YMMV / The Future is Wild

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• Accidental Innuendo: The episode "Scared Safe" of the Nelvana cartoon has C.G. run several safety drills, one of which involves her lighting up the beacon on her helmet to see if it's bright enough for her crew to see. When she wants the crew to confirm if they can see the light or not...
  Ethan: Uh, you're flashing us.
• Americans Hate Tingle: This seems to be the case in France, given that the now-closed attraction "Les Animaux du Futur" (in the amusement park Futuroscope, Bordeaux, France), based on this series, flopped, and the franchise since became obscure there, despite being locally adapted as a book too. Even, it's very difficult, if no longer possible, to find the French dub version, given that some of the last available copies has been bought in 2015 and 2016, even though said book version has a CD that show scenes from the now-probably lost French dub.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • The unlikely and impossible anatomy of the Titan Dolphin has had many fans trying to redesign a more plausible land cetacean, or alternatively come up with an evolutionary pathway for it that's consistent with the show's timeline.
  • The fact that the show only covers three time periods, with just four ecosystems in each, on only three or four species in them. Many fans have taken to creating their own species and ecosystems to cover the rest of the world over the course of the 200 million years shown.
• Gateway Series: This series and its cult following are this to Speculative Biology in general.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Japan is the franchise's most successful market.
• Harsher in Hindsight :
  • Because of certain groups of surviving species (like turtles, sharks, monkeys or raptors), or populations (such as european wolverines) being now endangered, some of the future species have become less plausible than they were.
  • Mammals, especially poggles, are in-universe of this trope : they are described as being the last mammal. This becomes even sadder when they go extinct because of the +100 mya mass extinction.
  • Just like poggles, humans are in-universe examples of this trope: the British version of the 2002 TV series speculates that they go extinct because of an ice age. 5 years later, in the 2007 cartoon series of the same name, humans are threatened by an ice age in Cassiopeia's period (+10 000 in the future).
• Hilarious in Hindsight
  • The series speculates that 200 million years in the future, nearly all land vertebrate life, including humanity, have been rendered extinct and sealife will move to land to fill the void, with squids becoming the new dominant species, and a particular squid species being hinted to become as or more intelligent than humans and making civilization sprout on Earth again. Fast-forward 12 years later, and out comes a video game series whose lore has that scenario actually happen, albeit on a ridiculously short timeframe of a few millennia rather than hundreds of thousands.
  • Squibbons are amusingly reminiscent of the infamous Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus hoax, created in 1998 as a social experiment on seeing if young people believe everything they see on the internet.
  • The premise of the Nelvana cartoon, with the human characters traveling forward in time to colonize the future, becomes this when you find out that was Dougal Dixon's original plan for Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future.
  • The Snowstalker is a sabertooth wolverine.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • As mentioned above, the Nelvana cartoon is more similar to Dougal Dixon's original idea for Man After Man than the actual book Man After Man is.
  • The avians of this series seem to have inspired some of the evolved canary descendants from Sheather's Serina project. The quadrupedal burrowing bumblets appear to be based on the Spinks, the four-winged archangels are reminiscent of the Great Blue Windrunner, the porporants are similar to Gannetwhales, and the flightless predatory banshees have quite a lot in common with Carakillers.
  • The French book "Demain, les Animaux du Futur" can be seen as this since some of the animals are probably inspired by their "The Future is Wild" counterparts, like the tyrranornis (a carakiller-like predatory parrot).
• Tainted by the Preview: Many fans were excited by the premise of a brand-new Future Is Wild VR game, with new creatures set in 20 million and 50 million years. Then they caught a glimpse of the infamous Titan Dolphin and...let's just say reception was as warm as the Ice Age that took place 195 Million years before the creature's time.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The Nelvana cartoon gets this reaction from some. While it does have its fans, it's not uncommon to hear people criticize the show for its more kid-friendly changes, such as having all the creatures engage in Animal Talk, using more cartoonish designs, and just being Lighter and Softer overall.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Not only is it totally implausible that any ice age short of another Snowball Earth would wipe out anywhere near all marine mammals (who have so far survived many relatively recent ice ages), but doing so for the series cuts off many fascinating possibilities to explore. For instance modern river dolphins evolved when shallow inland seas retreated and became river basins, this could happen again perhaps in new ways. It would be fascinating to see what the first freshwater baleen whale might be like! Or, what might future pinnipeds be like if they evolved to become fully aquatic? Would they resemble modern cetaceans? In what ways would they be different? Could cetaceans ever develop a civilization?
    • Somewhat...awkwardly addressed by the VR game, with a creature called the Titan Dolphin. However, aside from the Continuity Snarl of having mammals 200 myf where they're canonically extinct, the design is also completely unlikely: it turned its foreflippers into legs to walk bipedally on land and evolved into something looking like a twisted version of a theropod dinosaur.
    • It's implied that marine mammals- along with basically all other megafauna- went extinct due to human activities. This seems to be why rodents (a notoriously hardy group of mammals) evolved to fill many niches in the 5m year segments. It still seems like a wasted opportunity to not have at least a couple of descendants of megafauna that managed to survive the Anthropocene.
  • The use of multiple time periods opened up the possibility of showing the progression of evolution, such as by showing how an organism from one time period evolved into a descendant that lived in a future time period. However, this idea is never used, with every organism that appears in each time period having no relation to anything featured in the time periods before it (indeed, not even the Swampus is the canonical ancestor of the Megasquid and Squibbon, as they are squids rather than octopi, thus must have colonized the land independently at a later time).
  • Similarly, the Babookaris are implied to be on the cusp of evolving sapience, but nothing more is ever made of this.
  • The Nelvana cartoon qualifies too, especially if you watched after seeing the original miniseries. Instead of using its admittedly cool premise—humans are threatened by an ice age and must travel further into the future to a time when the planet is hospitable again— to its full potential, it spends most of its time focusing on the humorous antics of the various creatures.
  • All vertebrates but fish (even then only being relegated to the flish group) being extinct 200m in the future is seen as a missed opportunity by some fans. With the really creative stuff that they could have come up with for those groups of animals 200m in the future.
• Ugly Cute: The Squibbons, Spinks, and Desert Hoppers.
  • There's also something strangely endearing about the transporter Terabytes lugging their fat siblings around on piggyback rides.
  • Despite their long, serrated beaks, the Gannetwhales have a goofy-looking expression that makes them somewhat adorable.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The Babookaris. Their faces look disturbingly human.
• The Woobie: Poggles. They're so cute. And so tasty for spiders. That, and they're also the very last mammal species on the planet.
  • The scrofa who gets trapped in the salt flats
  • The Rainbow Squid who gets eaten by Sharkopaths.
  • The Shagrat who gets killed by a Snowstalker.

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