Discovery Channel's Planet Earth

It seems that recently, Discovery Channel has been showing nothing but TV shows. All of these TV shows revolve around learning, but they are still TV shows. The Discovery Channel has always been about documentaries and learning, but with recent series like Mythbusters, Dirty Jobs, and Man vs Wild, Discovery seems to have lost it's roots.

They recently have found their roots again with the biggest documentary series ever, Planet Earth.

Planet Earth is an 11 part series. Each part of the series is a documentary on one type of environment on Earth and a look at the weirdest, most endangered, and most interesting animals in that environment. Each part of the series can stand alone, or be part of the series. Planet Earth focuses on conservation efforts and is trying to show people what we have to loose if we continue like we have been.

Discovery started making this series in early 2002. It took them 5 years to shoot the 11 hours of television! Most of this time was taken up waiting and looking for certain rare animals. There was one cat in the episode "Mountains" that took 2 years to find and get good footage of! There were 2,000 days of filming in 204 different locations all around (and under) the planet, from the Arctic and Antarctic to caves and the top of the world, Mount Everest. Most of these locations are in the remotest places on Earth.

I can't imagine how much these 11 hours must have cost to film. It must have cost a lot, because Discovery is trying hard to sell DVDs of the episodes, at $11.99 each for 2 or 3 episode on each one. Also, they created 3 more shows on how the documentary was filmed.

The episodes (I don't include all animals shown):

1) Pole to Pole (March 25th):
A look at the entire earth and the effects of gradual climate change. Also looks at seasonal transitions around the globe. This episode features penguins, caribou, leopards, great white sharks, elephants, etc.

2) Mountains (March 25th):
This episode is about the mountains and the creatures that live in them.This episode features the gelada (only primate that lives off of a diet of grasses), wolves, pumas, grizzly bears, snow leopards, etc.