Can I just rant for a bit? Some backstory for this: I've been slowly watching Wild Kratts for the last month and a half? I watched it a lot when I was younger, but who remembers entire episodes of TV when you are like 8ish? I love animals, and do remember seeing these brothers and their adventures, but not in great detail.
I got into this fandom because I saw a YT video by @elmushterri about rewriting Wild Kratts and seeing their thumbnail I literally went, "Wait a minute... aren't those the Zoboomafoo guys? I remember that show and the animated one!" So I watched it.
Low and behold, I was so interested in their rewrite, and just watching their video re-remembering the show, I had to rewatch it. Got back into Tumblr, saw the small fandom was still alive with AUs and art, and here I am.
But oh my gosh, this show is just... so much more? Animated educational kids' show that teaches about animals. (And I love, love, animals. They are really the only thing I can draw accurately.) Basically, what it says on the tin, but the themes and how they write episodes and everything they talk about is so complex if you think about it.
I've seen so many posts talking about the lack of toxic masculinity by @wildhorizon, the girls being engineers (Let's go! I'm a female engineer!) in a post from @gloomy-girlypop, and just so many others. Even as a kids' show, it is so refreshing because of the constant socially acceptable (but stereotyped and outdated) themes ingrained in television aimed at older audiences.
The brothers write episodes themselves, and you can really tell. They have their own styles, and they play and joke with each other's animated counterparts. But not all the episodes are written just by them, or by either of them at all. Chris Roy helps write episodes, and Eva Almos wrote some of the earlier ones as well.
But further into the show, it's exclusively the brothers writing. And from watching season 1 to mid-season 6, the brothers' characters have begun to lean away from those exaggerated TV-ivied personalities into their real selves.
In season 1, Eva wrote 11 of the 40 episodes. And in those episodes, the brothers' differences are inflated a little for the screen. Like in 'Tazzy Chris', Chris and Martin argue more (good-naturedly, of course) and annoy each other like siblings do in shows. And in most of the episodes Eva wrote, the major conflict is less about villains and more about the brothers' mistakes.
The brothers will let an elephant wander onto the Tortuga, or a suit will malfunction, and then a villain will capitalize on that to advance their evil plot. It makes the show more grounded in reality (but in that sitcom-TV style we know so well), while the brothers' episodes are more, "Villains are evil, we must stop them!"
But also, it's just the brothers' passion for animals and conservation and teaching children about the world around them that shines through later on. Their real dynamic working with each other and their deep love for this is what has the show. It's heart in a sense.
Sorry, I think I really got off topic, but I just really wanted to say something about how this show is really changing my brain at the moment. (And the fandom is just so nice, guys!) At this point in my life, I've never been so ingrained in technology. All I do now is study electricity, mechanics, physics, write papers on a laptop, calculate particle movement, solve circuits for voltage and current, etc, etc, etc. (And my brain is all technology, and nature is the marvel of natural engineering we've based everything I'm learning on. It started somewhere, and both sides of my thoughts are shaking hands and going, "This is where it's at. This is where you've come from.")
This show just reignited that love for nature I had growing up, and I've genuinely learned a lot about animals I've known and seen forever, and about ones that I've never even heard of. I took a trip this weekend to a remote town surrounded by mountains and nature with a great camera, and literally all my pictures have nature as the focus. Trees and rivers and cattle and bugs and weather and flowers and deer and on and on. I took over a thousand photos in four days. And the whole time all I was saying in my head whenever I saw an animal was "Creature Adventure!"
Anyway, this has gotten long. My bad. But please, keep on creature adventuing and we'll see each other on the creature trail! God that is so cheesy I'm so sorry.
Link to the posts mentioned:
💬 13 🔁 210 ❤️ 851 · One thing I appreciate a lot about Wild Kratts is the lack of toxic masculinity. Both Bros seem perfectly comfortable
💬 7 🔁 7 ❤️ 81 · Sexist Tropes Absolutely Destroyed with the super Creature Power! Part 1 · Hi girls! Due to the analysis done by @wildhori
💬 2 🔁 1 ❤️ 26 · Gotta love Chris being trans as a kangaroo 🩷🤍🩵 · And the best part is how comfortable he is. No dysphoria at all. I love t
