TELEVISION : OK, So I Like Cats--PBS Does Too

You know that a writer has run out of things to write about when he writes about his family. What does that say about a writer who writes about his animals?

He’s run out of things to write about his family, too? Whatever.

Actually, this isn’t about my animals (not yet). It’s about 13 weeks of “Eyewitness,” a visually stunning new PBS series about animals, starting tonight with the cat. Big cat, little cat, extinct cat, cat in the house, cat in the wild, cat in art, cat in history, cat in myth, every cat but a hep cat and a cool cat. Each half-hour is packed.

The look of “Eyewitness” is dazzling. It uses vibrant and innovative design techniques--most notably something called “the technology of white”--to capture the essence of the natural world. You get a prey’s-eye-view of a hungry lion, for example. Think of yourself as a hot fudge sundae eyeing someone approaching with a spoon, and you get the idea.

Succeeding weeks bring the horse, the reptile, the fish, the dog, the bird, the elephant, the shark, the insect, the amphibian, the dinosaur, the jungle and the skeleton.

Narrated by Martin Sheen, “Eyewitness” incorporates live action into an electronic world. For example, the mythical Pegasus is depicted by electronically grafting the flapping wings of a swan onto the back of a white horse. And through computer generation, one fish becomes many fish, and macaws become a profusion of radiance as they appear to fly from an exploding egg.

Regrettably, some of the wild animals used in the series appear to be captives. Yet “Eyewitness” would be refreshing if for no other reason than its animals don’t eat each other or us. This is not “Jurassic Park.” Prey meets predator, but the picture dissolves or disappears before things get ugly. We do see a lunging snake appear to chomp off the tail of a lizard, but the dismemberment is achieved electronically with a computer--the way Gary Sinise lost his legs in “Forrest Gump.”

Actually, the snake appears to be a constrictor, which would dispatch its prey in a different fashion. For mealtime realism in the wild, though, there’s the Discovery Channel.

That’s not to say “Eyewitness” is Stupid Pet Tricks or either Disneyesque or humanesque. Animals here aren’t anthropomorphized--a fancy word for imbuing them with human traits, the way TV’s “True Life Adventures” did in the 1950s through music, narration and editing. You experience not only their environment on “Eyewitness,” but also the culture of their environment, as well as their fascinating physiology.

The “Eyewitness” producing credits trail as long as a brontosaur’s tail: BBC Lionheart Television, Dorling Kindersley Vision and PBS in association with Oregon Public Broadcasting. In fact, the series is inspired by Dorling Kindersley books, which pioneered the “technology of white,” a process of arranging subjects and text on a field of pure white so that each image stands out with unusual clarity. It succeeds even on my fuzzy set.

Although the series leads with cats, probably because of their popularity as domestic companions, the opening segment contains more visual style than substance. This is no problem for cat worshipers like yours truly. I could watch them endlessly in any setting, no narration needed. But next week’s half-hour on horses is stronger, from its factoids (“The horseshoe must hang open end up so the good luck doesn’t fall out”) to its history of the stirrup to its reflections on the horse-rider relationship. And there’s no ballet more spectacular than a feral horse running freely on a plain, captured in slow motion.

Unless, of course, it’s the daily routine of the animals that live at our house. That is, if you regard sleeping as balletic.

Yes, I’m now unmasked. The review of “Eyewitness” is a ruse, mere foreplay for the true subject of this column: my animals.

Since my last report, Snoopy, the beloved cat from hell, died of cancer at age 14. The mellow, gentle Sport, formerly a neighbor’s cat, was promoted to the house from the patio.

Woody, the elderly Guinea pig, continues to dine on gourmet salads prepared by my wife (he prefers the house dressing), and those cockatiels of the century, Sierra and Little Honey, are still upstairs, chirping outside my office. One whistle and you make their day.

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The newcomer is Percy, an amazing 9-month-old (the age is an estimate) feral cat who was recovered as a kitten by friends on the campus of Valley College. Percy is like no cat we’ve ever seen. He has the eyes and face of a tabby, longish ears, mane-length fur around his neck and the long, thick tail of a fox. What is this cat? To us, he’s the cutest, sweetest guy going, making even his flatulence tolerable. To Sport, he’s Satan (but that’s another column).

Meanwhile, there was Benji. Was there ever Benji, a lop-eared, burly white rabbit delivered to us by someone who found him on the street. For nearly a year, he lived on his own terms in our back yard (often spending his nights in the garage) and wherever else he chose to hop, showing up at the back door each morning and evening for his own salad munchies.

What a life. What a rabbit. He was absolutely fearless, an aggressive rabbit who chased and terrorized our cats to the extent that they became too traumatized to exit the house through the back door. A rabbit!

How mighty was Benji? So mighty that one day he chased off even that rotund neighborhood bully, Murray the Cat. Well, why not? Benji was the kind of rabbit that could bring down a moose. A coyote wouldn’t have had a chance with him.

Not long ago, though, he got very sick. The vet said a huge fur ball was lodged in his intestine and that, because rabbits can’t regurgitate as cats do, surgery was his only hope, and a slim one at that.

If there was a horseshoe on the wall above the operating table, it must have been hung open end down, for all of Benji’s good luck ran out there. He survived the operation, but died the next day.

Whew.

“Eyewitness” shows the wonder and uniqueness of animals with startling lucidity. What its technology can’t convey is how much we miss them when they’re gone.

Another 13 episodes of this series are said to be in the works. I hope this time the producers devote a segment to the rabbit.

* “Eyewitness” premieres at 8:30 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.