Animal snuff specials are TV's latest thrill fix
Have you noticed that, on TV, animals seem to be behaving a lot more like, well, animals lately?
There was that cheesy Fox special "When Animals Attack," for instance, which gathered up home video and local news footage of animals turning on humans -- everything from a runaway circus elephant stampeding down a busy street to Junior getting pawed when he stood too close to the bear cage at the zoo. Hosted by Robert Urich, the special's pseudo public service tone brought to mind the old "Saturday Night Live" skit where a heavily disfigured Dan Aykroyd played an outdoorsman recounting for a talk show audience his close encounter with a bear. Asked what safety advice he'd give to campers, Aykroyd replied that you should never, ever try to get a grizzly to take a marshmallow from between your lips.
The ratings for "When Animals Attack" were so nice, Fox ran it twice; in the second airing, on May 6 (a week after its initial outing), the special tied for 36th place in the Nielsens with "Murder, She Wrote."
"When Animals Attack" might have been an amusing example of only-on-Fox sleaze, except that beast-bites-man specials are turning up all over the tube. CBS's "The World's Most Dangerous Animals" also ran during the week of May 6 (however, it only ranked 57th). Earlier in the season, NBC aired a National Geographic special about crocodiles that featured some gnarly footage of a baby monkey caught in the jaws of death. And animal snuff specials have been an "educational" programming staple on PBS and the Discovery Channel for years (the latter's eight-year-old "Shark Week" blood-in-the-water fest pulls down some of the cable channel's highest ratings of the year).
What's behind this sudden run of, uh, nature specials? It might have something to do with the truce reached by the networks and anti-TV violence legislators that culminated in the passage of the Telecommunications Act. The networks have noticeably toned down the violence in the so-called family hours between 7 and 9 p.m. -- human-on-human violence, that is. "When Animals Attack" aired on many Fox affiliates at 7 p.m. on a Sunday. Obviously, call-of-the-wild specials allow networks to give viewers their fix of gore without risking the ire of the pols. It's unclear, too, where a python squeezing its owner or a hyena and lion engaged in the Serengeti equivalent of a steel cage match fall on the stuff-to-be-blocked-by-the-V-chip spectrum.
There's also the media's (particularly, the local TV newscasts') obsession with animal violence stories, from fatal mountain lion attacks on joggers in Northern California to the nationwide pit bull frenzy (which includes both pit bulls mauling humans and humans teaching pit bulls some Stupid Pet Tricks, like fighting each other to the death for their owners' fun and profit). What better way to pull viewers in than by giving them something new to fear?
But, listen, if you're going to fear something, why not animals? It is, after all, a jungle out there. And, in a weird way, the spate of attacking-animal specials could turn out to have a humbling effect on us all. We're just another link in the food chain, man. Deal with it.
Mountain Dew's crack new marketing campaignIf marauding elephants don't make you quake in your boots, how about beeper-sporting teens hopped up on 'Dew, driving those big-assed Hummer vehicles through your town on a frantic search for pay phones?
Thanks to Mountain Dew's $50 million "Extreme Network" promotional campaign, it could be a long summer. On July 4, Pepsi's suspiciously colored citrus-flavored beverage, in conjunction with Motorola and MobileComm, will kick off a massive marketing push which (according to the press release) hopes to place "a half-million beepers in the hands of teens and young adults, connecting them to each other and more than 20 of the world's top teen- and young adult-targeted brands." The pagers will contain "a special feature that allows only Extreme Network members to receive unique messages."
Here's how it works: After purchasing their special, discounted 'Dew pager, consumers get beeped to alert them to call a toll-free number to learn about special offers and giveaways "as told by popular sports and entertainment celebrities including Ken Griffey Jr., Lou Piniella and Richard Petty." Prizes include a Hummer, a training session with the Specialized Mountain Biking Team and an invitation to the MTV Beach House.
"This is the most innovative program in the history of paging," enthuses MobileComm CEO Gregory Rorke in the press release, which goes on to quote Teenage Research Unlimited's findings that "pagers are the one item teens want the most but do not have."
Hey, kids! For 10 Mountain Dew proofs-of-purchase and $29.99 plus shipping and handling, you too can look like a crack dealer! Just don't tell your friends it's only Lou Piniella on the line.
