Please, please, National Geographic — get a more serious narrator and some non-cheesy commentary. Otherwise, though, this movie about romantic arthropods is very nice.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Sir David Attenborough is rolling in his grave, if they have it dug.
Lots of Octopi action here.
“Oh Drew, you crackle like no male ever has before.”
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Great footage, of course, but I just want to strangle that voice-over guy.
It’s clearly a misguided attempt to update the wry, flip, detached style of the old Disney “nature” films (which also piss me off, in retrospect) to modern, sitcom-irony-marinated sensibilities.
And it doesn’t work.
For arthropod love, at least they didn’t show Enicocephalidae or Cimicidae mating behavior. The latter is unfortunate for the females and the former unfortunate for the males.
Nautilus love
How cutsey-wootsey that narrator is.
*ahegm*
Newfie,
Don’t scare me like that, mmmkay?
Disney did the scorpion mating ritual about 40 years ago, with fiddle music. Hoedown style.
BS
Best scorpion documentary: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7633509394552540790&ei=WZFcS5OOOZeuqQL63phQ&q=l%27age+d%27or&hl=en#
Has National Geographic done some sort of market survey that convinced them only five year olds are watching?
I found the commentary sober and cogent. After all, it completely lacked slide whistles, rimshots, and bicycle horns.
Someone hired that voiceover guy. Someone then directed him to speak like that. Someone took listened to this and said “yeah, this is good and ready for distribution around the world and worthy of national geographic” and nobody stopped them.
Why wasn’t Love Bites by the Scorpions used as the background music?
Oh, sorry… that was Def Leppard’s song. Wrong phylum.
There may be love among the scorpions, but they’re breaking up anyway.
Needs more David Attenborough. Oh yeah..!
It just doesn’t feel right without a narrator that has a British accent
If memory serves, News Corp owns 67% of National Geographic channel and 75% of National Geographic Channel International… according to wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_corp#Satellite_television
This sort of silliness is what you get when the people in charge don’t actually believe that their subject matter is interesting! Nat Geo needs to get some staff who understand the value of the natural world and realise that the rest of us do too. This crap is why I always prefer English programs to American ones. If it’s not kitsch it’s full of manufactured drama, very trying.
Is it just me or is Pharyngula slowly becoming a cheesy porn site?
aww, baby scorpions! lookit their liddle beady eyes and huggy claws.
Considering the decision to have Oprah Winfrey dub over Sir David Attenborough’s narration for the USA broadcast of BBC’s “Life” series, this can’t be any worse.
When did the TMZ announcer move to Nat Geo?
I remember searching for octopus/squid/cuttlefish videos on youtube and finding National Geographic videos featuring this horrible narrator. Does anyone know how we can complain to Nat Geo?