Product Details

• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Nat'l Geographic Vid
• VHS Release Date: July 11, 2000
• Run Time: 60 minutes
• ASIN: 0792290623
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #161,204 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Half the kangaroo species Down Under are extinct, endangered, or vulnerable due to human settlement. But conversely the red kangaroo has actually thrived due to the livestock wells dug across the desert. This 54-minute video follows one red mother-and-joey team as they avoid eagles and dingoes, forage for food, and experience the special relationship the mother's pouch affords the pair. Within 48 hours of the grown-up joey permanently leaving the pouch, a tiny embryo climbs in and the cycle begins again. The story takes several side trips, including one to the rain forest to visit a couple of tree-dwelling relatives and an excursion to Australia's companion isle to meet the ferocious Tasmanian devil. Narrator Stan Watt offers an abbreviated, speculative history on the 60-million-year evolution of marsupials on the isolated continent, and Aboriginal legend and dance are briefly explored. But it is the joey's coming-of-age story and the strong mother-child bond that is the focus of this tape. Graphic footage of dead kangaroos, fallen prey to other wildlife or killed by legal hunting and road accidents, might make this program unsuitable for very young or sensitive children. --Kimberly Heinrichs

From the Back Cover

Discover what Australia's beloved kangaroo is really like as National Geographic takes you from lush rain forest to rugged outback for an up close encounter with kangaroos and the spectacular land down under!

- Witness the amazing diversity of these remarkable creatures and see how kangaroos have evolved during 60 million years of isolation on the spectacular Australian continent.
- Follow a kangaroo "joey" from "life in a pouch" to the trials of adulthood.
- Experience the kangaroo's constant struggle to cope with its outback enemies, from wild dingoes and wedge-tailed eagles to human hunters.

From Olympic-caliber jumping giants to gravity-defying cliff dwellers, this is the definitive look at these wonders of natural engineering known as AUSTRALIA'S KANGAROOS.