Yeti Yes, Corwin Hardly Bearable
Posted by: Loren Coleman on April 16th, 2006
Loren Coleman Reviews "Corwin’s Quest: Realm of the Yeti"
On April 15, 2006, the Animal Planet’s Jeff Corwin treated us to a frustrating two hour advertisement for Disney World’s Expedition Everest. As it turns out, after watching "Corwin’s Quest," I have a lot more respect for Joe Rohde and his design team at Disney than I do for the Corwin staff’s research abilities.
Jeff Corwin is a popular and funny host of his animal programs, sort of an American version of Steve Irwin. Like Irwin, Jeff places himself in close encounters with dangerous animals as part of the fear factor appeal of his shows. He does that throughout the two hours here too, with snakes, monkeys, and rhinos, and, well, it gets to be a bit of a bore, old chap, if you know what I mean.
The whole goal of "Corwin’s Quest" this time, we are told at the top of the hour, is to get to the bottom of the planet’s "greatest animal mystery, the Yeti." The entire journey, both literally (to Nepal) and figuratively (through this documentary), is set up to tease us along with hints of what Jeff Corwin thinks the Yeti is.
Corwin goes to what we are told (with no evidence for the comment) is "the #1 hotspot for Yeti sightings," within the Makalu Barun national park. For two weeks, Corwin accompanies the Conservation International group as they "discover new species." Corwin, despite the fact I really wanted to like him, is heard saying "Will the Yeti be one of them?" – too often.
Any viewer can see the foreshadowing from six minutes onward. It was that soon into the program when verbal and visual clues began to be heard and seen that Corwin thought the Yeti might be a bear.
It rapidly becomes obvious that Corwin’s or his staff’s background research on the Yeti was minimal, or if it was extensive, he avoided putting any good use to it. He does show us he watched clips of the Hammer film, Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, apparently in his tent in Nepal. Ah, technology.
First, Corwin says that "Yeti" means "Creature of the Glaciers," within moments of when the program begins. This is a unique and rare translation of "Yeti." We learn later why he makes this mistake. Most Sherpas and scholars have translated "Yeti" as "that manlike thing."
Next, while catching frogs, and trying to find the one in hand with a field guide to frogs, Corwin makes the light-hearted comment: "Unfortunately, there is no such field guide for Yetis." Of course, I know this is humor, but the fact is, well, there is a field guide to Yetis. I cowrote just such a field guide. The drawings might have assisted him with his research, but then he was watching those 1950s Snowmen movies for his background research, wasn’t he? Besides, if he didn’t have a copy of The Field Guide to Bigfoot, Yeti, and Other Mystery Primates Worldwide, which was published by Avon/Harper Collins in 1999 (and now with a new edition in 2006), there are several other good overview Yeti books he should have consulted. Some even have pictures.
Really, I don’t want to be so hard on Corwin, and I congratulate him on doing his life’s work with animals. Furthermore, this is a documentary on the Yeti, so score one, yes, for Yeti. Thank you, Jeff Corwin for that.
But that Corwin didn’t do his homework (or was set up so badly by his producers) becomes sadly apparent in the next series of scenes about Yeti. Corwin breathlessly gets himself to Khumjung, and is shown the "Yeti scalp" there. This part of the documentary has the best cinéma vérité because the production crew has outtakes of Corwin fuming. He admits he is upset because his plans to handle the "skullcap" go haywire. He thought he was going to get to pick it up and maybe even take some hairs from it. Instead, Corwin is shown holding the locked glass-sided box (see below). I think someone tricked Corwin, here, to get this reaction, and I feel deceived by this scene. Perhaps I especially feel this way because I won’t have done this to Corwin, as his producer.
This is "not orangutan hair," says Corwin.
"I would need a sample to tell what this is," Corwin bemoans. He tells the viewing audience he was not given permission to unlock the box. He’s frustrated because he saw an old black and white photo of this in a book when he was a child, and now he is almost holding it.
Corwin says he doesn’t think this "scalp" is a primate, but speculates that this Yeti "skullcap" might be made from a "musk deer."
Needless to say, it has been known since first seen by Westerners in the early 1950s that this "skullcap" is a replica, a ritual object, and not something even claimed by the locals to be made from a Yeti. They told Sir John Hunt, Ralph Izzard, Tom Slick’s team, and others who came to see it that it was "made in imitation of Yeti." Furthermore, most casual Yeti researchers have understood this, and since 1960, also known that the skin that was used to make the skullcap is from a four-legged Himalayan animal, called the serow (Nemorhaedus sumatraensis).
Corwin appears to have taken a page directly from that of Sir Edmund Hillary’s World Book expedition of 1960. Hillary and Marlin Perkins knew the "skullcap" or "scalp" was made from a serow skin, but paraded the item as an "unknown" from Paris to Chicago. Then Hillary/Perkins revealed they had an exact but new copy in their briefcase. Their fake was from a serow’s skin, and the analysis of the Yeti relic revealed, of course, it was made from a serow too. Corwin even though he used the same Khumjung "skullcap" as his prop, never revealed that it was a serow hide and not a Yeti that made this “scalp.” Perhaps he so desired to keep the mystery alive in this “quest,” he simply forgot to tell us? Nay.
Corwin next spends a lot of time examining some photos taken at 15,000 feet, and, with great suspense, flown in to his base camp to be given to him. They are said to be of a Yeti, but they certainly appear to not be primate, but more likely of a canid or a felid. Soon, Corwin is back with snakes, large wasps, monkeys, and the like, in near death situations. He’s entertaining, makes funny faces, and it’s a good animal show. But is it cryptozoology?
Back to Yeti and Corwin’s jumping about, and now he goes to a zoo in Katmandu and shows us an injured sloth bear, saying, with great import, he thinks this could be the Yeti.
It should be pointed out that the bear theory and the design of the Yeti by Joe Rohde and his Disney team seems to be a subtle background influence even in Corwin’s program here. Rohde is shown sketching the Yeti from the Sherpas’ or porters’ descriptions, and giving his Yeti long nails and claws. This matches what is known about the descriptions of the large Yeti, the Chemo, Dzu-Teh, the bear, but not of the Met-Teh. Then Corwin is filmed asking leading questions of a group of porters (who are not Sherpas but Nepalese) about the creatures “having long nails.” The scenes with the sloth bear and others appear to reinforce this covert programming that we are being fed, which is that the Yeti and bear are one in the same.
Corwin interviews the open-minded, cryptozoology-friendly Russell A. Mittermeier, President of Conservation International, who brings in Gigantopithecus as a candidate for Yeti. But in the end Mittermeier feels that the "Yeti of today" is the brown bear, and that a legendary memory of Gigantopithecus is the Yeti of tens of thousands of years ago. At least Mittermeier gives a hint that to find a still surviving Gigantopithecus would be an exciting possibility.
By the way, the program mentions that Conservation International identified 200 species on their rapid assessment exercise, only six of which are new species. Most of these new ones are insects and frogs, and, of course, not anything that could be mistaken for a Yeti.
Flying in a helicopter, higher and higher, Jeff Corwin finally finds the final objective of his quest, some keys to the mystery, he tells us, in the Tengboche monastery. It is here he meets the lama who will be translated so badly. In a mirror of what happened when metoh-kangmi was mistranslated as "Abominable Snowman," Corwin, through translators, hears that "Yeti" means "Creature of the Glacier."
From what I heard myself, this lama is talking about the Chemo. Corwin has made the classic Reinhold Messner mistake, the one the mountain climber presents in his book, the ego-laden tome with a very similar title as we find for this Animal Planet program. Messner’s My Quest for the Yeti says he thinks he has made an earthshaking discovery no one else has. This is that the Yeti is the Chemo, and the Chemo, of course, is to the Tibetans a bear.
But sorry, memo to Jeff Corwin or more probably his producers, several explorers and cryptozoologists, fifty years ago, trekking in the Himalayas and writing about the Abominable Snowmen search, quite easily understood that there are three forms of Yeti – a little Yeti (Teh-lma) of the montane valleys, the man-sized Yeti (Met-teh) that sometimes tracks across snowfields, but lives mostly in the lower rainforests, and the Chemo, the giant bear, higher up.
The program would have been a good deal easier to watch if Jeff Corwin had done his homework and not gone down the same old confusing paths that so many before him have taken.
Yes, there is a bear in the woods, even in the Himalayan higher valley forests and up on the snowfields rarely, and some people, mostly the Tibetans, call it Chemo. But the Yeti or Met-Teh is the real quest, the primate, and Corwin went too high, looked in the wrong places, and got fooled by the multiple layers of this mystery, just as others before him have.
The show was a success on one level, at least. All of the product placement segments on the Expedition Everest attraction come off as the more enlightening and entertaining part of the two hours versus Corwin’s confused and predictable quest for a bear.
The documentary had as many holes in it as an old bear fur being passed off as a Yeti skin.
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
Great review. Wasn’t expecting much from Corwin. The guy showed up on CSI Miami, as himself. I’m sorry, but I don’t think an incredible, insightful genius of a researcher would waste time effectively pimping his show on a highly-rated crime drama. If this were shot in the 40’s, I highly doubt they would have been able to bop over to wacky professor Einstein’s lab if they had a case involving physics.
I think it’s clear that Corwin is a pretty face that allowed his network to reclaim some of the audience stolen by the Aussies with the crocodile guy.
And in one last little note, I’m just really hoping that one day, one of those two get eaten by something they’re out there messing with. There is SUCH a gap between going into the wild to research animals and doing amazingly stupid and dangerous things to amuse viewers. As I always say to people who ask why I get nervous around those who handle animals near me: the animals do not scare me, the jackass fooling around with them does.
Great review, Loren – my sentiments exactly! As I watched the program, I immediately became disappointed when I realized it wasn’t a serious endeavor to find the Yeti and even more disappointed when I realized Disney was interwoven into the show. Yikes!
Corwin and Animal Planet should be ashamed – this show should be shown on The Travel Channel as pure entertainment.
Happy Easter…..Bigfoot Bloggers…..most of the Travel Channel shows have been more informative than some “celeb herptologist” playing paddycake with a hibernating Cobra….
The sidewalks of downtown Bombay….aka Mumbai….have better herptology on display….I bought my favorite belt there thirty-five years ago…fresh..LOL
Even the Travel Channel’s “Bigfootville”….with two neurotic “crybaby’s” firing 9MM’s blindly into the night….(totally reprehensible fieldcraft)…while being consoled by Cindy…who could easily be mistaken for a Sasquatchette or a yak….was more informative than “Realm of the Yeti”….IMHO
seeing is believing…
ole bub and Toshiba the Samurai dawg
Well Loren I guess you said it all. I wonder when one of these guys will get bit by a snake or croc but they won’t show that on tv because it was stupid. Just like the major advertisement for Disney’s new park add on…Oh well I guess this was what we expected….Greywolf
Reading this review makes me glad I do not have TV. I would like to see Jeff Corwin try to find me in the woods. Tramping about with the production crew it is no wonder that he had to go to a zoo to find a injured sloth bear.
TV is just that, TV. For those who believe and research the past and its evidence often never make it to the “boob tube”, why? its simple, thats reserved for the entertainment people who are often BOOBS.
I will admit the special was disappointing, but what can we expect from Jeff Corwin, a known skeptic of cryptozoological findings? The 500-pound “Yeti” he and his team allegedly treated was most likely a Sloth Bear, and Corwin alleges he saw a 400-pound “Yeti”, which also was probably a Sloth Bear. I guess to Corwin, one man’s “Yeti” is another man’s Sloth Bear. Still, it was exciting to see new species discovered.
The Yeti was not discovered in this program. Nor was the sloth bear. But it would not have been watched if they entitled it “Corwin’s Quest: Realm of the Little, Tiny Frog,” of course.
This show again proves that cryptozoologists will still have plenty of work to do once “investigators” like Jeff Corwin leave the area. I was also disappointed with his revisitation of stale subject matter, as well as his patronizing tone throughout the show. On a positive note, it was good to see Lhapka Dhoma, the Sherpa girl who survived a Yeti attack back in 1974.
Yes, I too was surprised and happy to see Lhapka Dhoma in this program. As fate would have it, she appeared a couple nights ago when History Channel International re-broadcast the 1995 documentary with her being interviewed about her earlier Yeti encounter. Apparently, she is on a short list of eyewitnesses being referred to producation companies coming to Nepal for interviews.
Thanks Loren. This saves me the time I would have wasted watching this on TV.
hmm, reading that review, im glad our “crocodile guy” hasn’t set his sites on anything unknown (or remotely intelligent for that matter).
Can you imagine Steve Irwin hunting the yowie, “Crikey! There he is o’er there! I’m gonna go Poke ‘im with a stick!”
(just to let you know, Steve Irwin is the only “aussie” to have ever spoken like that, ever, with the exception of me, when talking to American tourists)
Good review Loren but I think the Conservation International segments did give it some redeeming value.Definitely a mixed bag of infomercial,foolishness and science.
It was a double header as the night before I caught another Yeti show on cable with Mr Coleman. I can’t remember which one- but they showed the context for the “Snow walker” footage- a expedition by some unnamed hikers who captured the beast on video. Was this video proven to be a hoax? It certainly seemed more compelling with the excerpts of the rest of the video- although the floundering monkey in the snow always seemed to me to be a bit goofy.
Yep, the Snow Walker segment was in the same program mentioned above that had Lhapka Dhoma’s older interview in it.
The Snow Walker footage is a hoax, made for the initial broadcast of a program entitled “Paranormal Borderlines” (1996), merely to increase ratings.
Thank goodness the Corwin production company left that footage out of this quest.
After watching this program it made me realize something, if Bigfoot, Yeti, the Johor or any unknown bipedal primate is ever discovered it would be devastating for that creature. Every network hungry for ratings and money would all but ruin these animals hopes of continued survival. They are already making Disney rides out of the “myth”. As much as I would personally love to learn more about these animals, we would be doing a huge disservice by bringing them into the light. In some ways I hope they all remain hidden from our distructive eyes, for it is the only way they can continue to live.
If I ever meet Steve Corwin I’m going to ask him to give me back the two hours of my life that he wasted.
Didn’t know the “Snow Walker” footage had been found to be a hoax, thanks for posting that.
I don’t have a TV, so I didn’t watch this, but I think it’s pretty darn exciting to find new species, be they frogs, bugs or otherwise. It’s a shame that for Joe and Jane TV viewer, the discovery of new frogs, (not to mention the striped rabbits, mini deer and other new birds and mammals discovered throughout Asia over the last couple years) isn’t enough to build a program around.
I know I’d love to see a documentary that focuses just on the new species discovered over the last decade.
–Didn’t know the “Snow Walker” footage had been found to be a hoax, thanks for posting that.
Someone needs to tell Dr. Meldrum. He was shown after it talking about how much it looked like a primate which to my untrained eye it did- except it appeared to be unable to climb the snow- it was sort of floundering around. For a creature- at least by the accounts of Bigfoot- which is known to be so fluid and agile- that seemed like a big red flag.
Eh, I’m not convinced by a lot of these “it’s too clumsy” arguments when analyzing footage or encounters. A cryptid primate is an animal, not a supernatural entity – it would be as likely to get caught in big snowdrifts, slip, lose their balance, etc. as any other animal. Especially under winter conditions – ice, snow drifts, etc. Granted, a man in an ape suit would be much clumsier than an animal that spends its life in the wild, but a slip or clumsiness are not convincing in and of themselves.
Let’s not get distracted by talking about the Snow Walker footage and its mechanics. Furthermore, Meldrum is the one who pursued the Snow Walker information to the end and established that it was a hoax. Today that is a ten year old documentary that remains edited to make Meldrum fixed in time saying something that seems supportive of the footage. But, naturally, events keep evolving in which his opinions change. That is exactly what happened.
The Paranormal Borderline footage is a hoax, but it lives on in that old program.
The Corwin documentary is current, and now re-invents the “Yeti scalp” as an “unknown,” even though it definitely is not. Documentaries have influence and impact, beyond the realities and falsehoods contained within them
I actually watched both shows with Joe Rohde. Corwin’s and the one about the imagineers trip to Nepal. Rohde seemed to me, much more researched and open to the idea that the yeti is a biological animal. What was more fascinating to me than Corwin’s quest was the program that came on after, that showed close filming of a snow leopard.
Corwin attracts younger viewers. When I was around 10 or 11 (6 or 7 years ago), he had a show on the Disney Channel that I watched a lot. That’s probably why his show seems meaningless and less informative. He’s used to pleasing children.
Watched part of it, about as much as I could stand, and am in total agreement with just about everyone here, with the possible admission of the dirty little secret that I kinda like Steve Irwin. Corwin is just an insipid, American copycat of that very, very strange little Aussie. Oh, and they show Irwin getting chomped by things fairly frequently. At least he admits that it’s his fault, not the animal’s.
I for one,found Jeff Corwins’ Special very entertaining,informative and educational.In my opinion,it was far better then most of the crap that is on TV now a days.I guess if a show doesn’t have sex,somebody getting shot at or getting killed,showing boobs sticking out,wearing clothes that are tight fitting,etc. then nobody really wants to watch it,the show seems so boring without all of the above mentioned~~no wonder the world is like it is today.Society lets TV be too much of a inspiration for the wrong reasons so much of the time.It was so nice to be able to watch a program that enabled the entire family to watch and parents did not have to worry about its’ contents. Maybe the Yeti is real,maybe it isn’t,maybe the Yeti is some kind of animal or maybe it is some kind of man,who knows.There are many,many things in this world today that can be debated over and over again to try and decide if they are actually real or just imagination,or a spiritual belief,or some strange wisdom in a culture.For those of you who bash what Jeff Corwin does,then why don’t you get off your a** and go out and just try to do what he does,I would be willing to make a bet then more then half of you would not be able to last more then just a few days out in the wilderness,away from all the luxuries of home.I am proud to be a Jeff Corwin fan and I will support him in all of his endeavors.I strongly believe that Jeff is trying his damnest to teach us about conservation and how the wilderness has got to be saved.He truly cares about the enviroment in a way that very few people do~~~~~~