Life Stories (David Attenborough) (DVD)

Product Description

Life Stories (David Attenborough) (DVD)

Renowned naturalist Sir David Attenborough has a remarkable treasure trove of stories following his 60-year career with the BBC. This 3-part series will bring to life some of his most memorable and is sure to be beloved by his legion of fans.

Amazon.com Part personal reminiscence, part science, and part dire warning, Life Stories is a tribute to the extraordinary work of David Attenborough. Attenborough has served variously as narrator, on-camera host, writer, and producer for an endless array of superb nature documentaries, including, along with this one, The Blue Planet, Frozen Planet, Madagascar, Galapagos 3D, Africa, and Planet Earth, the greatest of them all--and those are only some of the more recent achievements in a career that now spans almost six decades. In "Life on Camera," the first of the three 50-minute segments that comprise this program, Attenborough traces the enormous technical advances made in the field since his first series, Zoo Quest, aired on British television in the mid-1950s, from film to video to digital, from natural light to infrared (which made possible the extraordinary Planet Earth sequence of a pride of lions taking down an elephant at night), and from stabilizing camera mounts for aerial filming to computer animation of extinct species. In Part Two, "Understanding the Natural World," he discusses the phenomenon of imprinting (with some wonderful footage of geese who think a human is their mother), molecular genetics, evolution, animal behavior, and other scientific phenomena. Finally, in "Our Fragile Planet," the last and arguably most important segment, he notes that due to such human-related factors as poaching, rampant population growth, industry, agriculture, and climate change, more damage has been done to the natural world in Attenborough's lifetime than in the whole of the rest of our history. It's a grim tale, but there are success stories as well, ranging from the establishment of nature reserves and national parks to efforts to save blue whales, African mountain gorillas, and Malaysian sea turtles from certain annihilation. In the end, it's pretty clear that if this is indeed the golden age of nature documentaries, as he calls it, then David Attenborough is big part of the reason why. --Sam Graham