Wild Kingdom: A Favorite Television Show of the Past

 Edited and updated slightly 6-26-22

Way back in 1963, NBC brought a half hour show to television on Sunday evenings about animals. If you're like me, that show will stir a note of nostalgia in you, as you think back to host Marlin Perkins and his assistant Jim Fowler teaching us, and adults too, about wildlife of all types from around the world. The show, "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom," named after its insurance company sponsor, but commonly just called "Wild Kingdom" by the public, was such a great show. By the early 1970s, the show was, what you might say, "semi-retired," as the original shows from 1963 until the early 1970s continued to be rerun, but there were a few newly filmed shows interspersed. Marlin Perkins retired in the mid 1980s, and he passed away not long thereafter. Jim Fowler, Perkin's longtime associate, then took over the show himself, which kept viewers in touch with the show's roots. Mr. Fowler is now well into his 80s, and I wish him all the best. (Note: Since I first did this article, Jim Fowler passed away in 2019, age 89.) Thank you Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler for all you did in bringing this extraordinary series to us. Thanks too to Mutual of Omaha for its support in making the show a reality. Don't be afraid to think back to those times of Wild Kingdom folks. They are GREAT memories!*

A political note: People like Marlin Perkins, Jim Fowler and many, many others helped to bring the plight of a number of animal species to the attention of the public; thus helping to gain protection for these animals which were struggling to survive in modern times. Now, in our modern era, wildlife conservation finds itself threatened by those who are terribly concerned with the "plight of billionaires," as parks, refuges and environmental funding all come under attack by those hoping to exploit environmentally sensitive areas for their own personal gain. Don't let them get away with it!  

* The show was not without some hazards and controversy. Working with and around wild animals can be challenging and dangerous, and they did run through and rehearse things before filming the shows. They also set up some scenes with preparations, like having specific animals available for filming in specific locations for certain scenes and they probably should have told the audience that some scenes were not spontaneous, as implied by the show, but I'm still here, and I started watching the show in 1963.    

 Photo is of Marlin Perkins, the long time host of "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom," a public domain photo from Wikimedia, which simply identifies the photo being from between 1962 and 1971, "apparently" taken from an undated NBC press release.

WORD HISTORY:
Lion-The ultimate origins of this word for the large, ferocious member of the cat family are unclear, although it "seems" to have been borrowed by Old Greek from some language of the Middle East or North Africa (Egyptian is a candidate^). Old Greek had "leon," which was borrowed by Latin as "leo," but which had forms with "n" ("leoni, leone," for example), depending upon usage in a sentence. The Germanic dialects borrowed forms of the word long ago, which gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "leo." Meanwhile, Old French, a Latin based language, inherited a form of the word as "lion," which was carried to England by the Normans and became "liun." This form gradually overtook the closely related English "leo," and gave English "lion." The Germanic dialects of old rendered the borrowing from Latin in various ways, leading to rather stark modern spelling variations in their modern descendants such as German "Löwe," Low German "Lööw," Dutch "leeuw," West Frisian "liuw," Danish and Norwegian "løve," Icelandic "ljón," and Swedish "lejon."

^ Egyptian survives as modern "Coptic," a language now almost exclusively confined to use in the Coptic religion, a branch of Christianity. Essentially Egyptian was slowly overtaken by Arabic, which became the language of Egypt.