Even if the sound happened to go out on your television set, PBS's "The Living Edens" would be worth watching.
The film footage is simply spectacular.Tonight's initial installment in this ongoing series, "Denali: Alaska's Great Wilderness," contains fantastic images ranging from the northern lights to a pack of hunting wolves, from a mother bear and her three cubs to a frozen frog coming back to life.
This is, quite simply, some of the best nature photography you're going to see on television.
"Denali" covers an entire year in the Alaskan national park that includes Mount Denali (also known as Mount McKinley), North America's highest mountain. It opens in the depts of winter, when wildlife from the grizzly bears to the ground squirrels to the wood frogs is hibernating - the frogs by literally freezing solid.
As the weather warms, life explodes in the park. It's absolutely gorgeous, sometimes funny and often terrifying.
(Be warned - there are winners and losers in the wild, and younger children may not take well to seeing cute little squirrels turned into snacks for eagles and bears or seeing a baby moose lose a battle for survival.)
The best news about "Living Edens" is that this is the first of 20 episodes that will air through the year 2002. Sponsored by Readers Digest - which has made a $75 million investment in PBS programming - "Edens" is produced by the people who brought the excellent "World of Discovery" specials to ABC in recent years.
Exactly what a "living Eden" is is best described by executive producer Dennis Kane.
"A living Eden is a place on the face of our beautiful Earth that has been pristine from the beginning of time - a place protected by its indigenous people, the whims of nature, caring governments and remote geographical locations, a place that will remain pristine, hopefully, forever, and never be touched by the grasping hand of man," he said.
The next installment, scheduled to air on April 30, fits the bill. "Patagonia, Life at the End of the Earth" travels to southern Argentina's mountains, steppes and shores. Crews spent, on average, 10 to 12 months filming each hourlong episode, followed by six months of "intense editing."
"We are presenting natural history in a very special way - not focusing on a given animal in his setting, but giving the viewer a look at the whole ecosystem with the wildlife that inhabits it," Kane said.
And the end result is certainly spectacular.
UNEXPECTED PROBLEMS: The "Living Edens" filmmakers were not exactly working in ideal conditions. For "Denali," they spent months at a time in tents 4,000 to 5,000 feet above sea level in temperatures that reached close to 40 degrees below zero for days on end.
They thought they came prepared for the conditions. What they didn't know was that their own clothing was going to cause problems.
Producer/co-writer/cinematographer Bruce Reitherman said the enemy turned out to be that "pile fleece stuff" that makes for "very popular outdoor clothing - very effective for keeping warm, but it sheds these little filaments."
"Well, that gets into the camera eventually," he said, "especially in conditions like this, where it's very staticky and that stuff sticks to your hands, surfaces and things. And enough of that managed to get into the cameras that - gee, I don't know - a third of the stuff we shot was almost ruined."
All of which can be rather disconcerting when you leave the Arctic behind and get back to civilization and start developing your film.
"You're sort of patting yourself on the back for having survived this thing and having shot some great stuff - and you realize that it's not going to be quite as useful as you imagined," Reitherman said.