The great Open Culture points out that the much-loved 1963-1988 nature TV program, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, has a Youtube channel with some great footage. Hosted by zoologists Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler, the show raised environmental awareness and made it perfectly clear that the ecosystem was not something to be tampered with. And in years before cable and the Internet, this program, along with Wide World of Sports, introduced Cold War-era Americans to far-flung corners of the world they were supposed to ignore or fear.

Watch the “Land of Quaking Earth” episode, which features a reel-to-reel tape player and a monkey in a yellow suit slapping the crap out of an owl:

A wild tale about the normally mild-mannered Perkins from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation site: “Of course, asking the difficult question can be hazardous to a host’s health. In 1982, the fifth estate investigated whether the many nature documentaries interfered with nature for dramatic purposes. Bob McKeown reported how a Disney documentary showing the phenomenon of lemmings plunging to their death over cliffs had in fact been the same film footage spliced together to give the appearance of mass suicide. When McKeown interviewed zoologist Marlin Perkins, host of Wild Kingdom about truth and fiction on wildlife programmes, he clearly hit a raw nerve. The octogenarian Perkins firmly asked for the camera to be turned off, then punched a shocked McKeown in the face.”