“Mysteries of the Deep”

One of the most interesting parts of the True-Life Adventure brand, at least to me, is the variety of ecosystems covered. Oh, sure, you got the ones about the charismatic megafauna—your “Jungle Cat,” for example. But the point of the series came to be that there were wonders of nature wherever you looked and maybe we should consider preserving them. The ocean is more than just dolphins and whales and sharks; even looking into the smaller parts of a coral reef could provide you with fascinating creatures.

This says it’s filmed in Friday Harbor, which I can only assume is the one up in Washington State. I think, honestly, it’s a couple of different places. We have a minute or so of dolphins and then it’s on to the smaller denizens of a specific area. We do get the birth of a dolphin, but the point of the short is clearly that the whole thing is an interconnected web. Dolphins and sharks, sure, but also sea snails and other things you wouldn’t necessarily consider. We see how different species of fish interact with one another and with themselves.

I’m frankly annoyed that they don’t remaster the whole series and put it on Disney+. With the notable exception that everyone wants to talk about, they’re not really worse than a lot of the stuff you get on NatGeo. I grant you a lot of this series looks like it was filmed in a tank, but the actions of crabs and things don’t necessarily change there, and there are a lot of species covered in this particular installment that you don’t necessarily see. And it’s cool to watch a crab trying to fight off a fish several times its size.

I do wish this was a little more clear about where these animals live. With some of the series, they’re open; the Olympic elk lives in the Olympic Mountains. Okay, great. The Vanishing Prairie is the prairie of the US West. But “the deep” covers an awful lot of territory, even though this isn’t the deep so much as it is the mysteries of the kind of shallow, actually. And I’m only guessing—maybe there’s more than one Friday Harbor, and it’s just that Wikipedia only knows about the one I already knew about, up on San Juan Island.

Still, it’s kind of nice to think about going to see this sort of thing in the theatre. This is not, apparently, an official True-Life Adventure, but it was released alongside The Vanishing Prairie, and that’s not the sort of thing that gets put out in theatres for general release. Not these days. So okay, you go watch the fish fight one another and then the bison, you know, still exist, and you get a wider view of the world. Sure, we do that on TV and streaming these days, but there are a lot of things on streaming and TV that are still released on big screens. This sort of thing, not so much.