National Geographic's Really Wild Animals: Secret Weapons and Great Escapes [VHS]

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Product Description ------------------- Your top-secret mission: Detect and inspect the hidden weapons of the animal world with Spin, National Geographic's animated globe-on-the-go. Your undercover investigation reveals how skunks say "go away!" with a smelly spray, why a cobra's bite is such a fright, and how lizards are wizards at capturing bugs with their long, sticky tongues! Spin even gets under the skin of the not-so-tasty tomato frog, which oozes a goo that can glue a snake's mouth shut! Get the inside scoop on the SECRET WEAPONS AND GREAT ESCAPES that help animals survive. It's just one of the many Really Wild Animals adventures in this award-winning series. .com ---- This entry in the Really Wild Animals series is a fast-paced introduction to animals' hidden defenses. Spin, an animated globe voiced by Dudley Moore, sets the scene by assigning the viewer a secret mission--to find and examine the hidden weapons of animals. Spin leads his young detectives on an exploration of eight categories of secret weapons: bluffing, changing shape, smell, athlete's feet, the spurt that hurts, frog skin, poison-tipped harpoon, and venom. Well-chosen examples include the fake eyes of the owl butterfly, the scent glands of the skunk, and the tomato frog's ability to stretch its skin and ooze an oil that can glue a snake's jaws shut for two days. Interspersed between animal segments are comical interludes including tongue-in-cheek advertisements such as the one suggesting that "Uncle Spin wants you to join the ant brigade," and entertaining music videos. Spin examines islands in the second half of the video--specifically, unique island ecosystems that have formed as a result of geographic isolation. Informative segments on the lemurs of Madacar, the iguanas of the Galapagos Islands, and other island-specific anomalies alternate with comic "commercials" about the "amazing ecosystem" and an "emergency broadcast system" test for determining if you're a marsupial. Beautiful nature photography, a wealth of information, and comic abound in this 47-minute video that will have both kids and adults engrossed throughout repeated screenings. --Tami Horiuchi