Possible Zorilla in Eyewitness Mammal?

dillotest0

dillotest0

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In the DK Eyewitness episode Mammal, there seems to be this animal shown, and a segment in the video labels it simply as a 'skunk'. I initially thought it might be a spotted skunk, though I now see that the pattern is far off for a Spilogale, and the tail is too laid back for that too.
What do you think of it?
 

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During the lockdowns I've been watching through and note-taking on all the Dorling Kindersley Vision shows I can find as a means of keeping myself sane.

While I haven't finished everything just yet, I know a zorilla (probably the same individual as from Eyewitness Mammal) appears in at least two different episodes of Amazing Animals.
 
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As seen in Animal Acrobats
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As seen in Clever Animals
Though in books around the time, it seems like the zorille model was absent, and images of true skunks were used.
 

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I figured this would sort of fit in here, but as I said a couple of posts up, I have been watching through every single Dorling Kindersley Vision show I can find. As part of that, I noted down all the animals included in each episode and divided them up into studio species (animals filmed, mostly in a studio, but rarely also on location) and stock species (animals that appear via stock footage from other programmes - the differences between animals filmed on location and those appearing via stock footage are fairly obvious).

I have managed to see 107 out of the 114 episodes in full, across the four different programmes:
  • See How They Grow (8 of 10)
  • Eyewitness (39 of 39)
  • Amazing Animals (52 of 52)
  • Creatures Fantastic (8 of 13)
I figured I would share some figures about the number of species that appear in the shows. I have tried to identify as many species as possible but, courtesy of not knowing the sources of some stock footage, many smaller animals such as insects and some frogs and fishes remain unidentified.

At least 320 species appear that were filmed in the studio. At least 63 appear in See How They Grow, 204 in Eyewitness, 186 in Amazing Animals and at least 21 in Creatures Fantastic. The ten most common studio species, in order, are:
  1. Domestic dog (38 appearances)
  2. European rabbit (25 appearances)
  3. Domestic cat (25 appearances)
  4. Mallard (20 appearances)
  5. House mouse (16 appearances)
  6. Domestic chicken (14 appearances)
  7. Domestic horse (14 appearances)
  8. Brown rat (12 appearances)
  9. Imperial scorpion (11 appearances)
  10. Tiger (11 appearances)
At least 1,371 species appear via stock footage. See How They Grow has none, being the only programme relying entirely on studio footage, Eyewitness has 887, Amazing Animals has 815 and Creatures Fantastic has at least 83 species. The most common stock footage species, in order, are:
  1. Blue wildebeest (25 appearances)
  2. Lion (24 appearances)
  3. Plains zebra (24 appearances)
  4. African bush elephant (23 appearances)
  5. Cheetah (22 appearances)
  6. Domestic horse (21 appearances)
  7. Grey wolf (18 appearances)
  8. Chimpanzee (17 appearances)
  9. Masai giraffe (17 appearances)
  10. Domestic dog (16 appearances)
  11. Nile crocodile (16 appearances)
When both filming methods are combined, the number of species that appear by studio footage, stock footage or a combination of the two is 1,495. The most common species to appear across the programmes, by any means, are:
  1. Domestic dog (44 appearances)
  2. Domestic cat (32 appearances)
  3. Lion (30 appearances)
  4. Domestic horse (29 appearances)
  5. European rabbit (29 appearances)
  6. African bush elephant (27 appearances)
  7. Plains zebra (27 appearances)
  8. Blue wildebeest (25 appearances)
  9. Cheetah (23 appearances)
  10. Mallard (23 appearances)
So, onto the programmes themselves, to see how they performed individually.

4. See How They Grow has the fewest number of animals so far identified, with 63 species.

The low number of species is not entirely surprising. Some episodes, such as 'Pets', contain only their title species (so the entire 40-minute programme only contains domestic dog and cat, budgerigar and common goldfish). A total of 7 species appear only in See How They Grow (the Amazon tree boa, Cunningham's skink and 5 species of invertebrate).

One episode that would add a lot of new species is 'Sea Animals', which appears to have been filmed in a UK public aquarium (many species are fairly standard native aquaria fare, such as smooth-hounds, brill and gilt-head bream). Although this episode is available online in its US release format, I find the narration so ghastly that it is hard to watch and I also know, courtesy of seeing the UK version when I was younger, that the US release is not the complete episode. One episode, 'Tree Animals', has not been uploaded online and I have also never seen it for sale before.

3. Creatures Fantastic has the second lowest species total, with 76 species.

This is not so surprising, considering the series' focus on mythology. Even so, a total of 14 species only appear in Creatures Fantastic among the DK Vision media (including the leopard cat, European wildcat and Asiatic golden cat).

I am still missing five episodes from this series. I imagine some, like 'Creatures of the Deep' and 'Birds and Things with Wings' will add a number more animals to the series total. I don't imagine 'Mythical Horses' will add much, while 'Man Beasts' and 'Tricky Tricksters' are a mystery - the series does have a knack for surprising with animal numbers. I did not, for instance, expect that 'The Underworld' episode would have had 18 different species shown in it.

2. Amazing Animals has a very respectable total of 870 species.

Well over half of the species in Amazing Animals, a total of 469, do not appear in any of the other three programmes. These include some well-known and charismatic species like the black rhinoceros, blue whale, warthog and Central American spider monkey, as well as more unusual animals including the ground pangolin, mountain beaver, giant forest hog and Las Cajas water mouse.

One reason why Amazing Animals has so many unique animals is that, rather than being made partly by the BBC like the other three programmes, it was partly made by Partridge Films. That opens up a whole range of stock footage sources unavailable to the other three programmes.

1. Eyewitness has the runaway lead species total, with at least 951 different animal species appearing in it.

This total is even more impressive when it is remembered that some episodes (Planets and Human Machine most notably) have hardly any animals in them at all, and Eyewitness has one less season than Amazing Animals.

A total of 432 species only appeared in Eyewitness, including several species of bear (the sun, sloth and Asiatic black), aye-aye, Indian rhinoceros and several species of shark, including the tiger, sand tiger and great white sharks.

---

As for the zorilla specifically, it appears as moving footage (rather than still images) in five episodes - as studio footage it appears in Mammal (Eyewitness) and Animal Senses and Poisonous Animals (Amazing Animals), while it also appears in Nighttime Animals and Animal Colors (also Amazing Animals) as stock footage.
 
DesertRhino150 said:
I figured this would sort of fit in here, but as I said a couple of posts up, I have been watching through every single Dorling Kindersley Vision show I can find. As part of that, I noted down all the animals included in each episode and divided them up into studio species (animals filmed, mostly in a studio, but rarely also on location) and stock species (animals that appear via stock footage from other programmes - the differences between animals filmed on location and those appearing via stock footage are fairly obvious).

I have managed to see 107 out of the 114 episodes in full, across the four different programmes:
  • See How They Grow (8 of 10)
  • Eyewitness (39 of 39)
  • Amazing Animals (52 of 52)
  • Creatures Fantastic (8 of 13)
I figured I would share some figures about the number of species that appear in the shows. I have tried to identify as many species as possible but, courtesy of not knowing the sources of some stock footage, many smaller animals such as insects and some frogs and fishes remain unidentified.

At least 320 species appear that were filmed in the studio. At least 63 appear in See How They Grow, 204 in Eyewitness, 186 in Amazing Animals and at least 21 in Creatures Fantastic. The ten most common studio species, in order, are:
  1. Domestic dog (38 appearances)
  2. European rabbit (25 appearances)
  3. Domestic cat (25 appearances)
  4. Mallard (20 appearances)
  5. House mouse (16 appearances)
  6. Domestic chicken (14 appearances)
  7. Domestic horse (14 appearances)
  8. Brown rat (12 appearances)
  9. Imperial scorpion (11 appearances)
  10. Tiger (11 appearances)
At least 1,371 species appear via stock footage. See How They Grow has none, being the only programme relying entirely on studio footage, Eyewitness has 887, Amazing Animals has 815 and Creatures Fantastic has at least 83 species. The most common stock footage species, in order, are:
  1. Blue wildebeest (25 appearances)
  2. Lion (24 appearances)
  3. Plains zebra (24 appearances)
  4. African bush elephant (23 appearances)
  5. Cheetah (22 appearances)
  6. Domestic horse (21 appearances)
  7. Grey wolf (18 appearances)
  8. Chimpanzee (17 appearances)
  9. Masai giraffe (17 appearances)
  10. Domestic dog (16 appearances)
  11. Nile crocodile (16 appearances)
When both filming methods are combined, the number of species that appear by studio footage, stock footage or a combination of the two is 1,495. The most common species to appear across the programmes, by any means, are:
  1. Domestic dog (44 appearances)
  2. Domestic cat (32 appearances)
  3. Lion (30 appearances)
  4. Domestic horse (29 appearances)
  5. European rabbit (29 appearances)
  6. African bush elephant (27 appearances)
  7. Plains zebra (27 appearances)
  8. Blue wildebeest (25 appearances)
  9. Cheetah (23 appearances)
  10. Mallard (23 appearances)
So, onto the programmes themselves, to see how they performed individually.

4. See How They Grow has the fewest number of animals so far identified, with 63 species.

The low number of species is not entirely surprising. Some episodes, such as 'Pets', contain only their title species (so the entire 40-minute programme only contains domestic dog and cat, budgerigar and common goldfish). A total of 7 species appear only in See How They Grow (the Amazon tree boa, Cunningham's skink and 5 species of invertebrate).

One episode that would add a lot of new species is 'Sea Animals', which appears to have been filmed in a UK public aquarium (many species are fairly standard native aquaria fare, such as smooth-hounds, brill and gilt-head bream). Although this episode is available online in its US release format, I find the narration so ghastly that it is hard to watch and I also know, courtesy of seeing the UK version when I was younger, that the US release is not the complete episode. One episode, 'Tree Animals', has not been uploaded online and I have also never seen it for sale before.

3. Creatures Fantastic has the second lowest species total, with 76 species.

This is not so surprising, considering the series' focus on mythology. Even so, a total of 14 species only appear in Creatures Fantastic among the DK Vision media (including the leopard cat, European wildcat and Asiatic golden cat).

I am still missing five episodes from this series. I imagine some, like 'Creatures of the Deep' and 'Birds and Things with Wings' will add a number more animals to the series total. I don't imagine 'Mythical Horses' will add much, while 'Man Beasts' and 'Tricky Tricksters' are a mystery - the series does have a knack for surprising with animal numbers. I did not, for instance, expect that 'The Underworld' episode would have had 18 different species shown in it.

2. Amazing Animals has a very respectable total of 870 species.

Well over half of the species in Amazing Animals, a total of 469, do not appear in any of the other three programmes. These include some well-known and charismatic species like the black rhinoceros, blue whale, warthog and Central American spider monkey, as well as more unusual animals including the ground pangolin, mountain beaver, giant forest hog and Las Cajas water mouse.

One reason why Amazing Animals has so many unique animals is that, rather than being made partly by the BBC like the other three programmes, it was partly made by Partridge Films. That opens up a whole range of stock footage sources unavailable to the other three programmes.

1. Eyewitness has the runaway lead species total, with at least 951 different animal species appearing in it.

This total is even more impressive when it is remembered that some episodes (Planets and Human Machine most notably) have hardly any animals in them at all, and Eyewitness has one less season than Amazing Animals.

A total of 432 species only appeared in Eyewitness, including several species of bear (the sun, sloth and Asiatic black), aye-aye, Indian rhinoceros and several species of shark, including the tiger, sand tiger and great white sharks.

---

As for the zorilla specifically, it appears as moving footage (rather than still images) in five episodes - as studio footage it appears in Mammal (Eyewitness) and Animal Senses and Poisonous Animals (Amazing Animals), while it also appears in Nighttime Animals and Animal Colors (also Amazing Animals) as stock footage.
Click to expand...
From what I understand, the UK and US dubs of See How They Grow were rather different - the US dub indeed having something of a more, perhaps, intolerable demeanor.
The other shows as far as I can tell were far less drastic in regards to borders - Henry's Amazing Animals, for example, only changes the voice of the narrator - and, by extension, some of the dialogue in the episodes. [In the US, it's a murre, but in the UK, it's a guillemot] [as a bit of side-trivia, I also helped out a while back in making all 52 episodes easily available on the internet!]
Henry's Amazing Animals was, in fact, not the only children's media work done by Partridge - they also worked on a musical video known as Animal Alphabet, which aired on Nick Jr. by lettered episodes, or was sold in DVD/VHS format as the entirety. As one would expect, in the English dub the total number of species seen on-screen comes out to a fair bit more than 26 - although each letter was dedicated to a specific animal, in several of the songs a number of 'supporting' animals were to be seen as well. Whereas other dubs would have completely different animals for some of the letters - and the Spanish dub would add an extra episode for Spanish letter Ñ. [for Ñandu, known in English as a rhea] It also seemed that Time Life Kids got their hands on the show for an American DVD release - which in addition to changing some of the pronounciations for an American audience [jag-yoo-are > jag-war + zed > zee etc.] seemingly stripped down many of the songs for no discernible reason than perhaps those at Time Life worried that the songs in their entirety may be a bit much somehow for the American audience ! It was dubbed also into 6 other languages - French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian and Maori - I have seen the French and Spanish myself - though for the others I'd imagine the ITV archives would have a fair few of them. But... perhaps now I digress!
I somewhat have admiration somehow for those who worked at Eyewitness to have a veritable menagerie in-and-out of the studio - certainly difficult to replicate today - as even if the species are all still present in the UK to some capacity, I doubt there are as many possibilities to convince animal collections to let their creatures into your studio!
 
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dillotest0 said:
From what I understand, the UK and US dubs of See How They Grow were rather different - the US dub indeed having something of a more, perhaps, intolerable demeanor.
The other shows as far as I can tell were far less drastic in regards to borders - Henry's Amazing Animals, for example, only changes the voice of the narrator - and, by extension, some of the dialogue in the episodes. [In the US, it's a murre, but in the UK, it's a guillemot] [as a bit of side-trivia, I also helped out a while back in making all 52 episodes easily available on the internet!]
Henry's Amazing Animals was, in fact, not the only children's media work done by Partridge - they also worked on a musical video known as Animal Alphabet, which aired on Nick Jr. by lettered episodes, or was sold in DVD/VHS format as the entirety. As one would expect, in the English dub the total number of species seen on-screen comes out to a fair bit more than 26 - although each letter was dedicated to a specific animal, in several of the songs a number of 'supporting' animals were to be seen as well. Whereas other dubs would have completely different animals for some of the letters - and the Spanish dub would add an extra episode for Spanish letter Ñ. [for Ñandu, known in English as a rhea] It also seemed that Time Life Kids got their hands on the show for an American DVD release - which in addition to changing some of the pronounciations for an American audience [jag-yoo-are > jag-war + zed > zee etc.] seemingly stripped down many of the songs for no discernible reason than perhaps those at Time Life worried that the songs in their entirety may be a bit much somehow for the American audience ! It was dubbed also into 6 other languages - French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian and Maori - I have seen the French and Spanish myself - though for the others I'd imagine the ITV archives would have a fair few of them. But... perhaps now I digress!
I somewhat have admiration somehow for those who worked at Eyewitness to have a veritable menagerie in-and-out of the studio - certainly difficult to replicate today - as even if the species are all still present in the UK to some capacity, I doubt there are as many possibilities to convince animal collections to let their creatures into your studio!
Click to expand...

So first off, I'd like to personally thank you for helping upload the Amazing Animals series online. Watching it, and writing down transcripts for each episode, and noting down species lists from each episode helped keep me sane during the Covid lockdowns.

I think the only one of the four main DK Vision shows that remained unchanged in the UK and US was Creatures Fantastic - I certainly cannot find anything suggesting America had its own narrators. Eyewitness definitely had a different narrator between the two. I must admit I was a bit surprised to hear one of the UK episodes of Amazing Animals in 2021(?) - the first episode I got on VHS, way back in the 90s (Nighttime Animals), had Tom Clarke-Hill as the narrator so I thought that was the standard.

One set of films I recently found that links quite strongly to Amazing Animals was the 6-part set of Wildlife Explorer VHS. On watching them for the first time, I found they contained a lot of the Partridge footage shared with Amazing Animals (the Hunters of the Night episode, for instance, had clips of owls, vampire bats and the water mouse that all appeared in several Amazing Animals episodes). They also contain the names of all the contributing filmmakers for each episode, which I hope will allow me to track down the sources for some of the clips - in particular, I would love to find which programme had the water mouse footage. As an added twist, the videos were the US version, which is also narrated by Tom Clarke-Hill.
 
@DesertRhino150 From what I recall, Partridge had quite a comprehensive library of animal footage - and it was Partridge actually who gave rights to the Wildscreen ARKive [RIP!] as so to utilise their footage on their multimedia platform, which definitely helped a great deal. Of course, ARKive no longer exists today - all photos and videos 'stored away for perpetuity'. Would be a great shame should they never see daylight again !
Sometimes I do rattle on about how I dearly wish there would be a website on the internet that would take foot in ARKive's sizeable shoes, how most animal website content on the internet is rather pandering to the crowds who dress their pooches in silly costumes ... but I appreciate this is probably not the place for me to rattle !
P.S.
I recall a while back asking Eric Meyers [the V.A. of Henry] as to whether HAA was planned to be renewed for a fifth season - and quite amusingly, I received an audio file actually of Meyers doing a Henry impression - in all likelihood, the first he has done in over 20 years ! [this was in 2020.] I very much respect this was likely a one-off situation, so that is how it shall be. As to the answer of the question, he clarified only 4 seasons, 52 episodes, were ever made. And so for a while I wondered why that was ...
though recently I figured out what may well be the reason - HAA was, in fact, not alone in a roster of 52 episodes - multiple other children's shows, including The Magic Schoolbus, numbered 52 in episodes as well. This may well be because a year has, roughly, 52 weeks, and it was figured that showing re-runs of one episode per week would be enough for 'good' syndication. Disney neutered its own library with a cap at 65 episodes / show, and Teletubbies was particularly interesting in that by the final cut in 2001, 365 episodes were produced - one for each day of the year [save leap years]... and so I digress once more!
 
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Hello! I'm a huge natural history stock film footage nerd. Just found this thread from searching around google and wanted to bring up a few things.

1. Most of Arkive.org's video files were luckily saved on wayback machine right before it closed. Anything labeled under "Granada Wild" on there is a Partridge Films stock clip.

2. Partridge Films Ltd's stock footage library, judging by the media credit on Arkive.org, used to be on ITN Source until it closed in 2017. I contacted Getty Images UK, which bought out ITN Source and they mentioned they only had the news footage from ITN Source and they didn't acquire the Partridge Films and Survival (Granada Wild) content. The only hope for retrieving this content seems to be the ITV Archive, which I am in progress of getting in contact with.
 
Koala18849 said:
Good News! ITV Archive indeed confirmed they hold the Partridge Films catalog. I'm currently asking them the limitations for getting into the website.
Click to expand...
Nice!
Perhaps you could also enquire about Animal Alphabet (1998) and its language dubs? [Portuguese, German, Italian particular]
It was produced by PF too. I recall being pretty interested in the dubs a while back, but I don't recall finding much.
 
My current plan is to get access to watermarked prints of the footage on the website atm. Animal Alphabet will probably be on there and anything Partridge or Survival related on the site I've got covered.
 
They told me it would be about roughly 75 pounds for a 30 minute tape of footage unwatermarked, so it would be quite the investment to get it as such
 
Just out of interest, I have created an online gallery containing screenshots of as many species that were filmed in a studio setting for the four main Dorling Kindersley Vision shows I could find - so far, 321 species in all:

Gallery of studio-filmed animal species

Some species are best guesses (the online quality is sometimes not high enough to determine exactly what species is actually being shown), but I think I have the majority of them correctly identified.
 
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