Long, long ago, in a time before Starbucks, cellphones and rap music, there existed a TV show called &uot;Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.&uot; It was a couch potato’s window upon nature years before the Discovery Channel, the Animal Planet and National Geographic appeared on the scene. It was a nature show and my favorite TV program.

In those days less than half of a network show consisted of commercials. The shows today have so many commercials that it is very easy to forget what it is that we are watching. Many of the commercials are more entertaining than the programs.

Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom was hosted by a fellow named Marlin Perkins, a famed zoo director. Most of the shows started with Marlin, safely ensconced in an army surplus tank, watching for vultures as naturalist Jim Fowler checked the abscessed tooth of an angry mother grizzly bear that had not been anesthetized. Jim was Marlin’s right hand man. He was a put-upon fellow whose battle scars evidenced the fact that Jim did the dirty work. It was a good thing that the series was sponsored by Mutual of Omaha, an insurance company. I think that Jim found out weekly if the medical insurance policies offered by his sponsor were any good. The company must have paid plenty of claims for Jim who regularly fell victim to fang, tooth and claw. Jim was the Crocodile Hunter before there was a Crocodile Hunter.

Wild Kingdom was a nature show from a more innocent time. A peek at the offerings of the Discovery Channel shows that the nature shows of today are likely to feature animal attacks. The nature shows there are a cross between Wild Kingdom and &uot;Cops.&uot; The creatures shown are definitely not cuddly and after a few minutes of one of those shows I feel as though I am watching the end of nature as I have known it. The Wild Kingdom visited our homes in a friendlier, gentler time.

I was enchanted with Wild Kingdom, Marlin and Jim. There was some scary stuff on Wild Kingdom, even if the emphasis was more on conservation than hostile encounters. They did such a good job presenting the plight of many of our world’s creatures that I would come away with the feeling that zoos had it backwards &045; people should be locked up and the animals set free. But there were frightening moments and they were appreciated by at least one viewer in Hartland. Before we had karaoke, we had to find other ways of scaring ourselves. In those olden days, if we wanted to see a man-eating fish, we had to go to a smelt feed on a Saturday night. Oh, there were man-eaters in Hartland. They were called mosquitoes and were not featured in nature shows in those days. I guess the world wasn’t ready for something that terrifying.

Back to our program. There Marlin was, safe and sound in the Sherman tank, while poor Jim, recently rolled in a vat of bacon grease and battling to evict a family of weasels that had taken up residence in his shorts, struggled to do some serious dental work on a nasty grizzly. &uot;See those sharp teeth. What a marvelous creature,&uot; Marlin would say. I never knew if he was referring to Jim or the bear. I would watch intently, expecting the worst for poor old Jim. I prepared myself to turn on the TV one night (you had to turn them on early in those days because it took the TV set a while to warm up) and see hyenas picking their teeth with Jim’s ribcage. But Jim was fearless and resilient. As Jim and the bear wrestled in a death match, Marlin would interrupt the scene, just as Jim’s entire head disappeared into the bear’s mouth, to pitch insurance.

&uot;Just as the mother grizzly bear protects her young, you, too, can with a policy from Mutual of Omaha.&uot;

Those shameless commercial plugs, which always came at the worst time, actually enhanced the enjoyment for the viewer. The insurance policies being described while Jim wrestled with a wolverine or was attacked by an anaconda added a surreal effect to Wild Kingdom. I loved Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. I would watch Jim slap the gizzard out of a giant lizard, while a lion carrying a bottle of ketchup would be sneaking up from behind. Marlin, calling on his vast experience that allowed him to immediately sense the danger, would spring into action and try to sell us a life insurance policy.

It doesn’t get much better than that.

Hartland resident Al Batt writes columns for the Wednesday and Sunday editions of the Tribune.