Wild Kingdom (1)

In the 1960s and 1970s there was no mass cable television. There were no channels devoted to one lone subject, like nature documentaries. Thus, the fix for lovers of animals and adventures came down to a foreign import, the underwater television specials of Jacques Cousteau, and the weekly television series, Mutual Of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. It was a nature show for the family, and did not feature computer graphics and slow motion shots of animals killing each other.

It was hosted by the retired director of the St. Louis Zoo, Marlin Perkins, and co-hosted by naturalist Jim Fowler and several others over the years. Each episode focused on the peculiarities of an animal, and ended with Perkins stating that this or that was important to ‘the Wild Kingdom.’ While I loved watching the show as a child, over the years, I had let it slip through the crannies of my aging. Then, a while back, while selling some old books and DVDs to a Half Price Books store, I noticed two DVDs containing 10 half-hour episodes each of the old show. One was on The African Wild and the other was on Mammals Of North America.