Easily one of the most influential shows of my childhood. It introduced me to so many amazing animal facts and unique species. The show has amazing cinematography and impressive animal footage. The show has such a great soundtrack with so many unique leitmotifs. Both narrators are great, with such smooth and expressive voices. Not to mention the iconic setting with the Matrix-inspired green number computer background and the amusing and cleverly educational visual metaphors with the CGI humans recreating animal abilities. The show is not always a traditional top 10, since there's plenty of episodes where the first two contenders have relatively minor fears for the topic. But it provides great contrast to the most accomplished contenders just to highlight how impressive their abilities are. There's so many fun topics and animal categories that the show covers. The show also isn't afraid to go dark and trusts kids' maturity to digest the subject matter in how nature can be beautiful, amazing, bizarre, and terrifyingly harsh. There's also a fun contrast with the stock footage of old serial films, B-movies (often cheesy horror movies about killer animals), cartoons, and real-life interviews that share a unique, borderline-ADHD parallel to the animal of discussion. It's an amazing love letter to animals and easily my favorite Animal Planet show.
