Watching wildlife shows was a particular passion of mine as a kid, from Mutual of Omaha's "Wild Kingdom" with Marlin Perkins to anything featuring Jacques Cousteau. This was before television was quite as big or certainly before it was clogged with reruns and serialized pap to the extent we have today. The concept of a nature documentary without flashing fangs and bloody kills was unknown to me before my middle-school science teacher introduced us to David Attenborough. Now that I'm a bit older, I can get excited about Attenborough or the new breed of largely contemplative and beatific nature shows on television, but... watching Raw Nature makes me full-on nostalgic for the old days, when nobody watched "nature" shows; it was "wildlife" or nothin' else! These folks set out to make a show that puts the "wild" back in wildlife, but with a twist.

The twist, in case you've chalked me up as a blood-crazed big game hunter, is that Raw Nature injects each show with a strong message about conservation, environmental stewardship, and animal protection. This is a break with some older wildlife shows that seemed at times heaven-sent for no purpose other than to make exotic locations and the animals in them haunt the bad dreams of impressionable little children. Raw Nature manages to give some good jolts, and is certainly not appropriate for younger children. It's not so much that animals are killing or being killed by each other. Instead we see depictions of animals that are being threatened, abused, or killed as man encroaches on their habitats. The show depicts a stark reality and incredibly hard odds animals face while trying to survive alongside exploding populations in a country like India. In many places visited during the filming of Raw Nature, we also see signs of the hardship faced by people, forcing them to extreme acts like smoking rats out of holes and cooking them for food in a fire-pit.

One odd decision made for Raw Nature is the overlap of locations across the five episodes contained on this DVD. Perhaps the footage in these countries was just too much to fit into a single episode, but you'll have this weird sense of deja vu throughout the show because the same locations keep coming up. The crew features a different animal in each segment, but it would have made more sense to stick with one country/city per show than all the pseudo hopping around. The greatest achievement in Raw Nature is the depiction of some really wild cultures and marginal individuals so completely focused on saving animals that they can seem a bit possessed. Rather than poke fun at this quality or try to mask it with melodrama, Raw Nature just embraces the madness and takes you along for the ride. Like a good comedian, Raw Nature gets the timing and the pace just right. You'll breeze right through the episodes here and be left wanting more, only to find that this collection appears to be the alpha and omega of Raw Nature. Animal Planet ran the full series in 2008 and doesn't show any sign of bringing it back, which is a shame.