Last night I was watching my usual Discovery TV shows, and I see a comercial for Man vs. Wild with Will Ferrell. Are they serious? This site isn't very nice to Man vs. Wild, with some very justifiable reasons, but for the love of all things wilderness Will Ferrell, in this show brings it to a whole new level of low.

Any and all credibility I feel has totaly left the show,, well unless Bear Grills snaps and puts Will out of our missery.

I notice that this show is really a weekend snow camping with Will Ferrell, with Bear Gryllis as the straight man. Hey, that sounds like a hoot to me. I'll record and watch this too.

Some professions are protected by statute for the common good.
You practise western medicine without a license and you go to jail.
You put on a police uniform and you go to jail.
But buy a set of buckskins from reenactors, a dreamcatcher and after reading a military handbook of survival you can open a school. Ditto if you don military fatiques or a Hudson's Bay capote- whatever GQ magazine hasn't named fashionable.
Wilderness has been abused to the point our one and only 'Liferaft' may well sink in a century.
Entertainment sees it as just another milieu to exploit.
So we have 'contestants' right out of THE PRICE IS RIGHT apparently 'playing with the heads of game animals' if I read another thread correctly.
Getting upset over Will Ferrel is like asking a masochist if it hurts.

for the advertisers sake I hope this show does have some sort of intertainment value....

I agree...this show was never credible.

I saw the preview for this too. Need to watch it, just for the laughs. The pure silliness of it all...

Maybe Will and Bear will turn on each other; wonder who would win that fight...

Never cared much for Will Ferrell and his brand of juvenile humor, so I will find something else to do. I am really surprised Bear is doing this one.

bear always dose thing the hard way expect when he stays at a motel 6 so now he going to take a moron along. hey wolves need to eat too

C'mon. It's going to be great. Even Bear admits that the smartest thing to do when lost is stay put. That being said it makes for boring television so he finds his way out and along the way shows us what can/will/would happen if someone trys something stupid like swimming under ice or trying to drink from a bad patch of water.

He is at least illustrating what happens in an accident and at most what happens when ego interferes with rescue.

The Will Ferrell thing...remember the SNL kits (w/o Ferrell) on the Scoutmaster? Funny stuff.

Bear entertains and educates, a little. I think if you listen to him you'd hear him sayng he dosn't always do things the smart way. I've heard him say that as far as heading down a big slope, "there is the sensible way and the Bear way." Some things he does would be idiotic for most people to try, but I also don't hear him saying it's the best choice.

I'm guessing this has something to do with promoting Ferrell's upcoming movie "Land of the Lost."

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809953162/info

Henry, it certainly does. I am looking forward to seeing this...Will's comment on the commercials have me rolling!!!

Sounds like the "Survivorman" episode from "The Office". I gotta admit, that was one of few episodes that I've actually seen of The Office. One of the office guys tried to hide behind the scenes to support his boss and "protect" him. I suspect the Will Ferrell episode will be similar to this.

Ray Mears and Ewan McGregor did an episode together but that was far from a Will Ferrell comedy. McGregor does haves pretty decent skills and was a serious student.

To my knowledge Les Stroud hasn't done any shows with celebrities but Ron Hood has taught many people outdoor skills including Backpackers's John Viehman. (Ron loves messing with people especially when he gets them to eat bugs!)

Ray Mears and Ewan McGregor... I'll have to keep an eye out for that one.

Don't mean to jump the shark here, but to tag on the Ewan McGregor documentary boat, his documentary, "Long Way Round" is the ultimate buddy road trip video log. Him and his best friend ride from London to New York via Asia. It goes from concept of two buddies drinking up a plan, creating the route and getting visas and then the trip. Awesome.

Funny you mention this. Me and the family just spent four days camping with Ron/Karen Hood and his Hoodlums. Ron seemed really shocked when saw DD1 and I munching on roasted June bugs.

Hoodlums Spring Thing '09

-Blast

I watched it last night and overall it really wasn't that bad, Bear (and crew) knew their butts were on the line if anything happened to Will, so I am betting they took "extra" precautions for his safety.

Mike

I didn't know that the Hostess TWINKIE was the new preferred "survival ration" until I saw Will and Bear together.

I enjoyed that episode... very funny!

I enjoyed it too, good entertainment. You could tell that Will Ferrell was legitimately sh*t scared from the rapels, but he followed through, he may not have rapeled from a heli before but he had obviously had enough training to get over his trust in the rope issues. And you could also see just how tired he was at the end of day one, when they were making camp. I've been there, you don't want to move, you just want Bear or the camera crew to set up camp and let you collapse and sleep. Instead they feasted on caribou eyeball, which was a funny sequence.

Overall I think the drop site had to have been well-scouted, and the sequence of challenges cleared with Ferrell and his people. The distance traveled wasn't very far but would challenge someone not used to snow travel. How fortunate to find the caribou carcass exactly where they needed one, the intact caribou skin gave them ground warmth for the first night (along with whatever sleeping bags the camera crew carried with them). The cornice breaking off on the first rapel seemed legitimate, but I wouldn't doubt a second crew member behind Ferrell holding Bear's belay.

They had a lot of assists on this one even if the above were just coincidences, but its entertainment and not meant to be done by anyone else.

Damn you Bear Gryllis.

If there were 4 people on-camera there were at least 40, if not more, off-camera. Remember somebody is shooting the video of the camera crew. There was an ambulance/medevac helo standing by I guarantee you. No production company would take a chance with a celeb of Ferrell's standing otherwise, whether you think he's funny or not. When actors talk about not being allowed to do certain stunts due to "insurance", they're telling the truth. The cost of something going wrong on a film or a television show is way too high to risk these days to let untrained actors do anything really dangerous.

Maybe so, although even with more support people they appeared to do some risky things, unless those were staged. Like the short rope maneuver with Will leading Bear down an icy slope, unless they staged that on the base of a slope it was definitely risky, they were crossing without crampons with a tired non-expert actor across a legitimately icy slope. Maybe Bear had a secret belay on? Who knows.

I could see this level of prep: scout the terrain, and run the sequence of necessary death defying events past Ferrell's people. Will gets a week to practice his repels and belays, and maybe a weekend to march around in the snow during daylight hours. The crew decides what additional safety measures to take so he avoids any obvious and deadly falls. Even then things go wrong - the belay out of the copter sure started out badly.

At minimum you're left with a long weekend trudging through deep snow and with a couple belays thrown in - had to be exciting and exhausting from Ferrell's perspective.

It was definitely "interesting" to watch...

It was obvious that they had to set stuff up in advance... They wouldn't take any risk with him.

Bear said a hunter had left the caribou carcass for them.

The show was entertainment - it wasn't rolling on the floor laughing, but my family enjoyed it well enough.