Why haven’t we gotten a decent nature movie about whales? It’s one thing to film penguins, after all they just sort of sit there and waddle around and at the end of the day, you could probably go to the zoo and get pretty much the same experience, provided Morgan Freeman was there with you to narrate a mostly inaccurate story ascribing human attributes to their instinct-driven, animal behavior. But whales! That’s the thing. They’re elusive and except for the occasional Orca, they’re mostly too big to be seen at your local Sea World. For most people, their vision of our gigantic undersea brethren is still probably the humpbacks they saw in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and most of those shots were animatronics.
Where’s the whales goddammit? These asshole nature documentarians are apparently too damn lazy to put on a snorkel and hang out in the water near some humpbacks. They prefer filming animals they can buzz with a helicopter, or reassembling leftover stock footage, forcing a deep-voiced black man to narrate it, and releasing it as a new movie with Disney. Unacceptable. If Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom was still being hosted by Marlin Perkins, I feel confident that by now I’d be knee deep in baleen.
It’s not a nature documentary, but somebody out there is doing something with our mammalian, underwater brothers. Variety says Warner Bros. is making a movie called Everybody Loves Whales. That title is true. The movie is based on a true story too. It follows the 1988 rescue of three California gray whales found trapped under the arctic ice in Alaska. The US government, soviets, Eskimos, businessman, and all kinds of people came together for one brief moment to help a flipper out.
Completely unverified fun fact: Killer Whales once commonly attacked humans. In fact they did so right up until World War II when fighter pilots flying over the ocean began using them for target practice. Since then, Killer Whales no longer attack man and instead perform amusing tricks under pseudonyms like “Shamu”.
