyment) and its’ script was smartly written, actually. Even the grading
system was well designed…and this brings us back to ‘Kings of Pain’, even
though we would rather not.
The show’s hosts, and actually the show itself keeps on
imitating ‘Brave Wilderness’, and they are not succeeding even here: judge for
yourself. On one episode, Coyote Petersen got stung by two North American scorpions, (this is important), and in another, he
got stung (or spiked?) by a lionfish. And what do we see on this week’s episode
of ‘Kings of Pain’? They travel to – South Africa, where they get stung by two
scorpions and a lionfish. Cough.
Now, there is another episode, where Petersen actually gets
himself treated for the lionfish stinger, for example; it is product placement, true, but it does balance-out nicely the
process of him actually getting hurt. We are getting nothing like this in ‘Kings
of Pain’… on top of the mess with the scorpions.
…Let’s talk about the scorpions. In this week’s episode, Mr.
Rob Alleva and Mr. Adam Thorn got stung by two South African scorpions – one is a ‘bark scorpion’, and another one
is an Uroplectes, aka a lesser
thick-tailed scorpion. That is not the problem, the problem is that normally
the moniker ‘bark scorpion’ applies to several North American species – the Arizona bark scorpion, the striped
bark scorpion, and the Baja California bark scorpion. They all belong to the Centruroides genus, which is found only
in the Americas… which hasn’t prevented an article – you can find it here,
right now (https://meaww.com/kings-of-pain-rob-alleva-adam-thorn-stung-two-scorpions-lionfish-389378),
from calling the ‘not-Uroplectes’
scorpion a ‘South African bark scorpion (Centruroides vittatus)’. End quote.
There is such a scorpion indeed – it is the previously mentioned striped bark
scorpion, which is found in the U.S. and northern Mexico. Supposedly, it is the
most frequently encountered species of scorpion in the U.S., so some confusion
can be accepted, especially since there is also a scorpion species known as Uroplectes vittatus instead, but still.
The words Uroplectes and Centruroides are completely different –
intentionally different, as to prevent confusion that can arise when only lay-names
such as ‘bark scorpions’ are used instead. Someone is being unprofessional in
the ‘Kings of Pain’ cast, crew and associates, and that really is not good. Seriously,
we’re ripping-off ‘Brave Wilderness’, whose double-scorpion episode was set in
the U.S., where the various bark scorpion species, (or rather, the scorpion
species that are most commonly known as bark scorpions by the American
populace), live. Can we at least put-in some extra effort to ensure that we got
our scientific names and geography straight? The continents of North America
and Africa are distinctly separate from each other, and so are their respective
animals. Real life sucks already, but it does not mean that we should make it
dumber as well.
…As for the lionfish…fair enough. There currently are 12
recognized species of those fish and they all resemble each other closely enough
for lay-people (such as you and me) to honestly confuse them. No problem there,
good luck to Mr. Alleva and Mr. Thorn as well as their entourage – they will
need it.
…This is it for now; see you all soon!
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