Meerkat Manor was a British television programme produced by Oxford Scientific Films for Animal Planet International. It premiered in September 2005 and ran for four series until its cancellation in August 2008. Using traditional animal documentary style footage along with narration, the series told the story of the Whiskers, one of more than a dozen families of meerkats in the Kalahari Desert.
About Meerkat Manor in brief
Meerkat Manor was a British television programme produced by Oxford Scientific Films for Animal Planet International. It premiered in September 2005 and ran for four series until its cancellation in August 2008. Using traditional animal documentary style footage along with narration, the series told the story of the Whiskers, one of more than a dozen families of meerkats in the Kalahari Desert. The original programme was narrated by Bill Nighy, with the narration redubbed by Mike Goldman for the Australian airings and Sean Astin for the American broadcasts. The fourth series, subtitled The Next Generation, saw Stockard Channing replacing Astin as the narrator in the American dubbing. The show’s experimental format broke new ground in animal documentary filming techniques and gave viewers a long-term, intimate look into the lives of its meerkat stars. It was nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards: two in 2007 and one in 2008. The first three series have been released to DVD in both Region 1 and Region 2. In August 2009, it was reported that the programme had been cancelled. It has since been rebroadcast in more than 160 other countries, including the US, Australia, Canada, and the UK. The programme was Animal Planet’s top series in October 2007, both on the cable channel and through its video-on-demand service. It won awards at the 2006 Omni Awards, and at the2006 and 2007 New York Festivals TV Broadcasting Awards. In 2007, a book entitled Meerkat Manor – The Story of Flower of the Kalahari was released in the UK, detailing the life of Flower and the Whiskers before the series’ filming began.
A television film documenting Flower’s birth and rise to matriarch of the whiskers aired on Animal Planet on 25 May 2008. Most scenes were filmed on location at the Kuruman River Reserve, where the Meerkats are a part of is based. However, the meerkats seen in commercials and on the show’s website were not the same animals portrayed in Meerk at Manor. Instead, tamer-rescued meerk Kats from the Fellow Earthlings’ Wildlife Center were filmed against a green screen. The meerkATS are marked with dye to differentiate them – especially younger and roaming males – are especially marked with yellow dye. The UK and US versions of the show have the same content for most episodes; however, the latter version sometimes changed the names of the meerkets and the latter were sometimes removed from the US version of the programme. Two US versions were occasionally edited for more commercial breaks to allow more commercial break length for the latter episodes. Although the show faced criticism from viewers for not intervening when ameerkat was injured and faced death, MeerkAt Manor enjoyed considerable success and was Animal Planet’s top programme in October 2007. For scenes inside the animals’ burrows, mini fibre-optic infra-red cameras were employed; wide-angle shots were filmed with a seven-metre crane and a remote-controlled camera platform.
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This page is based on the article Meerkat Manor published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 05, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
