INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Madagascar's aye-aye: "as if fear and panic had a baby and rolled it in dog hair"
National
Geographic/Eleanor Paish
Madagascar's aye-aye: "as if fear and panic had a baby and rolled it in dog hair"
National Geographic/Eleanor Paish
An emerald jewel wasp emerges from a cockroach
National Geographic/Simon De Glanville
An emerald jewel wasp emerges from a
National Geographic/Simon De Glanville
A pack of African hunting dogs is no match for the
honey badger's thick hide
National Geographic/Tom Walker
A pack of African hunting dogs is no match for the
honey badger's thick hide
National Geographic/Tom Walker
An emerald jewel wasp emerges from a cockroach
National Geographic/Simon De Glanville
A pack of African hunting dogs is no match for the honey
National Geographic/Tom Walker
A fireworm is hit by a cavitation bubble shot from the claw
of a pistol shrimp defending its home
National Geographic/Hugh Miller
As it grows and molts, the mad hatterpillar
stacks old head casings on top of its head
Scientists think it is used as a decoy against would-be predators and parasites, and when needed, it can also be used as a weapon.
National Geographic/Katherine Hannaford
Worst parents ever? A young barnacle goose
chick prepares t make the 800-foot jump from its nest to the ground.
National Geographic
An adult pearlfish reverses into a sea cucumber's butt to hide.
National Geographic
A vulture sticks its head inside an elephant carcass to eat.
National Geographic
A manatee releases flatulence while swimming to lose the buoyancy build up of gas inside its stomach, and descend down the
water column.
National Geographic/Karl Davies
"There is a sense after awhile that
you're playing the same animals to the same people, and the shows are starting to look the same and so is your audience," Linfield told Ars
"We thought, okay, how can we do something absolutely the opposite? We've gone through our careers collecting stories of these weird and
crazy creatures that don't end up in the script because they're not big or sexy and they live under a rock
But they often have the best life histories and the craziest superpowers."Case in point: the velvet worm featured in the "Superheroes"
episode, which creeps up on unsuspecting prey before squirting disgusting slime all over their food
(It's a handy defense mechanism, too, against predators like the wolf spider.)Once Linfield and Berlowitz decided to focus on nature's
As luck would have it, the pair shared an agent with the mega-star
So even though they thought there was no way Reynolds would agree to the project, they put together a sizzle reel, complete with a "fake
Canadian Ryan Reynolds sound-alike" doing the narration
Reynolds was on set when he received the reel, and loved it so much he recoded his own narration for the footage and sent it back."From that
moment he was in," said Linfield, and Wildstar Films worked closely with Reynolds and his company to develop the final series
"We've never worked that way on a series before, a joint collaboration from day one," Berlowitz admitted
But it worked: the end result strikes the perfect balance between scientific revelation and accurate natural history, and an edgy comic
tone.That tone is quintessential Reynolds, and while he did mostly follow the script (which his team helped write), Linfield and Berlowitz
He gets into character and starts riffing off [the footage]
though it meant going back and doing a bit of recutting to get the new lines to fit.
