If you were riveted by Discovery Channel’s “Planet Earth” and “Life,” get ready to be taken to even greater heights, deeper depths and further realms than you ever thought possible — at least without leaving this planet.
Sunday night begins the incredible new series,”Frozen Planet,” perhaps the single greatest accomplishment in nature TV history.
And I don’t say that lightly — I mean Discovery left us all breathless when we went inside bodies and outside the confines of nature with the other two series.
“Frozen Planet” doesn’t just take us to the Arctic and Antarctica (which literally means the opposite of “Arctic”), on some Frommer’s tour, but it takes us to places never been seen by humans — in conditions no humans could have survived for this period of time.
In fact, it took four long, cold years in 130-mile-an-hour winds on ice-covered continents to film the series.
The footage they have come away with is so incredibly awe-inspiring that I found myself exclaiming over and over, “Oh my God!” — which makes sense since this is a world only God could create, where no humans could survive for long.
There is never-before-filmed footage inside the ice cave of a volcano, and up-close video of icebergs and ice floes breaking apart and causing massive waves. There is the never-before-photographed hunt by pods of whales who seek their prey by swimming synchronized patterns. There is the largest pack of wolves ever caught on film.
The cinematographers track a male polar bear as he tracks a mate across a frozen ocean to win her, mate her and spend weeks battling — nearly to the death — other males who want his “woman.”
As fascinating as the animals are, if you’ve ever wondered who the hell photographs all this stuff, on April 8, Discovery has an hour-long “making of” documentary that shows the humans who are wired to live even more dangerously than these animals.
They’re called photographers and cinematographers.
You’ll see a team of two men alone in a shed for four months enduring 130-mile-an-hour winds in white-out conditions, another team that climbs into and dives under the largest constantly-erupting volcano on earth and, oh, there are the giant whales and the tiny boat. Brilliant.
‘Frozen Planet’ fun facts
Male polar bears — the largest land predator at around 1,400 pounds — track a female by picking up her scent from as far away as 10 miles and then find her by stepping into the footprints she’s left behind.
Forty-million is the key word for penguins in Antarctica. All 40 million of them who live here are descendants of a prehistoric version of the penguin that lived 40 million years ago.
Whales can’t hunt seals on land, so they synchronizeswim in pods to create giant waves to knock seals off the safety of their ice floes.