NATURE AS A TELEVISION GENRE Even as Walt Disney returned nature
films to movie theaters, the wider film industry began facing
competition from the new medium of television in the post–World
War II era. In 1945, the Lincoln Park Zoo's director, Marlin
Perkins (1905–1986), began taking animals to a Chicago TV
station for occasional live broad-casts. By 1949, Perkins had
convinced the local NBC affiliate, WNBQ, to help transform the
staid show-and-tell format by shooting at the zoo itself, under
the title Zoo Parade . By the time the show was cancelled in
1957, a few episodes had also been filmed in African
conservation parks. Perkins and other nature filmmaking
pioneers, such as Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910–1997), who began
contributing oceanographic segments to CBS's Omnibus series in
1954, and David Attenborough (b. 1926), in his first of many
series for the BBC, Zoo Quest (1954–1964), moved out of the
studio and zoo and into the field with film crews in tow. The
technological, aesthetic, and narrative featur