Discovery Channel’s Life series has been receiving a lot of rave reviews for its stunning footage of plants and animals. This excerpt showing creeper plants climbing trees lives up to the hype. Leave it to a little time-lapse video–not to mention a voice-over by Oprah Winfrey–to blur the line between plant and animal.
UPDATE: A reader in Europe informed me that this video is apparently being blocked outside of the US. It’s extremely rare that this happens with YouTube videos (I’ve only seen it happen with full movies), but for some reason, it happened here. My apologies. [Dan]
Wes Alwan lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he works as a writer and researcher and attends the Institute for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture. He also participates in The Partially Examined Life, a podcast consisting of informal discussions about philosophical texts by three philosophy graduate school dropouts.
The video is blocked in my (European) country:
“This video contains content from Discovery Communications, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds”
I just watched one of the BBC episodes of the series, and it is absolutely amazing. But hearing Oprah narrate instead of David Attenborough is like night and day. I highly recommend people watch the BBC version over the Discovery one. You won’t regret it.
Compare these two identical videos to see what I mean:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzILn3rWTwc (Oprah)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7eQKSf0LmY (Attenborough)
I totally agree with you Avi. I don’t know what the deal is with Discovery dropping Attenborough’s narration. They did the same by using Sigourney Weaver on Planet Earth. Do these executives think we American’s can’t handle a British accent? Why would you even want to spend the extra money getting Oprah when you have everything recorded already by one of the most respected voices in the field?