WHAT WAS IT?
‘Syndication’-conscious reconfiguration of Anglia’s sedate early evening eco-pioneering zen-out Survival for thrill-seeking American market, with judicious addition of John Forsythe narration to facilitate transatlantic comprehension. Natural habitat – that awkward gap between the end of Saturday Morning children’s programming and the start of World Of Sport. EIGHT POINTS.
WHAT HAPPENS?
One of those none-more-seventies rotating model Earths that somehow never quite looked as convincing as the BBC Globe goes on whistle-stop tour of the continents with overexposed 16mm footage of the weird and wonderful wildlife to be found in each, via the transitional effect of an even-more-none-more-seventies shower of tessellating squares. This in turn gives way to one of those even-more-even-more-none-more-seventies graphical representations of the Earth as a sort of slightly out of proportion grid thing, which promptly doubles up as the ‘o’ in the programme logo. NINE POINTS.
CUE THE MUSIC!
Starts out with strident Current Affairs-style brass-led bombasticness, but only a couple of bars later alarming Micro Moog-mayhem slips its moorings and proceeds to squiggle its way across the remainder of the theme as if trying to shake juvenile nature lovers awake with the shock of the musical new. Probably a better ambassador for the synthesiser age than Brian Eno and Peter Howell combined. What’s more, this all takes place in the context of a tune that sounds like it should more rightly belong to a long-forgotten American superhero/sci-fi series than to film of ocelots washing. Almost certainly seared indelibly into the subconscious of anyone who witnessed it in the throes of post-Mersey Pirate lethargy. TEN POINTS.
END TITLE INTERESTINGNESS
Probably not a legally applicable term here. All you get is the credits over some static images of that week’s star endangered species, and nondescript pipe-tootling acting as some kind of World Music-derived ‘chillout’ gambit. Hardly worth dwelling on really. TWO POINTS.
CUNNING VARIANTS
And how. Random episodes would, for no readily obvious reason, be introduced by an entire alternate opening sequence, with a less sophisticated (but still more convincing) photographic Earth morphing into a camera lens with completely different animal footage in the middle, a totally different if still Moog-crazy theme tune, and a distracted-sounding voiceover that was hardly likely to pull in the Stateside viewers in their millions. And the Earth still turned into the ‘o’ at the end. Fantastically, you can see this in full here. TEN POINTS.
ICONIC MOMENT
As memory-imprintingly exciting as it may have been, this sort of generic-through-neccessity title sequence didn’t really ‘do’ iconic. At a push, the goose that looks like it’s grown weary of constant media intrusion. Maybe. FOUR POINTS, which nets The World Of Survival a far from extinction-threatened FORTY THREE POINTS.
