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What's great about the rumpled, khaki-clad team of Steve and Terri Irwin, hosts of
The Crocodile Hunter, is their complete lack of pretense. Make no mistake: Steve is a goofball, prone to pronouncements ("By crikey!") that plant him squarely, cartoonishly, in his native outback, but he clears through the TV muck quickly, plopping his big-eyed persona behind him to deliver his points on the ABCs of wildlife. Mostly, it's the C's the Irwins dwell on, as they do here. "How to Catch a Crocodile" is a croc conservationist's field guide, broken down into two lessons. First up is a primer on nabbing the big fellas, which goes something like this: set up a heavily reinforced mesh net in the croc's best-loved sunning spot and get the heck out of Dodge. Then there's the method for snagging the under-six-footers, which makes for considerably more compelling viewing. Here, Steve and Terri leap out of a paddle boat after dark and wrangle a red-eyed bugger--one who turns out to be bigger and more "naughty" than Steve expected--to the riverbank, where they pounce atop her back and blindfold her for transport to a more croc-friendly habitat. "Charlie" dips into more of the same, but its focus is fixed on the namesake croc, a humongous beast who's been confined to a concrete pit all his life and bears bedsore-like wounds on his claws and belly to show for it. These are the sort of episodes that
Crocodile Hunter fans find irresistible--gritty, swampy shows, as solidly action-packed as they are chirpily educational, just right for couch-bound adventurers looking for something to sink their teeth into, so to speak.
--Tammy La Gorce
