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Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom
1963 · TV series · documentary · 30 min episodes · 26 seasons
Created by Don Meier
Premiering in 1963 broadcast on prime-time from 1968-1971 and airing in syndication until 1988 the Emmy Award-winning Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom was one of the longest-running and most beloved television series of all time. A pioneer of the narrative nature-documentary format the educational series followed venerable host and ecologist Marlin Perkins (later joined by Jim Fowler Peter Gros Stan Brock and Tom Allen) as he trekked to the farthest reaches of the globe to study wild animals in their natural habitats.
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boomslang is my new favorite word. it means (and literally and in order) "tree snake" in dutch/afrikaans.
TLDR from TFA: Karl Patterson Schmidt (June 19, 1890, Lake Forest, Illinois–September 26, 1957, Chicago) was an eminent American herpetologist at the Field Museum in Chicago, where he was zoological curator from 1941 to 1955, and a leading expert on coral snakes. He died nearly 6 decades ago of internal bleeding from his eyes, lungs, kidneys, heart, and brain 24 h after being bitten on his thumb by a juvenile South African green tree snake, also known as the boomslang. The snake had been sent to him for identification by the then director of the Lincoln Park Zoo (Chicago. IL), Richard Marlin Perkins.
interestingly for old-timers, "Richard Marlin Perkins" is the Marlin Perkins from "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom", the popular nature TV show from the days before things like the Discovery channel. For you youngsters who didn't get a chance to see it, the show would end with a topical promotion for the sponsors. Marlin Perkins, the star who had just been talking about something like a Galapagos tortoise, saying in a slightly high, somewhat awkward speech pattern something like, "the tor-toise has its shell to pro-tect it; we hu-mans need life insurance" :)