Planet Earth

Like a lot of people, Robyn and I have been entranced with the BBC/Discovery Channel production of Planet Earth, especially the HD broadcasts. It’s been fascinating viewing, amazing cinematography capturing sights rarely seen.

I mean, what’s not to love about a nature documentary series that captures incredible shots like this?

A Great White Shark leaping out the water to catch a seal off the South Africa coast, scary but beautiful… As is most of the series, from Polar Bears coping with their habitat disappearing to a cave with 3 million bats in it, and a huge mound of bat droppings. Even the “cutest” looking animals can turn out to be killers, some of it is quite sad to see…

This is must see TV, and if you can see it in HD then do so, this is the perfect example of the difference between standard TV (and indeed even DVD) and HDTV, it’s mindblowing when you see flocks of birds, hundreds of thousands of them, and shoals of fish in crystal clarity. We’ve enjoyed it so much we made our own DVD set from Netflix, and watched them again as the DVDs are the BBC edition with David Attenborough narrating as opposed to the Discovery version narrated by Sigourney Weaver… As good as Sigourney Weaver is, she’s no David Attenborough.

I look forward to rewatching this again and again. Makes me wish we had either an HD-DVD or BluRay player or even a HD TiVo so we can rewatch in HD over and over and over.