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Wild New World

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  • Nightmare Fuel: “Edge of the Ice” has some rather scary moments.
    • Its depiction of the Missoula floods, caused by ice dams collapsing and allowing entire glacial lakes to flood the landscapes, killing every animal in the region. The narrator stresses how the animals could have heard the roars of the advancing tidal waves up to half an hour before they reached them, and had no means to escape it. And although the episode doesn't mention it, these floods happened time and time again.
    • The scene where an ice age hunter gets attacked by a grizzly bear inside a cavern is straight out of a horror film, where we first hear the bear’s terrifying roars coming out of the darkness and then the beast emerges, cast in shadows, and mauls the man to death.
  • Special Effect Failure:
    • Due to the animated special effects being sourced in-house, the CGI on this show is rather dated, stiff, and cheap-looking, especially when compared to contemporary shows like Walking with Beasts, which was done out-of-house with a more expensive animation studio. The animation is usually limited to just showing basic walk cycles or the animals milling around in their habitats. A particularly cruddy example is the Homotherium being chased away by a bull mastodon in "Edge of the Ice", where the cat doesn't run away but just walks away, via clearly sped up walk animation.
    • Whenever one of the live-action animals is shown against a greenscreen, it’s pretty obvious. It’s especially noticeable in several shots with the cave lions in “Land of the Mammoth”.
  • Spiritual Successor: The series can be seen as a prequel to Land of the Eagle, which is retroactively considered to be the start of the BBC's Continents series of nature documentaries. Like Land of the Eagle, the series focuses on the fauna of the United States while educating viewers about the people and natural history of the continent.

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