WILD KINGDOM Marlin Perkins in Australia
One of the first wildlife weekly TV shows that ran for decades in North America. Several programmes were made in Australia, especially on the Great Barrier Reef and The Coral Sea. (sharks, sea snakes, turtles).
The host (pictured) was accompanied by a more youthful assistant, such as
Tom Allen (whose Dad I remembered from short cinema supporting films -
Ross Allen who wrestled a huge snake in the crystal fresh waters of Florida, where
Sea Hunt sequences were also filmed).
Such antics were not for Wild Kingdom - who seemed to do other things with animals. This was the era when animals were being shot at with drugging darts to be tagged for
scientific studies.
Those faults aside,
Wild Kingdom was highly sucessful and continued for a while after Marlin Perkins passed away but gradually faded like Marlin into TV history.
"Africa in the 1920's was where my most memorable adventures occured" Marlin replied when I asked him this obvious question.
We were at Saumarez Reef in the southern Coral Sea with a huge storm front just days from us and the producer in no hurry to leave. I was 2nd cameraman to
Ralph J. Nelson. Tom Allen was there too, and
John C Fairfax was along as an underwater assistant from Sydney.
John Reynolds (a director of the oceanarium then known as Marineland on the Gold Coast) had organised the safari.
The previous day a giant tiger shark had fed on another shark, which we viewed from above water feeding under our chartered boat, a tiger five or six meters in length. The biggest I've seen. My eyes popped when I watched with a face mask with just head and shoulders in the water.
The schedualed night dive that same day was cancelled at the very last moment. (Not until we were all sitting in the dinghy with scuba tanks on, unhappily considering the giant shark that we'd watched just a few hours earlier near sunset. Perhaps it was now well fed - perhaps not?
Photo: John Harding fathom TMMutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom (also titled
Wild Kingdom) was one of television's first wildlife/nature programs, and stands among the genre's most popular and longest-running examples.
Wild Kingdom premiered in a Sunday afternoon timeslot on NBC in January 1963, and remained a Sunday afternoon staple until the start of the 1968-69 television season, when it was moved to Sunday evenings.
NBC dropped
Wild Kingdom from its regular series lineup altogether in April 1971 as part of the programming changes and cutbacks each of the three networks were making at that time in response to the newly-created Prime Time Access Rule.
Interestingly,
Wild Kingdom found its largest audience as a prime-access syndicated program, playing to an estimated 34 million people on 224 stations by 1974, and beating out the likes of The Lawrence Welk Show and Hee Haw to top the American Research Bureau ratings for syndicated series in October of that year.
Though a good number of the episodes aired after 1971 were repackaged re-runs from earlier network days, new episodes continued to be produced and included in the syndicated program packages as well.
Wild Kingdom continued to be produced and distributed in first-run syndication until the fall of 1988.
The perennial host and figurehead of
Wild Kingdom was zoologist
Marlin Perkins. Perkins began his zoological career as reptile curator at the St. Louis Zoo in 1926, then became director or the Buffalo Zoo in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Lincoln Park Zoo (Chicago) through the 1950s, and finally the St. Louis Zoo in 1962, a position he held until his death on 14 June 1986.
Throughout his career, Perkins was drawn to the medium of television as a means of promoting a conservationist ethic and popularizing a corresponding understanding of wildlife and the natural world.
Perkins' initiated his involvement in the production of nature programming in 1945, when television itself was only beginning to work its way into the fabric of American life.
Having recently been named director of Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo, Perkins began hosting a wildlife television program on a small local Chicago station, WBKB. Perkins then became the host of
Zoo Parade in 1949, which began its eight-year run on Chicago station WNBQ before becoming an NBC network show early in 1950.
A precursor of sorts to the regularly-featured animal segments on
The Tonight Show and other late-night talk shows,
Zoo Parade was a location-bound production (filmed in the reptile house basement) during which Perkins would present and describe the life and peculiarities of Lincoln Park Zoo animals.
Soon after his move to the St. Louis Zoo in 1962, Perkins and Zoo Parade's producer-director Don Meier were convinced by representatives of the Mutual of Omaha Insurance Company to create
Wild Kingdom.
Perkins remained involved with the production of
Wild Kingdom until a year before his death on 14 June 1986.
Unlike
Zoo Parade,
Wild Kingdom was shot on film almost entirely in the field, and featured encounters with wildlife in their natural habitat. Indeed, one of the program's signature features was the footage of Marlin Perkins, or his assistants Jim Fowler and later Stan Brock, pursuing and at times physically engaging with the wildlife-of-the-week, whether that meant mud-wrestling with alligators, struggling to get free from the vice-like grip of a massive water snake, running from unexpectedly awakened elephants or seemingly angered sea lions, or jumping from a helicopter onto the back of an elk in the snows of Montana.
Edited to emphasize the dangerous, dramatic or comedic interplay between man and beast, accompanied by the appropriate soundtrack mix of music and natural sound, and always punctuated by the familiar voice-overs of Marlin or Jim, the popular narrative conceit of
Wild Kingdom was criticized at times by some zoologists and environmentalists for putting entertainment values before those of ecological education.
JH on 20.11.05 @ 09:24 AM AEST [
link]
