Customer Reviews

National Geographic's The Great Whales [VHS]

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This video provides a broad overview of whales and their relationship with man through history up to the time of its publication. Historical material includes discussion with images as well as some interesting whaling footage from the early 1900s, when hand thrown harpoons were still used. More recent material includes footage of the birth of a killer whale calf in captivity and of grey and humpback whales under study in the wild, along with some discussion with researchers about the significance of the behavior we see. Perhaps some of the most interesting material is of Greenpeace activists in high speed rubber boats attempting to protect sperm whales from Soviet whaling ships in the 1970s.

The video was released in 1978, so it is somewhat dated today. If you keep the release date in mind, though, there's still a wealth of interesting information here. It's definitely still worth seeing, and I don't know of any more recent videos that provide as good a survey of a variety of great whale species.