Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Men Vs. Wild

As mentioned earlier, I have been awaiting with great anticipation tonight's Man Vs. Wild with Will Ferrell. It's airing right now and it is amazing. It's not as serious as a normal episode, but it isn't ridiculous, in a funny way, as Will Ferrell is known to be.

Sure they're in Sweden, so I'm a bit partial to their locations. But I am enthralled with this episode. There is little information, but a fair amount of adventure and a fair amount of humor. I love how Will started to get more and more animated as he got more comfortable with Bear, and how Will began to experience a bit of mania as he started throwing Bear around, talking gibberish and loosing coordination. Perhaps it wouldn't be funny if it happened to someone like you or me in a survival situation, but when it's fodder for a show like this, one needs to take the liberty to laugh. Especially since both you and I know that should anything have happened to Will, helicopters and remote hospitals would not have been far away. I wish I knew more about the Lapland area (where I presume they are), to know how many major cities are nearby (though I know there are practically none), but I'm sure they chose a location that was safe(r), was previously scouted and was easy to get in and out of should anything have happened. I wonder if any spotters were present?

Regardless, it was a great episode and I'm glad that Discovery is pairing up with this new Land of the Lost movie, though it looks mindless and stupid. It's a great advertising and PR move to promote both the new Man Vs. Wild season and Will's never movie. There wasn't any product placement in the episode, aside from the Twinkies in the beginning, so that part made me happy, but a lot of the commercials were similar--clearly cluing the attentive watcher into the fact that the show must have had a long-standing and thorough contract with most of these companies for strict rights to advertise during the show.

Always be on the lookout for product placement to see how the world tries to fool or influence you.

I leave with a fantastic quote I found spoken by one of our great orators (our = America), Ben Franklin. I found several versions of the quote, so who knows which is the authentic one, but I chose the one that I found from the most reliable sources, which also happened to be the one that appeared most frequently:

"[Our] fate is now...we may hang together, but surely we will hang separately..."

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