Product Description
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Planet Earth: Special Edition
The best-selling factual series of all time is now even better!
Planet Earth took the world by storm when it originally aired. It
garnered uniformly glowing reviews, won four Emmy Awards,
including Best Nonfiction Series and Best Cinematography, and its
longevity on the best-seller list is legend. Now, with the
addition of all new commentary and new bonus programs, you can
relive this incredible experience all over again! From the
highest ains to the deepest oceans, Planet Earth illuminates
the wonders of our astonishing world like never before. It’s a
celebration of the spectacular diversity of our planet, revealing
the vast as well as the as only high definition
cinematography can. In this truly special edition, prepare to be
overwhelmed again by the beauty and majesty of Planet Earth.
Life
Four years in the making, filmed over 3000 days, across every
continentand in every habitat, Life is the latest wildlife
blockbuster from the BBC’s award-winning Natural History Unit,
the producers of Planet Earth and The Blue Planet. Packed with
excitement, revelation, entertainment, and stunning screen
firsts, this breathtaking ten-part epic presents 130incredible
stories from the frontiers of the natural world. Discover
theglorious variety of life onEarth and the spectacular and
extraordinary tactics animals and s have developed to stay
alive. This is evolution in action; individual creatures under
extreme pressure to overcome challenges from adversaries and
their environment, pushing the boundaries of behavior.
.com
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Planet Earth: Special Edition
As of its release in early 2007, Planet Earth is quite simply
the greatest nature/wildlife series ever produced. Following the
similarly monumental achievement of The Blue Planet: Seas of Life
( /dp/B001957A4E ), this astonishing 11-part BBC series is
brilliantly narrated by Sir David Attenborough and sensibly
organized so that each 50-minute episode covers a specific
geographical region and/or wildlife habitat (ains, caves,
deserts, shallow seas, seasonal forests, etc.) until the entire
planet has been magnificently represented by the most astonishing
s and sounds you'll ever experience from the comforts of
home. The premiere episode, "From Pole to Pole," serves as a
primer for things to come, placing the entire series in proper
context and giving a general overview of what to expect from each
individual episode. Without being overtly political, the series
maintains a consistent and subtle emphasis on the urgent need for
ongoing conservation, best illustrated by the plight of polar
bears whose very behavior is changing (to accommodate
life-threatening changes in their fast-melting habitat) in the
wake of global warming--a phenomenon that this series
appropriately presents as scientific fact. With this harsh
reality as subtext, the series proceeds to accentuate the
positive, delivering a seemingly endless variety of natural
wonders, from the spectacular mating displays of New Guinea's
various birds of paradise to a rare encounter with Siberia's
nearly-extinct Amur Leopards, of which only 30 remain in the
wild.
That's just a hint of the marvels on display. Accompanied by
majestic orchestral scores by George Fenton, every episode is
packed with images so beautiful or so forcefully impressive (and
so perfectly photographed by the BBC's tenacious high-definition
camera crews) that you'll be rendered speechless by the splendor
of it all. You'll see a seal struggling to out-maneuver a Great
White Shark; swimming macaques in the Ganges delta; massive
flocks of snow geese numbering in the hundreds of thousands; an
awesome night-vision sequence of lions attacking an elephant; the
Colugo (or "flying lemur"--not really a lemur!) of the
Philippines; a hunting alliance of fish and snakes on Indonesia's
magnificent coral reef; the bioluminescent "vampire squid" of the
deep oceans... these are just a few of countless highlights,
masterfully filmed from every conceivable angle, with frequent
use of super-slow-motion and amazing motion-controlled time-lapse
cinematography, and narrated by Attenborough with his trademark
combination of observational wit and informative authority. The
result is a hugely entertaining series that doesn't flinch from
the predatory realities of nature (death is a constant presence,
without being off-putting), and each episode ends with 10-minute
"Planet Earth Diaries" (exclusive to this DVD set) that cover a
specific aspect of production, like "Diving with Pirahnas" or
"Into the Abyss" (the latter showing the rigors of filming the
planet's most spectacular caves, including the last filming ever
officially permitted in the "Chandelier Ballroom," a
crystal-encrusted cavern found over a mile deep in New Mexico's
treacherous Lechuguilla, the deepest cave in the continental
United States.)
With so many of Earth's natural wonders on display, it's only
fitting that the final DVD in this five-disc set is devoted to
Planet Earth: The Future, a separate three-part series in which a
global array of experts is assembled to discuss issues of
conservation, protection of delicate ecosystems, and the
socio-economic benefits of understanding nature as a commodity
that returns trillions of dollars in value at no cost to Earth's
human population. At a time when the multiple threats of global
warming should be obvious to all, let's give Sir David the last
word, from the closing of Planet Earth's final episode: "We can
now destroy or we can cherish--the choice is ours." --Jeff
Shannon
Life
This enthralling BBC series examines "the lengths living beings
go to to stay alive," in the words of Sir David Attenborough
(Oprah Winfrey narrates the Discovery Channel version). Aided by
breathtaking high-definition cinematography, the makers of Planet
Earth explore the more colorful strategies the world's creatures
employ to procreate, evade predators, and obtain nourishment.
Cameras travel though the air, under the water, and right into
the faces of insects, like the alien visage of the stalk-eyed
fly. Except for "Challenges of Life" and "Hunters and Hunted,"
each episode covers a different category, such as mammals and
birds. Among the more memorable images: three cheetahs move with
the relentless rhythm of mobsters, a school of flying fish glides
through the air with the grace of ballerinas, and a Jesus Christ
lizard skips across the water, like, well, you know. The
strangest s range from a pebble toad bouncing away from a
spider like a rubber ball and brown-tufted capuchin monkeys
pounding palm nuts with stone tools like the apes in 2001: A
Space Odyssey. Witty writing and skillful editing, which distills
thousands of hours of footage, make the learning go down easy (at
one point, Sir David references Jurassic Park, which featured his
brother, Richard).
If the sound effects seem overamped, George Fenton's score is
always on the money, adding humor and suspense at crucial moments
(martial drums for the mud skippers, woozy brass for the Darwin's
beetle). Nonetheless, delicate sensibilities may find some
sequences disturbing, as when Komodo dragons feed on a water
buffalo or when a leopard seal dines on a penguin (according to
Attenborough, the Komodo siege caused the camera operators
"emotional turmoil"). More often, the filmmakers capture the
moment of impact before moving on. The set comes complete with 10
featurettes on the four-year production. --Kathleen C. Fennessy