he also killed a rabbit with a stick
I don't know if anyone else has stumbled across the Man Vs. Wild marathon that Discovery played tonight, but if you haven't seen the show I recommend you track it down and give it a few Tivo thumbs-up. It's a survival show hosted by an ex-special forces badass (but he's British, so he's charming). Tonight I got to watch him rip the meat from a zebra carcass with his teeth and squeeze life-sustaining water from elephant droppings directly into his mouth. Seriously! And that was just one episode!
Anyway, if you've got an inner boy scout you should really check this out. It makes that Survivor Man dude — who is admittedly awesome in his own right — come off like that weirdo who keeps spending his family's savings on anti-bear suits that the military then refuses to buy.
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Isn't the Boy Scout motto "always be prepared" or something like that? I just flipped it on when your post poppped into my reader, and I saw him running willy nilly around an active volcanic field in Hawaii. Not Boy Scoutish! And now he's going to jump into the rain forest with only "a knife and a water bottle."
And, to complete the churlish response, the camera guy does it all while carrying a lot more gear.
All that said, it's pretty hard to stop watching.
we've watched a few times, and I was pretty intrigued (esp. the episode where he parachuted into the rainforest) - but I think what's just really thrown it off the realism scale (mostly for the N, less for me) is the production value. Really, you've been surviving all along in the jungle with no help from anyone and then at the end when you end up on a beach walking towards civilization agin, there's a panning shot that looks like it was taken with a the camera mounted on a track????? WTF?
I may have just gotten all of the above wrong since I know nothing about filming, cameras, etc. Ask the N, I'm sure he'd be able to explain his own reservations more competently thhen I can.
Ogged: yeah, he does kind of gussy things up sometimes. I remember one episode in which he showed the fastest way to get down a steep shale field, without explaining why you'd want to get down it so quickly (presumably special forces have a good reason, but lost tourists? Not so much). Another time he tried to tame a wild horse (!) so that he could ride it out of the forest. He got surprisingly close to succeeding, but obviously it was a somewhat ridiculous idea (weaving reins out of willow branches, etc).
G: It's true, it does make you wonder exactly what the camera crew is going through. They must, at the very least, have some pretty sophisticated climbing gear, and potentially access to a helicopter to get into position.
But that doesn't bother me. The alternative is the aforementioned Survivor Man. Conceptually, it's more awesome: he doesn't bring anyone with him, and he has to schlep all of his gear around himself. If he wants to get a shot of himself climbing a rock face he has to set up the camera, climb the rock, go back down, pack up the camera and climb up again. It sounds cool, but in practice this sometimes leads to him simply explaining the situation to the camera and saying he's not going to do it -- it's too tough -- so here are a few establishing shots and some shitty handheld camera work.
Besides, there's no denying that he's actually climbing that rock face, or drinking from that elephant dung.