This mockumentary was successful enough to inspire a recently released sequel: "Mermaids: The New Evidence," a talkshow followup featuring various pseudo "viral videos" and "leaked videos" of incidents that help to support the myth.
This is a fictional documentary special about the story of a scientist and his team stumbling upon "evidence" supporting the "Aquatic Ape" theory, which purports that a branch of ancient human returned to the ocean, and that we are a near-branch of those creatures that still carry apparent aquatic features.
The idea is provocative because it is not at all outside the realm of scientific feasibility for ancient humans to have returned to the oceans, just as the ancestors of whales and dolphins did. But just because it's a feasible notion, that doesn't mean we need to consider that it may have happened. The problem is that aquatic mammals are air-breathers, and therefore need to surface with at least enough frequency that, with the ever-growing human population, it's extremely unlikely for them to escape direct evidence that they are alive. There is nothing in the fossil record supporting such creatures either. And finally, there is no reason any government around the world would want to suppress evidence of such creatures, any more than a new species of land primate or a new species of dolphin.
I must digress for a moment, so that this kind of program is placed in context.
Animal Planet, like any non-premium television channel, is in the business of advertising. That is how they make most of their revenues, and all content in between the commercials is a sales gimmick to attract an audience to watch the advertising. Even a news broadcast is a gimmick, though it runs by a certain code that at least pretends to be objective, and is further governed by laws such as "freedom of the press." Therefore, any television content can be manipulated to maximize interest in it, either by creative editing, creative writing, or creative visuals, or any combination thereof. It is folly to see television as a reflection of reality. It is not at all the same as personal experience. But television producers and the technology at their disposal are getting more and more clever at blurring the line between entertainment and reality. The precocious radio / television / film actor / producer, Orson Welles, created a live radio play in 1938 inspired by H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds that came across as a news broadcast, and accidentally tricked lots of people into a panic thinking Martians were really invading. This demonstrated the power of mass media vs the gullibility of humans to confuse what they see and hear on media with reality.
Mermaids: The Body Found, and Mermaids: The New Evidence, explore the same territory by mixing various known scientific paradigms with fake interviews, fake footage, labeled live action reenactments, and CGI dramatizations. The network's interest is simply in ratings. But what of the producers? I believe one motivation of the producers is simply to find a creative way to protest military testing in the ocean that can harm marine life, in particularly sonar testing which many believe is proved to link to the mass beaching of marine mammals. The producers needed to find a way to draw mass interest in their protest. So they devised a gimmick to propose that there could be very important undiscovered life in the ocean that is being damaged by this testing.
However I feel they crossed the line, and may have shot themselves in the foot. For one thing, by creating a fake documentary and passing it off as a real one, it creates distrust that anything in the show has any basis in fact at all. Call it the "cry wolf" syndrome.
Secondly, and more importantly, in their fake documentary they create an atmosphere of animosity toward our government - claiming that our government and military agencies stole evidence, harassed witnesses, and interfered with their programming. It is one thing to scream "fire" when this kind of thing happens for real, and to protest testing that may be very damaging to the environment. But to make up government "cover-ups" and pretend it's real, and distribute that on a channel that passes itself off as an educational outlet for all ages, is in my opinion unethical, irritating, and dangerous.
If my pre-teen kids watch this show along side genuine nature programming, they can walk away feeling angry toward our government for something it isn't doing - covering up evidence of something important. Or they could walk away not believing the entire thing - dismissing something the military may be doing that it should not be.
While one can argue that a mockumentary like this challenges our youngsters to think critically, teaching them to discern what is real and what is not, I tend to think it actually does quite the opposite.
This is a fictional documentary special about the story of a scientist and his team stumbling upon "evidence" supporting the "Aquatic Ape" theory, which purports that a branch of ancient human returned to the ocean, and that we are a near-branch of those creatures that still carry apparent aquatic features.
The idea is provocative because it is not at all outside the realm of scientific feasibility for ancient humans to have returned to the oceans, just as the ancestors of whales and dolphins did. But just because it's a feasible notion, that doesn't mean we need to consider that it may have happened. The problem is that aquatic mammals are air-breathers, and therefore need to surface with at least enough frequency that, with the ever-growing human population, it's extremely unlikely for them to escape direct evidence that they are alive. There is nothing in the fossil record supporting such creatures either. And finally, there is no reason any government around the world would want to suppress evidence of such creatures, any more than a new species of land primate or a new species of dolphin.
I must digress for a moment, so that this kind of program is placed in context.
Animal Planet, like any non-premium television channel, is in the business of advertising. That is how they make most of their revenues, and all content in between the commercials is a sales gimmick to attract an audience to watch the advertising. Even a news broadcast is a gimmick, though it runs by a certain code that at least pretends to be objective, and is further governed by laws such as "freedom of the press." Therefore, any television content can be manipulated to maximize interest in it, either by creative editing, creative writing, or creative visuals, or any combination thereof. It is folly to see television as a reflection of reality. It is not at all the same as personal experience. But television producers and the technology at their disposal are getting more and more clever at blurring the line between entertainment and reality. The precocious radio / television / film actor / producer, Orson Welles, created a live radio play in 1938 inspired by H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds that came across as a news broadcast, and accidentally tricked lots of people into a panic thinking Martians were really invading. This demonstrated the power of mass media vs the gullibility of humans to confuse what they see and hear on media with reality.
Mermaids: The Body Found, and Mermaids: The New Evidence, explore the same territory by mixing various known scientific paradigms with fake interviews, fake footage, labeled live action reenactments, and CGI dramatizations. The network's interest is simply in ratings. But what of the producers? I believe one motivation of the producers is simply to find a creative way to protest military testing in the ocean that can harm marine life, in particularly sonar testing which many believe is proved to link to the mass beaching of marine mammals. The producers needed to find a way to draw mass interest in their protest. So they devised a gimmick to propose that there could be very important undiscovered life in the ocean that is being damaged by this testing.
However I feel they crossed the line, and may have shot themselves in the foot. For one thing, by creating a fake documentary and passing it off as a real one, it creates distrust that anything in the show has any basis in fact at all. Call it the "cry wolf" syndrome.
Secondly, and more importantly, in their fake documentary they create an atmosphere of animosity toward our government - claiming that our government and military agencies stole evidence, harassed witnesses, and interfered with their programming. It is one thing to scream "fire" when this kind of thing happens for real, and to protest testing that may be very damaging to the environment. But to make up government "cover-ups" and pretend it's real, and distribute that on a channel that passes itself off as an educational outlet for all ages, is in my opinion unethical, irritating, and dangerous.
If my pre-teen kids watch this show along side genuine nature programming, they can walk away feeling angry toward our government for something it isn't doing - covering up evidence of something important. Or they could walk away not believing the entire thing - dismissing something the military may be doing that it should not be.
While one can argue that a mockumentary like this challenges our youngsters to think critically, teaching them to discern what is real and what is not, I tend to think it actually does quite the opposite.