The Ultimate Guide is a Discovery Channel series focusing on wildlife and later various science topics that ran from 1996 through 2002. It was originally narrated by Will Lyman. The series is formatted as a comprehensive study guide on the topic, which explores aspects like its behaviors, inner workings, evolutionary history, and some aspects of its impact on human culture. Through its run, 26 episodes were made.
Episodes that featured animals sometimes showed them a room with a grid to show off their movement.
The show was repackaged several times throughout its airing history based on its topics. Some of its episodes were repurposed for Discovery Channel's Wild Discovery block while others were inserted into various programs. Stock footage from its pilot episode, Tyrannosaurs Rex, was used in later episodes of Paleoworld and its Discovery Kids re-edit. A kids-oriented version of the program was re-edited into The Ultimate Guide to the Awesome, which added interstitial segments hosted by Zachary Fehst. This version of the program was later retooled and retitled into Zach's Ultmate Guide.
The original series run contains examples of:
- Ascetic Aesthetic: Some of the sequences in the series features trained or captive animals moving in a large space dominated by a white numbered grid in a black background and little else. In Elephant, the sequence that segues to the grid's arrival edited in footage of a wild African elephant meeting its Asian counterpart before being covered up by the falling grid.
- Enhance Button: The series used a magnifier to zoom in on various inner workings of an animal or object that functions like this. A bit justified in this case as it's a graphical representation meant to illustrate inner workings.
- Nature Documentary: Most of its earlier episodes were focused on the lives lived by animals, living and deceased.
- Rewind, Replay, Repeat: The show sometimes utilizes this to capture what happens when an animal is in motion.
- Roger Rabbit Effect: The first episode, Tyrannosaurus Rex, was rendered this way; dinosaurs from a distance were rendered by stop-motion models, not unlike in Prehistoric Beast, but superimposed onto images of the Florida Everglades (which bears some similarity to the habitat T. rex may have lived in).
- Stock Footage: It uses a lot of stock footage of animals. Some of its own footage was later used in other Paleo media aired by the Discovery Channel.
- Stop Motion: Although it used some CGI and puppets like the contemporaneous Walking with Dinosaurs and Jurassic Park, the series' T. rex episode was unique in that it was one of the few pieces of dinosaur media in The '90s to still use this animation technique for the bulk of its shots.
The Ultimate Guide To The Awesome and Zach's Ultimate Guide contains examples of:
- Named In The Adaptation: This repackaging of the program gave the name "Mega Magnifier" to the original series' magnification graphic.
- The World Is Just Awesome: Although Discovery wouldn't actually use the slogan for a few years after the show's release, it was definitely the sentiment behind the title of the Discovery Kids re-edit.
