Animal Planet - Lions - 4 in 1

Amazon and the mail keep on surprising me — this collection of 4 Animal Planet films about lions came out on September 29th, and that's when I ordered it, right after midnight their time. They shipped it the same day I ordered, and it reached me in less than a week, and in one piece too. Let's see how the second half of the order arrives, also from a collection of 4 lion films, but this time on 4 discs.

I ordered this disc for the sake of the film A Lion Called Christian (2009), which I already wrote about here. I've already watched it — yes, it's a new film, released this year, made up of improved excerpts from the film Christian: The Lion (1971), new fragments that weren't in that film and ended up on YouTube, and commentary newly filmed from eyewitnesses to the events, among whom are Tony Fitzjohn (George Adamson's assistant and the main character of the film "To Walk With Lions" (1999)) and Virginia McKenna (Joy Adamson in "Born Free" (1966) and founder of the Born Free Foundation).

This film shows the ending of Christian's story, it shows the fragments that weren't there, neither on YouTube nor in the old version, but part of what was in Christian the Lion has been cut out, fewer sad facts are mentioned and much has been left out. The new version is much nicer to watch thanks to the improved quality of the forty-year-old video and audio.

Right now I can't say anything about The Lion's Share and Rogue Lions, they aren't new and have long been on foreign torrent trackers, also only in English, I think I've already seen them.

White Lions is an interesting film, its SATRips with Russian voiceover have been around for a long time, and now you can watch the white lions in DVD quality. It's just that I'm fairly biased against it because of what The Global White Lion Protection Trust wrote. I'll quote myself:

The point is that here they baselessly assume that the lions were exterminated by Africa's indigenous population, they portray the people running the "canned hunting" operation in a favorable light and claim that the lions can't survive in the wild... And the Trust isn't mentioned in the film, even though it's the only organization that is returning white lions to the wild, and so far relatively successfully.

It's a film for admiring the animals, but for information you're better off going to Linda Tucker's book Mystery of the White Lions: Children of the Sun God.