By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
"Jackass meets 'Wild Kingdom'" meets Telander: Irwin was a crock
A small regret about not following sports is missing out on the output of talented sportswriters like the Chicago Sun-Times’ Rick Telander, with unsentimental, independent-minded columns such as this one, headlined “Irwin’s nature act, sadly, was a crock.” Starting with a cleanly described childhood anecdote about encountering a jellyfish. He recalled the pain when he “heard that animal provocateur Steve Irwin, the Australian television celebrity known as ”Crocodile Hunter,” was killed Monday by a stingray’s barb… There’s nasty stuff in nature… Irwin, a hyperactive entertainer whose giddily-excited expression was part-lemur, part-carnival barker, was drawn to it the way a cat is drawn to rolled string. I am saddened that he died, and it is tragic that he leaves behind a wife and two small children… But isn’t there something very much like karma at work here? If you flaunt the dangers of the animal kingdom—using the creatures’ teeth, claws, armor, venom, reflexes as your props—you really aren’t teaching about the natural world, you’re exploiting it. Besides putting himself recklessly in the path of creatures’ natural instincts, hyperventilating, ”Crikey!” every so often, and mesmerizing awe-stricken kids crouched in front of TV sets—what exactly did Irwin, lauded as a conservationist, do?… The simple fact is, Irwin’s show was an inevitable melding of ”Jackass” meets ”Wild Kingdom” for the short-attention-span set.” [More at the link.] (Predictably, the New York Times has a dithering scrap on its editorial page that says nothing, by Lawrence Downes: “It was easy to parody Mr. Irwin’s boisterous shtick, and many people did… It is all too obvious that Mr. Irwin was no biologist, that exploring the world on cable TV is a lot different from actually plunging into it, that wild animals really are dangerous, and blah blah blah.”)