Courtesy NBC Networks
BEAST LEGENDS
Friendly Rating: Could be scary for the youngest viewers, but otherwise kinda cool.
Safety Rating: Mild, implied violence – these are monsters.
Quality Rating: Surprisingly cool and interesting.
Series premieres tonight on Syfy at 10 p.m.
Talk about sneaking some science past your kids. This is technically a reality series that looks at the monster legends of yore and tries to apply that to real life. Which sounds kinda contradictory, but actually has some good information about biology and zoology.
Take the Kraken – which I’d never heard of until last spring when the movie preview of Clash of the Titans turned Liam Neeson’s big line (“Release the Kraken”) into a big joke. Apparently, while there is some conflict in the Syfy show about just when folks started writing about this gigantic squid/octopus-like thing that could break ships apart, most folks trace it back to the 1700s (although according to Wikipedia, there are references that go back to the 13th Century).
The thing that’s interesting is that it’s possible drunk sailors saw some giant squids and drew some over-sized conclusions. So what do the folks on the Beast Legends team do? They go looking for what these critters could have been. Even cooler, the biologist on the team, Scott, is an African American. Not that I’ve got anything against old White guys in lab coats. But I do love it when we see someone who isn’t on TV. Hey, those images are powerful.
The other members of the team include an explorer, a legends expert and a couple of artists – what a blending of the arts and science. Even more fun was Scott getting all over the artists when they suggested something that didn’t make sense biologically.
The result is that we learn an awful lot about marine life, in this case, even while the artists are trying to create what the monster could have been if it had been real. Like I said, way to combine art and science and sneak it all past your kids. I do wish we had more women involved, especially on the science side. But there is one woman on the team, so all is not lost. One other fun thing that the show does is add CGI of the legendary monsters right into the real life footage. Though if you have little ones, especially ones who scare easily, you may want to point that part out.
