VSI Episode 39

Petr Kratochvil has released this “Baby Monkey” image under CC0 Public Domain license. It means that you can use and modify it for your personal and commercial projects. If you intend to use an image you find here for commercial use, please be aware that some photos do require a model or a property release. Pictures featuring products should be used with care.

Awww, cute.

Episode Blurb from Original Website: 2012

Tonight’s episode is a good old-fashioned movie review. Here’s the clip that reminded me about the charity aspect of the movie, and convinced me that I needed to do a little promotion on my own, since none of the previews I've seen mention that Disney will give money for chimp conservation if you go see the film during opening week.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-april-16-2012/jane-goodall

It’s only a coincidence that the movie’s big allegory is “superior cooperation beats superior force,” which I’ve been ranting about all week [on the blog] in connection to Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, but it’s a neat coincidence, so I’m going with it.

Updates from 2021

Where my basic anecdotal comments about the style of nature docs left off, real research has begun to pick up. Phys.org has a series of blog posts about academic papers studying the details of scripts and the impact of those details on measurable outcomes, like Wikipedia visits and giving to conservation charities.

https://phys.org/news/2019-10-nature-documentaries-difference.html

https://phys.org/news/2019-09-nature-documentaries-increasingly-threats-dont.html

https://phys.org/news/2019-08-nemo-effect-untrue-animal-movies.html

Whether this will lead to a transformation in the way documentaries are produced (and what ripple effects such a transformation might have, good or bad) remain to be seen.