Dropping into a viper pit in Panama’s Camino Reale…navigating his way out of a crevasse of one of the world’s largest glaciers…battling extreme conditions in frozen Siberia…it’s all in a day’s work for adventurer Bear Grylls. A former British Special Forces soldier, Bear shares ingenious and often shocking techniques for surviving in some of the world’s most treacherous environments in each unforgettable episode of Man vs. Wild.
Episodes: Sahara: Bear Grylls parachutes into the hottest place on Earth to tackle extreme survival challenges, showing you how your own urine and eating the feared camel spider can stave off dehydration and heat-stroke. Desert Survivor: A camel train takes Bear to the deadly desolation of the salt pans where there’s no food and no water but plenty of mirages to trick the mind. However, his biggest survival challenge will be something he learned from the indigenous Berber tribesmen of West Africa. Panama: Bear parachutes into croc- and shark-infested water to tackle the stinking tangle of the mangroves and drops from a vine into the lethal Viper Pits on the historic Camino Reale – where he has to face one of his biggest fears in the pitch-black of a cavern. Jungle: Bear encounters the Emberra Indians, who teach him some of their legendary survival techniques. And in a country where there’s a high risk of kidnapping, how can you conceal yourself and dodge your trackers? Patagonia: In the Southern Patagonian Ice Field – one of the largest expanses of ice in the world – Bear negotiates his way out of a crevasse and spends the night in a snow hole sheltering himself from an icy blizzard. Andes Adventure: In this chilling episode, Bear spends the night sleeping under a rock in freezing conditions, skins a hare, climbs a 100-foot cliff, meets a gaucho (a South American cowboy) and tracks pumas to find a recent kill. Bear Eats: Bear puts his taste buds (and stomach) to the ultimate test as he takes us to nature’s kitchen: See him drink the liquid from a camel’s stomach and eat elephant droppings, live frogs, 3-inch-long beetles and raw goat’s testicles…if you dare. Siberia: Battling sub-zero temperatures, Bear journeys toward the Taiga forest, where it’s thought that a quarter of the people who enter it never find their way out. On the way, he uses a deer skin he finds to sled down a series of treacherous inclines. Land of Ice: In the Sanyan Mountains in Siberia, Bear meets the Tuvans, yak herders descended from Genghis Khan who have lived there for 20,000 years, and learns some survival techniques from these cold-climate experts. Namibia: Bear’s journey begins on the notorious skeleton coast, a lethal 900-mile stretch that has wrecked thousands of ships. Fighting dehydration, Bear meets the masters of desert survival, the San Bushmen, who reveal their methods for finding water in barren locales and teach Bear to hunt porcupine. Zambia: Flash floods of the Zambezi River and the 12-foot waves and vicious currents of the Batoka gorge regularly claim the lives of canoeists and rafters. Before heading into the bush, Bear demonstrates how to survive some of the world’s biggest rapids. Jungle Swamp: Bear goes into the Pacific Ring of Fire as he takes on a week of challenges in an area devastated by the 2004 tsunami. He shows how to stay alive by making a simple shelter and scavenging whatever he can from the tiny island. Castaway: In the jungle, Bear sleeps in a tree to stay safe during tropical storms, sharing his bed with a variety of horrible insects. Then he dines on grubs and snakes and must use all his survival skills and ingenuity to get through waterfalls, sheer cliffs and deadly jungle.
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February 8, 2006
#1
My review of this show has generated quite a few negative–and even immature ad hominem–comments. I would like to explain that yes this show is entertaining and yes many people already know that this show is completely staged (though many still don’t); HOWEVER, the main reason that I am giving this show one star is that a lot of the survival techniques that Grylls depicts and a LOT of the advice that he gives is wrong and DANGEROUS. Doing the nonsense that he does in a real survival situation could kill you.
As someone who actually studies wilderness survival I just can’t forgive him for that one. Therefore, one star. Some have retorted that this shouldn’t matter because “it’s just a show” and, common, they say, how likely is it that you’ll even find yourself in a survival situation? Well, to address the latter comment, that entirely depends on your lifestyle. If you regularly go hiking in the wilderness like my wife and I do then the odds are actually quite high. Tens of thousands of people get lost hiking every year. Here in this part of Oregon search and rescue is sent out ALL THE TIME.
Regarding the comment that “it’s just a show,” that comment is, well, ridiculous. What good would a show about car mechanics be if it were entertaining if a great deal of the mechanical advice given was completely wrong? It might interest people who take this childish stance seriously to know that Man vs. Wild–as confirmed by the show’s crew–was actually supposed to originally be an educational show, but then they realized they could make more money and be more successful if they abandoned the educational part and (using the crew’s words) “dumbed the show down.” So all of you complainers who can’t sit through an episode of Survivorman, this show is meant for you. It’s been dumbed down to your level for entertainment purposes. So yeah, it’s fast paced, but just know, a lot of what Grylls does is completely bogus.
After learning that Man vs. Wild is just a bunch of staged scenes The Discovery Channel dumped unaired episodes of the show. It will now only air the show with a statement that appears before every episode stating that “situations are presented to Bear so that he can demonstrate survival skills.” This disclaimer is a nice way for the Discovery channel to state that they acknowledge that this show is phony but that they are showing it anyway because it has become a money maker for them. If you want to SEE an example of how this show is phony go to Youtube and watch the clip entitled Man vs. Wild, Bear Grylls is a fake. It depicts good old “Bear” (his name is Ed) acting like he is trying to cross a “dangerous lava bridge” in the middle of nowhere. If you keep watching, the camera pans back and reveals that Ed is in fact just walking on some rocks immediately to the right of a busy highway!
Also check out the website Bearwiki. This excellent Wikipedia site, protected from saboteurs, documents elements of the show that are phony. This information has either been pointed out by real survival experts or has been confirmed by the show’s crew. Here is a sampling of what it says: It points out that in most episodes in season two Ed actually slept in nearby hotel rooms. It shows that a lot of the animals that appear on the show are actually domesticated and therefore completely safe and tame. The “bear” that he encountered in season one was–lo and behold–a man in a bear suit (I kid you not). The “dangerous volcanic gasses” that he encountered was actually smoke from a fog machine. The “dead badger” that he ate was really a piece of steak that the crew gave him. Usually when the show depicts him “catching an animal” it’s really a dead animal that the crew gave him. Episodes that Discovery has reedited do not claim that Ed actually caught the food the original episodes claimed. By the way, ALL scenes of Ed using a bow/drill to make fire are fake. The list goes on and on.
Most of his leaps and bounds are even fake, as evidenced by the fact that the crew is already ahead of him, as well as by numerous discontinuities (such as leaping off a boulder and, when landing, not having the same clothes on that he had on in the previous shot!). In fact the whole shtick about being “dropped off” by the chopper is fake–the camera crew, with food and supplies, is already there waiting for him. In one episode you can see him holding the edges of his parachute and not the brake toggles, suggesting that the “rough landing” was faked. Often when he is climbing something–tree, chimney, ice, etc.–there is a rope that he is using that the camera doesn’t show and/or pre-dug hand holds arranged to make it look like he can just climb up a natural surface. A harness usually lifts him to a certain point, is removed so that the camera can film him a while, and then is put on again to lift him up some more. The edited footage makes it look like he is climbing up a cliff when he really isn’t.
If you respect nature you probably won’t like a lot of the things Ed does. For instance–and just to make a comparison–in Survivorman Stroud does not like killing things unless he really has to. Sometimes he does because he–unlike Ed–is in a real survival situation and needs to eat. Ed, on the other hand, is not in a survival situation and is not even hungry (the crew feeds him), and yet he and the crew run around killing animals right and left. In the South Dakota episode Ed makes a torch. He doesn’t really need it because he doesn’t need to go into the mine in the first place (that is stupid and dangerous)–but that’s neither here nor there. So what’s he do? He goes to a birch tree THAT HAS TINDER FUNGUS RIGHT ON THE TRUNK and then, of course, he doesn’t use it but instead cuts a ring of living bark from around the trunk, not telling the viewer that he just killed that tree for no apparent reason.
As stated above, this show’s “authenticity” is not its main problem. The main problem with this show (and the reason I give it one star) is that A LOT of the advice that Ed gives is wrong and dangerous and could actually kill you if you followed it. In short, this show is irresponsible.
Things that Ed says and does that could kill you if you did them include: Drinking urine if you’re thirsty. You should NEVER drink urine as it can be highly toxic and it also dehydrates you, which defeats the purpose of drinking it in the first place. He correctly states that it’s not safe to drink dirty stream water but then says it’s okay to drink water from elephant dung. Huh? Ed gets unnecessarily wet all the time. It’s fine for him because he’s not really in a survival situation (remember the show is fake). For those who are in a survival situation, however, this could be fatal. Ed unnecessarily climbs things all the time and leaps about, which in real life would just cause injury.
Crossing frozen lakes, trying to ride feral horses, heating rocks (they might explode), lighting a fire in a cave (this could cause a cave-in), eating egg shells for calcium (this only depletes your calories), getting into hot water to treat hypothermia (this can kill you), going into a mine (mines are unsafe), using a parachute cord to abseil down a cliff…all of these things could injure you or result in your death.
Ed also regularly finds dead animals on the show and then is shown eating meat from them. He can do this safely because, again, the show is fake. Often when he “finds” a dead animal it is simply animal that was provided by the crew. Recall that when he was shown eating a dead badger he was actually eating a piece of steak (cow meat) that the crew gave him. Once, when the show portrayed him eating a fish that he supposedly caught out of a stream, many viewers did not notice that the fish had already been boiled and that Ed was making it look like it was alive by twitching his fingers. Why is this important? Because in real life if you come across a dead animal you probably don’t want to eat its meat raw.
Fans seem to not at all mind that the fact that this show is completely staged completely goes against the show’s dramatic title, “Man vs. Wild.” Ed is not taking the wild on, at all. He’s eating food the crew gives him, sleeping at Howard Johnson and is flown to different destinations to make it look like he’s trekking through the wilderness and “completing a challenge.” Watch, by all means. They succeeded in making an entertaining show, if you can get past Ed’s ego. But know that what you’re seeing is closer to Survivor than Survivorman.
February 8, 2006
#2
Bear Grylls has a somewhat entertaining show but it is completely worthless from a survival standpoint. I do not like the Title “Man vs. Wild”? There are enough people going against the natural world already. That title gives nature a bad name, like it is something you must fight against. The man has admitted to staging scenes of the show and staying in hotel rooms, to me, that discredits almost anything he has to say about natural living. If you are only interested in entertainment, then this show deserves about three stars. However, if you are interested in learning survival information, or not interested in seeing a fool run around in the woods, I would highly recommend Survivor Man. Also, any of Tom Brown’s field guides are great for a person who is truly interested in survival and not just cheap entertainment.
Also, NEVER drink your urine as Bear tells you to do. That “survival advice” can easily get you killed.
February 8, 2006
#3
Discovery Channel is planing to have some real wilderness survival experts on in the 2010 season. I will believe it when I see it.
February 8, 2006
#4
Entertaining show with some interesting survival tidbits. Forget all the “fake” hype, all of these shows have some production value-added, otherwise they’d be so boring and unappealing they’d never get past one pilot episode.
February 9, 2006
#5
I live in Europe and a great majority of us know about Bear Grylls. This is an amazingingly skilled and highly trained human being whose experience in the United Kingdom Special Forces Selection has made him who he is. All of his experiences are real and unfabricated. He is trained for survival at all costs, and rescue teams are on stand-by should something go dreadfully wrong for him and his crew. In case some of you are unfamiliar with this bit of trivia, Bear Grylls learned to climb and sail from his father at an early age. He earned a second dan black belt in Shotokan karate as a teenager. He now practices Yoga and Ninjutsu. He also became involved in scouting, beginning at age eight, as a cub scout. He speaks English, Spanish, and French. Grylls is Christian, describing his faith as the “backbone” in his life. In other words, he is no joker! God bless and long live Bear Grylls!