If you’re anything like me, you saw the announcement for Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age and jumped for joy. Then you went to its IMDB page and saw that there was absolutely no trace of David Attenborough’s involvement, and your heart sank.
Since the Apple TV CGI documentary series began in 2022, the British King of nature has been its voiceover. By season 2, Attenborough was even hosting the behind-the-scenes section of each episode on camera. Surely, this could only mean the near 100-year-old was having a health scare, as social media frequently likes to believe.
Our ‘whole new period’ is to blame for the voiceover change in Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age
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“It’s a new series. We’ve done two with David and this is a whole new period,” Gunton tells me. “We just thought it would be an interesting idea, to take a different direction. Tom, of course, is quite a well known wildlife narrator on Apple so it seemed like a good opportunity.
“It was a wonderful experience with him. He’s so enthusiastic, enthusiastic about it. He’s got a young child who’s obsessed with these creatures. Tom had the cuts to look at the show before, and apparently his little boy was fascinated by the creatures. So it just seemed like the right time to move to a slightly different perspective.”
On the surface of it, it’s an absolutely fair move. We can’t keep asking a national treasure who’s almost hit a century of living to keep delivering the high-quality nature documentaries we want from him. If he was going to scale back on anything, it would be the Ice Age and Jurassic creatures that don’t actually exist.
However, Hiddleston isn’t quite the right fit for me. Attenborough has incredibly big shoes to fill, and anybody who isn’t him automatically comes under a lot of scrutiny. As much as I love him, Hiddleston’s voice doesn’t sit right on the ear, but this probably isn’t helped by the fact the Ice Age world of animals is so close to our own (i.e. it’s a bit more boring than usual).
Both of these reasons mean I’d recommend rewatching seasons 1-2 of Prehistoric Planet instead, but Ice Age is far from a bad time… it’s just less Attenborough-y.
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