Wonders Never Cease On 'Planet Earth'

Elephants in the Kalahari Desert join baboons, giraffes, antelopes and other beautiful beasts in making their way through sandstorms to a swamp and their precious treasure, water. The sequence includes amazing footage of the elephants swimming and cavorting underwater -- graceful, playful and weightless. But as the tour continues farther south, warmth gives way to cold again, and the hour ends in Antarctica, where emperor penguins huddle and waddle together, protecting a precious egg that hatches with the first sunlight of spring.

As the series continues, there will be pandas and pumas, grizzlies and goats, golden snub-nosed monkeys and graceful migrating cranes, a gigantic whale shark and the swirling schools of little fish that follow it almost everywhere. From satellite views of the Earth floating in space to microscopic shots of a bug-eating plant sucking up an ant, the series is wall-to-wall with wonders.

Continuing themes include the mating reflex and the maternal bond (a baby elephant almost blindly following its mother through the desert toward water, or a mama polar bear taking her cub on its first outing on the snow). And, most of all, the persistence of life, the fight put up by creatures and plants of every kind to survive. When you see the surreal creatures running around on the ocean floor, some of them looking like hallucinogenic cartoons, you have to wonder why they're there and what put them there -- a great all-seeing intelligence or a coldly indifferent fate?

"Planet Earth's" high-tech accomplishment continues a TV tradition that goes back to such pioneering efforts as NBC's low-tech "Wide Wide World," a travelogue that aired on Sunday afternoons in the '50s, hosted by the great Dave Garroway, first emcee of the "Today" show. Even then, TV was trying to deliver the world. Garroway liked to end the show with lines from Edna St. Vincent Millay, and "Planet Earth" evokes them again:

"The world stands out on either side, no wider than the heart is wide; above the world is stretched the sky, no higher than the soul is high."

Rarely does television touch heart and soul as effectively as "Planet Earth."

Planet Earth debuts tomorrow night at 8 on Discovery Channel and Discovery HD Theater with the first three one-hour episodes.