April 16, 2006

Yeti Yes, Corwin Hardly Bearable

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.

Filed under Abominable Snowman, Breaking News, Cryptotourism, CryptoZoo News, Cryptozoology, Movie Monsters, Pop Culture, Reviews, Television, Yeti