Journo

Planet Earth for Dummies

"A hundred years ago, there were one and a half billion people on Earth. Now, over six billion crowd our fragile planet. But even so, there are still places barely touched by humanity. This series will take you to the last wildernesses and show you the planet and its wildlife as you have never seen them before."
-- Sir David Attenborough, PLANET EARTH

Was that bit of opening narration from the BBC/Discovery Channel series PLANET EARTH not good enough for American audiences? Was it too preachy ("fragile planet," pshaw!)? Could we just not stand having a finger pointed at the human race (all six billion and more of us)?

Whatever the reason, the Discovery Channel replaced naturalist and writer Sir David Attenborough's narration with that of Sigourney Weaver. She's talented! She's beautiful! She looks just like my mom! And she has a clear, eloquent and educated voice.

But Attenborough she ain't.

I don't have cable, so I had to do a little hunting to find PLANET EARTH online. Watching the high definition footage is still very cool, even on my little Dell laptop, but I found Weaver's narration almost immediately irritating... and not a little dull. Her opening lines?

"Earth is the lucky planet. Not too near the sun; not too far. Just right. Every corner of planet Earth* is shaped by the sun. Whether sun-kissed, sun-burned or sun-starved. It triggers cycles of birth and death, feast and flight. The sun is the engine of life."

Yawn.

*A challenge would to be count how many times Weaver is made to say "Planet Earth" throughout the first episode. Perhaps this is some thinly veiled form of brainwashing, so that we're incapable of thinking the words ‘planet' or ‘Earth' without immediately calling to mind the show.

It's frightening to think that producers really have that little faith in Americans' ability to understand true British English or that we can't handle "facts," but instead require cute puns, fragmented sentences, and allusions to Sublime lyrics ("It's summertime... and the living is truly easy." Oh, guffaw! To be fair, I couldn't get my hands on the Attenborough version of this episode, and so it's quite possible that he made the same Sublime joke. Perhaps someone could enlighten me.)

The Weaver vs. Attenborough battle currently being waged on the internet (at sites like http://imdb.com, among others) should be a clue for producers in the future: just because we liked her in ALIEN doesn't mean we want her reading a much, much dumber script in place of the guy who made nature documentaries famous in the first place.

Another, more minor beef with the show: the UK trailer apparently featured hit music from the Icelandic band Sigur Rós. Since Americans apparently have no appreciation for truly moving post-rock music sung in a foreign language, the US trailer featured industry standard stock production music (which was also used for video games, movie trailers, and commercials). My favorite bit of trivia is that the Australian trailer actually used music from Gustav Holst's THE PLANETS. It's too bad Holst didn't create an ‘Earth' movement in anticipation of the show; as it were, the Australians had to use ‘Jupiter.' (Which is probably what led the writers to be so paranoid about possible planet confusion, see note above.)

Now, if you'll excuse me, I am going to sit back and watch the next episode, "Mountains." On mute... at least until the BBC version finishes downloading.