why they dissin' Attenborough?

I didn't understand it for Planet Earth, and I don't understand it now.

I had the good fortune to see the BBC "Planet Earth" series first in New Zealand and then parts of the second season in England.

The show's release dates followed me around the world. The Discovery Channel announced it would be showing Planet Earth, all two seasons worth, a few months after we returned to the States. I'm a sucker for nature documentaries, and I hadn't seen all the newer episodes, so I made it a point to tune in.

Until I heard Sigourney Weaver's voice. The BBC version (shown everywhere but the U.S.) had David Attenborough narrating, as it was meant to be.

I don't understand the point of it all. Or rather, I understand why Discovery decided to go with Weaver, and I don't agree with any of it. Who tuned in just to hear Sigourney Weaver? As relentlessly as they hyped the series, people would have watched the first few episodes if the only soundtrack was a chimp muttering to itself.

The sad part is the marketers were probably right; they might have lost viewers over the course of the show if people were forced to listen to a foreigner rather than a recognizable celebrity voihttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifce. At least the comments at Amazon seem to show a significant portion of the American population fear anything delivered in an accent. People who accidently ordered the BBC version of the DVDs complain about being unable to understand Attenborough's thick accent. I can't imagine what they'd say if they were forced to listen to a Scot for a while.

The Discovery marketers are being underhanded again this week. I caught a bit of Blue Planet last night. Once again, I didn't hear the original Attenborough narration.

Of course, Discovery is hyping the hell out of this series as From the Creators of Planet Earth, without mentioning the fact it already aired this series a few years ago. As far as I can tell with a quick search, that time around they did use Attenborough. This time, however, they hired Pierce Brosnan to supply the new narration. As Kirsten said when I told her I thought they'd changed narration, "Why would they replace him with another Brit?" Especially when they're not even using his name to sell the series?

Discovery isn't explicitly mentioning the previously-aired fact, but the promotional material does say something like "with new material." I didn't see the original episodes, but I'm guessing the cutaway interviews with the crew shown during last night's episode weren't in the original. I actually like the extra commentary - the behind the scenes stuff for these series are at least as interesting as the series themselves. But they could have shown the original episode, followed by an hour-long look at how the same episode was shot.

At any rate, if I'm right about the new stuff at least there's some sense to having a new narrator, since the episodes would have had to be re-edited. This doesn't appease my dismay about the Sigourney Weaver thing.

The only explanation for the different Planet Earth commentary I've seen (other than the crass marketing purposes we can all assume) was written anonymously in a message board on the Internet, so it must be true. The gist of it was the U.S. broadcast needed to make more time for commercials than the British broadcast, so it had to be re-edited as well. (Not that I accept this necessitated a new narration track. Shows are edit to cut length all the time - every syndicated episode of the Simpsons is a few minutes shorter than the original to allow more commercial breaks. And on a tangent: I'm amazed that in this great society of ours, such a situation is allowed to continue. I can't believe the wise heads of the networks haven't hit on the obvious remedy: make the prime time shows that much shorter to squeeze in just as many commercials as the syndicated slots do.)

I can't afford a complete DVD library of the David Attenborough series' (although I contemplated buying a bunch of them in China) so for now, I'll just be thankful I have the the Internet.