Wildlife Jams is a half-hour educational television program that focuses on how animals behave in the wild and is targeted to teenage viewers. The program is narrated and also provides music from critically acclaimed jazz musicians.
Television (TV), sometimes shortened to tele or telly, is a telecommunication medium used for transmitting moving images in monochrome, or in color, and in two or three dimensions and sound. The term can refer to a television set, a television program, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertising, entertainment and news.
Animals are multicellular eukaryotic organisms that form the biological kingdom Animalia. With few exceptions, animals consume organic material, breathe oxygen, are able to move, can reproduce sexually, and grow from a hollow sphere of cells, the blastula, during embryonic development. Over 1.5 million living animal species have been described—of which around 1 million are insects—but it has been estimated there are over 7 million animal species in total. Animals range in length from 8.5 millionths of a metre to 33.6 metres (110 ft) and have complex interactions with each other and their environments, forming intricate food webs. The category includes humans, but in colloquial use the term animal often refers only to non-human animals. The study of non-human animals is known as zoology.
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, United States, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and developed from roots in blues and ragtime. Jazz is seen by many as "America's classical music". Since the 1920s Jazz Age, jazz has become recognized as a major form of musical expression. It then emerged in the form of independent traditional and popular musical styles, all linked by the common bonds of African-American and European-American musical parentage with a performance orientation. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Jazz has roots in West African cultural and musical expression, and in African-American music traditions including blues and ragtime, as well as European military band music. Intellectuals around the world have hailed jazz as "one of America's original art forms".
Wildlife Jams presents information featuring a wide variety of animal species, including fish, reptiles, birds, and land mammals. Certain episodes investigate certain types of animals, including horses ("Horsing Around"), dolphins ("Dolphins"), tortoises ("Slow and Steady in the Shell") and apes ("Apes"). Other episodes examine animal topics relevant to many species, such as "Animal Communication", "Animal Adaptation", and "Swimming". The narrative guides viewers through a wealth of information, but also frequently allows space for them to draw their own observations and conclusions based on the facts presented.
Fish are gill-bearing aquatic craniate animals that lack limbs with digits. They form a sister group to the tunicates, together forming the olfactores. Included in this definition are the living hagfish, lampreys, and cartilaginous and bony fish as well as various extinct related groups. Tetrapods emerged within lobe-finned fishes, so cladistically they are fish as well. However, traditionally fish are rendered paraphyletic by excluding the tetrapods. Because in this manner the term "fish" is defined negatively as a paraphyletic group, it is not considered a formal taxonomic grouping in systematic biology, unless it is used in the cladistic sense, including tetrapods. The traditional term pisces is considered a typological, but not a phylogenetic classification.
Reptiles are tetrapod animals in the class Reptilia, comprising today's turtles, crocodilians, snakes, amphisbaenians, lizards, tuatara, and their extinct relatives. The study of these traditional reptile orders, historically combined with that of modern amphibians, is called herpetology.
Birds, also known as Aves or avian dinosaurs, are a group of endothermic vertebrates, characterised by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the laying of hard-shelled eggs, a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a strong yet lightweight skeleton. Birds live worldwide and range in size from the 5 cm (2 in) bee hummingbird to the 2.75 m (9 ft) ostrich. They rank as the world's most numerically-successful class of tetrapods, with approximately ten thousand living species, more than half of these being passerines, sometimes known as perching birds. Birds have wings which are more or less developed depending on the species; the only known groups without wings are the extinct moa and elephant birds. Wings, which evolved from forelimbs, gave birds the ability to fly, although further evolution has led to the loss of flight in flightless birds, including ratites, penguins, and diverse endemic island species of birds. The digestive and respiratory systems of birds are also uniquely adapted for flight. Some bird species of aquatic environments, particularly seabirds and some waterbirds, have further evolved for swimming.
Wildlife Jams also promotes awareness and responsibility toward wildlife issues, such as endangered species, threatened habitats, and wildlife conservation.
An endangered species is a species which has been categorized as very likely to become extinct. Endangered (EN), as categorized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, is the second most severe conservation status for wild populations in the IUCN's schema after Critically Endangered (CR).
The show is syndicated to television stations nationwide. And until its October 1, 2007 closure, it was also seen on The Tube Music Network as part of federally mandated E/I programming requirements.
The Tube Music Network, Inc., or The Tube, was an American digital multicast television network. The network was a wholly owned subsidiary of The Tube Media Corp., an independent company that was founded by David Levy in 2003. The Tube focused classic and modern music videos in a format similar to the original format of cable networks MTV and VH1, prior to those networks' shift towards long-form entertainment programming. The network also aired occasional commercials and public service announcements, as well as three hours of educational and informational programming on Saturday mornings.
Desmond John Morris is an English zoologist, ethologist and surrealist painter, as well as a popular author in human sociobiology. He is known for his 1967 book The Naked Ape, and for his television programmes such as Zoo Time.
The Irrawaddy dolphin is a euryhaline species of oceanic dolphin found in discontinuous subpopulations near sea coasts and in estuaries and rivers in parts of the Bay of Bengal and Southeast Asia.
Hinterland Who's Who is best known as a series of 60-second public service announcements profiling Canadian animals, produced by Environment Canada Wildlife Service and the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) in the 1960s and 70s, and re-launched by the Canadian Wildlife Federation in the 2000s. While the word "hinterland" refers to an area near a coast line or river bank, the series explores wildlife throughout Canada in general, regardless of location.
BET Jams is an American pay television network controlled by BET Networks and owned by Viacom Media Networks. The channel features hip-hop and urban contemporary music videos. The network, formerly known as MTV Jams, was rebranded under the BET banner on October 5, 2015.
Julie Scardina is Animal Ambassador and Corporate Curator for SeaWorld, Busch Gardens, and Discovery Cove zoological parks. She was formerly curator of animal training for SeaWorld San Diego.
Animal training is the act of teaching animals specific responses to specific conditions or stimuli. Training may be for purposes such as companionship, detection, protection, and entertainment. The type of training an animal receives will vary depending on the training method used, and the purpose for training the animal. For example, a seeing eye dog will be trained to achieve a different goal than a wild animal in a circus.
Wildlife conservation is the practice of protecting wild plant and animal species and their habitat. Wildlife plays an important role in balancing the ecosystem and provides stability to different natural processes of nature like rainfall(transpiration from plant),changing of temperature(heat evolution by animals), fertility of soil. The goal of wildlife conservation is to ensure that nature will be around for future generations to enjoy and also to recognize the importance of wildlife and wilderness for humans and other species alike. Many nations have government agencies and NGO's dedicated to wildlife conservation, which help to implement policies designed to protect wildlife. Numerous independent non-profit organizations also promote various wildlife conservation causes.
Globe Trekker is an adventure tourism television series produced by Pilot Productions. The British series was inspired by the Lonely Planet travelbooks and began airing in 1994. Globe Trekker is broadcast in over 40 countries across six continents. The program won over 20 international awards, including six American Cable Ace awards.
Planet of the Apes is an American science fiction television series that aired on CBS in 1974. The series stars Roddy McDowall, Ron Harper, James Naughton, Mark Lenard and Booth Colman. It is based on the 1968 Planet of the Apes film and its sequels, which were inspired by the novel Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle.
A working animal is an animal, usually domesticated, that is kept by humans and trained to perform tasks. They may be close members of the family, such as guide dogs or other assistance dogs, or they may be animals trained to provide tractive force, such as draft horses or logging elephants. The latter types of animals are called draft animals or beasts of burden. Most working animals are either service animals or draft animals. They may also be used for milking or herding, jobs that require human training to encourage the animal to cooperate. Some, at the end of their working lives, may also be used for meat or other products such as leather.
Little Einsteins is an American interactive animated children's television series on Playhouse Disney. The educational preschool series was developed for television by Douglas Wood who created the concept and characters, and a subsequent team headed by Emmy Award-winning director Aidan Abril and JoJo's Circus co-creator Eric Weiner, and produced by Curious Pictures and The Baby Einstein Company. The first episode of the Little Einsteins TV series premiered on Playhouse Disney in the UK on October 3, 2005, in the United States on October 9 and in Japan on TV Tokyo on February 14, 2006. In Europe, the second season of the show premiered on the Disney Channel around Christmas time, and in Japan, it aired on October 8, 2007, on Playhouse Disney Japan. Reruns were then moved to Playhouse Disney's successor, Disney Junior. The final regular episode was broadcast in December 2009, and a final standalone special was broadcast in mid-2010, marking the end of the series.
A natural history film or wildlife film is a documentary film about animals, plants, or other non-human living creatures, usually concentrating on film taken in their natural habitat but also often including footage of trained and captive animals. Sometimes they are about wild animals, plants, or ecosystems in relationship to human beings. Such programmes are most frequently made for television, particularly for public broadcasting channels, but some are also made for the cinema medium. The proliferation of this genre occurred almost simultaneously alongside the production of similar television series.
Nigel Marven is a British wildlife TV presenter, television producer, author and birdwatcher. Nigel is known for his unorthodox, spontaneous, and daring style of presenting wildlife documentaries as well as for including factual knowledge in the proceedings. This has led some people to compare him to Steve Irwin. Nigel ran the 2008 London marathon in 4 hours 4 minutes to try to raise £20,000 for the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society UK.
Neil Nightingale is the creative director of BBC Earth, BBC Worldwide's global brand for all BBC nature and science content.
Alastair Fothergill is a British producer of nature documentaries for television and cinema. He is the series producer of the series The Blue Planet (2001), Planet Earth (2006) and the co-director of the associated feature films Deep Blue and Earth.
Really Wild Animals is a children's nature television series, hosted by Dudley Moore as Spin, an anthropomorphic globe. Comprising 26 episodes, the series aired between October 24, 1993 and March 2, 1998. The series was released on thirteen VHS tapes, and later on thirteen DVDs. The creator and executive producer of Really Wild Animals was Andrew Carl Wilk. The series was nominated for five national Emmy Awards and won one.
Going Ape is a British Television docu-soap program that is aired on the Animal Planet.
A talking animal or speaking animal is any non-human animal that can produce sounds or gestures resembling those of a human language. Several species or groups of animals have developed forms of communication which superficially resemble verbal language, however, these are not defined as language because they lack one or more of the defining characteristics, i.e. grammar, syntax, recursion and displacement. Researchers have been successful in teaching some animals to make gestures similar to sign language. However, these animals fail to reach one or more of the criteria accepted as defining language.
Bellum Entertainment Group is a Burbank, California-based television production and distribution company.
The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) is an international non-governmental organization founded in 1961, working in the field of the wilderness preservation, and the reduction of human impact on the environment. It was formerly named the World Wildlife Fund, which remains its official name in Canada and the United States.
