SteveInNC
11-18-2006, 05:40 AM
Pathetic...
This is Discovery's latest variant of a show about a guy surviving in the wild. If you watched Survivorman at all, you'll be unimpressed with this.
Survivorman used to get dropped off in hostile locales (arctic tundra, desert, etc.) with just a few random manmade things that one might have if you got lost in the wild, like a broken down snowmobile. Survivorman would then spend seven days in the area, catching food, building fire and shelter etc. with just the materials on hand. He also carried a couple of video cameras and filmed everything himself. This meant for shots of him walking into the distance, he had to set up the camera, walk away, then come back to recover the camera(s), expending extra energy, something you wouldn't have to do in your own survival scenario.
By contrast, the guy on MvW takes a whole camera crew with him. I saw at least one shot that looked like it was made from a dolly crane. The host also generates a lot of fake drama, doing what IMHO are stupid things, like using vines to scale down the face of a running waterfall (wtf !?), then "falling" for the last few feet.
His goal is to get "out" of the wilderness; in the first episode, this took about three days total. He parachuted into a jungle in Costa Rica (I think) pretty close to the coast that they flew in over. His goal was to get back to the coast. He eventually found a river, built a balsa raft, then floated down to the coast. He made a big deal about abandoning the raft before he got all the way to the ocean so he "wouldn't be carried out to sea". Oh Please! After wasting time banging around in some mangroves, he decided that the raft might be better after all, then rode it out to the ocean.
At one point, he drank river water without boiling it, treating it, etc., after claiming that because there were crayfish in the water and it was clear and moving fast that it would probably be OK. That night he was puking his guts out (gee, wonder why).
The guy has credentials, being ex-special-forces, etc. but he seems to know less about survival than a typical boy scout. Why Discovery is showing this after a successful run of Survivorman, I'll never know. I'll watch it once more to see if this was just a particularly bad epsiode, but I suspect it's all like this.
This is Discovery's latest variant of a show about a guy surviving in the wild. If you watched Survivorman at all, you'll be unimpressed with this.
Survivorman used to get dropped off in hostile locales (arctic tundra, desert, etc.) with just a few random manmade things that one might have if you got lost in the wild, like a broken down snowmobile. Survivorman would then spend seven days in the area, catching food, building fire and shelter etc. with just the materials on hand. He also carried a couple of video cameras and filmed everything himself. This meant for shots of him walking into the distance, he had to set up the camera, walk away, then come back to recover the camera(s), expending extra energy, something you wouldn't have to do in your own survival scenario.
By contrast, the guy on MvW takes a whole camera crew with him. I saw at least one shot that looked like it was made from a dolly crane. The host also generates a lot of fake drama, doing what IMHO are stupid things, like using vines to scale down the face of a running waterfall (wtf !?), then "falling" for the last few feet.
His goal is to get "out" of the wilderness; in the first episode, this took about three days total. He parachuted into a jungle in Costa Rica (I think) pretty close to the coast that they flew in over. His goal was to get back to the coast. He eventually found a river, built a balsa raft, then floated down to the coast. He made a big deal about abandoning the raft before he got all the way to the ocean so he "wouldn't be carried out to sea". Oh Please! After wasting time banging around in some mangroves, he decided that the raft might be better after all, then rode it out to the ocean.
At one point, he drank river water without boiling it, treating it, etc., after claiming that because there were crayfish in the water and it was clear and moving fast that it would probably be OK. That night he was puking his guts out (gee, wonder why).
The guy has credentials, being ex-special-forces, etc. but he seems to know less about survival than a typical boy scout. Why Discovery is showing this after a successful run of Survivorman, I'll never know. I'll watch it once more to see if this was just a particularly bad epsiode, but I suspect it's all like this.