Jungle Jack Bash: Millennial wildlife gurus reflect on Hanna’s influence

Jack Hanna’s Animal Adventures grand-marshaled a parade of captivating, informative nature programming. It all inspired a wave of new wildlife educators taking serious fun across new media.

Back in the ’90s, the delivery of the latest ZooLife with Jack Hanna VHS was Corbin Maxey’s event of the month. He remains adamant about preserving his prized collection and screening the specials for his kids. (Photo submitted by Corbin Maxey)

A TV personality, a feathered friend, and a young fan walked into a breakfast bar.

This is no joke. That is the beginning of Clark DeHart’s unplanned, over-before-you-know-it meet-your-hero memory.

The finer details escape him, but the crucial points have stuck.

One morning, on a family vacation, DeHart went for a bite at his hotel’s bottom level. There he happened upon Julie Scardina of Jack Hanna’s Animal Adventures fame.

Scardina’s affiliation: SeaWorld and Busch Gardens, where she was the chief animal ambassador from 1995 until retiring in 2016. Her inlet to celebrity: Hanna’s syndicated weekend-morning nature series plus regular spots on NBC’s Today Show and Tonight Show.

Her travel partner of the day: A cockatoo.

And her approachability: Sublime.

“That was probably 20 years ago,” DeHart said in an email exchange with this author, “and I still remember that she was very friendly and I was very shy.”

When their time came, the most riveted members of the Animal Adventures audience were less hesitant to see other species in their domain. They respected boundaries, of course, but were not too wary about immersing themselves in unfamiliar, unstructured habitats.

Around her neighborhood in Towson, Maryland, Molly McKinney started small by dropping in on the reptilian residents. That activity was one of two fixtures — and the outdoor half of that pair — in her recreation regimen.

“If I wasn’t wading waist-deep in a creek trying to catch frogs or snakes,” she reflected via email, “you’d probably find me in our family living room watching these programs.”

Or, when said shows weren’t on, she was running a prized ZooLife with Jack Hanna tape in the VCR. Out in Idaho, the mail carrier’s delivery of the latest ZooLife installment was the event of the month for young Corbin Maxey.

“My wife wants me to throw them away. I’m like, ‘Honey, this is a classic.’” – Corbin Maxey on his ZooLife with Jack Hanna VHS collection

The sentimental preservatives match the VHS’s educational value. So much so that Maxey has seven editions at his current residence plus whatever lingers at his parents’ place. He is adamant about screening them for his own kids one day.

“My wife wants me to throw them away,” he said in a phone chat. “I’m like, ‘Honey, this is a classic.’”

Both the physical and intangible substance back his statement. Maxey’s collection symbolizes an era that will be hard for his field to recreate, although everyone will certainly try.

What started circa 1992-93 with Hanna — who carried on his signature show for 18 years, has hosted other programs since, and is now retiring as director emeritus at the Columbus Zoo this week — pluralized with comparable offerings and other instant household names in the second half of the ’90s. Young viewers who were drawn to Disney and PBS Kids content straight from the wild let their appetite take them beyond the 12-and-under menu.

“I just recall that we got to go on a journey with this interesting person who loved learning,” emailed Stephanie Arne. “I just really related to each of them so much that I became a tour guide and, eventually, a wildlife host myself.”

Spoiler alert: DeHart, Maxey, and McKinney all did something along the same lines. They want to inform and intrigue like they were informed and intrigued before, and like their elders hardly ever were.

When reached for this story, Maxey spoke of Hanna with as much exuberance as he exuded when speaking to Hanna on his podcast, Animals to the Max, in May of 2019. Maxey is maxing out the present day’s media to spread his fervor for wildlife, including endless invitations to do high-profile talk-show segments.

But when it comes to groundbreaking small-screen series hosted by nature gurus themselves, he sees one item that slipped by with time.

“I’m a little too late to the game,” he lamented, “because those types of shows don’t really exist anymore.”

That said, they did exist, and still exist on the record. In so doing, they comprised a new breed worth emulating.

Up close and animal

After a few false starts, televised animal edutainment was barely burgeoning as a concept when Maxey was born. Meanwhile husband and wife Dave and Sue Kleven were establishing Animal Edutainment as an enterprise.

Sue is the director of the Frank Buck Zoo in Gainesville, Texas, and the Zoological Association of America Committee Chair. Dave is also known, if not better known, as Critterman around the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex and among steadfast nature enthusiasts at large.

Despite a dearth of niche programming in their youth, the Klevens are testaments to effective animal education in the media. As Sue recounted to the Gainesville Register, the two met in Southern California while studying at Moorpark College’s selective exotic animal training program. That program — which produced Scardina in its formative years — came to her attention through a National Geographic magazine article she read in early adolescence.

Together the tandem wasted no time building on their unique postgraduate education. This past spring marked their 30th Moorpark commencement anniversary, and this fall marked Animal Edutainment, Inc.’s 30th birthday.

A 10-minute mini-documentary produced by David Goodman for Dallas-Fort Worth’s PBS station in 2013 captures Critterman’s essence. It leads with none other than Hanna emceeing an auditorium visit where the buzz-cut, bespectacled Kleven enters with a lemur perched on his left shoulder.

The primate’s trademark ringed extremity casts a Rapunzel-like stretch down to Kleven’s own tailbone. Hanna assures the audience the prominent appendage is “lighter than a feather,” a revelation the eyes and the brain could take days of follow-up research to accept.

As Critterman, Kleven presents exotic animals in local auditoria, grade-school science labs, and living rooms. In the third minute of Goodman’s segment, he relates to the audience by engaging an iguana and its tail in a good-natured “Stop hitting yourself” trick. He subsequently draws a gush of guffaws as the lizard lets out its tongue and an audible spray of saliva.

“I just recall that we got to go on a journey with this interesting person who loved learning. I just really related to each of them so much that I became a tour guide and, eventually, a wildlife host myself.” – Stephanie Arne

His expressed objective is to let the kids and the creatures meet face-to-face, an endeavor that is especially rewarding in cities, where the residents lack everyday access to wildlife. It is a quintessential Hanna-esque philosophy, as was established in the Animal Adventures zoo tours.

In the PBS short’s sixth minute, as they chat backstage, Kleven credits Hanna with teaching him to “use humor and self-deprecation and everything to kind of invite people in.” Hanna adds that “sometimes fun has to be” a factor in imparting “education” and “understanding” of nature.

Teamwork is equally indispensable. When he wrote an occasional guest column for Discover Denton, Kleven rattled off the ultimate who’s who of connections in his bio. There he cites his “good fortune to work with Jack Hanna, Jeff Corwin, Steve and Terri Irwin, Chris and Martin Kratt, and the hosts of Wild Kingdom Jim Fowler, Peter Gros, and Stephanie Arne.”

With Hanna, Gros, and Fowler, he collaborated with his pioneering predecessors among celebrity animal experts. With Corwin, the Irwins, and the Kratts, he teamed with national (or even international) TV personalities among his fellow Generation Xers.

And with Arne, CuriosityStream’s official wildlife and conservation ambassador, he has joined a quintessential testament to Hanna’s small-screen students. The blueprint for that vital additive to their collective cause took shape alongside Critterman’s regional in-person tour.

Critterman’s show does customers a service by bringing pieces of the wild, zoo, or nature preserve to them. And even before the Klevens reached adulthood, Ranger Rick and Zoobooks had youngsters absorbing accessible wildlife write-ups.

But only through appointment viewing on a moving picture screen can one take a nation’s worth of kids and families to a given zoo or on an exotic nature expedition at once.

As the likes of Clark DeHart learned from ’90s nature hosts, this line of work requires a good deal of grit. (Photo by Margaret DeHart)

E/I, E/I, Whoa!

First as a consumer, then as a caterer, Arne got her start in nature shows with Wild Kingdom, which also fostered Dave Kleven’s infatuation.

The terrestrial TV version that Fowler, Gros, and Marlin Perkins delivered after dark overlapped with Arne’s pre-K years. That and Marty Stouffer’s Wild America signaled her budding niche and whet her appetite for shows her young age group could use, but still had to wait a change in decade for.

While the original incarnation of Wild Kingdom had a solid run from 1963 to 1988, it had little competitive company. Coinciding with that show’s formative years, the three major networks gave Animal World the hot-potato treatment.

Five years after the latter sputtered, ABC tailored Animals, Animals, Animals to young audiences on Sunday mornings. Despite a string of accolades, it only stuck for five seasons, ending in November of 1981. One knock on the show, especially in retrospect, was that host Hal Linden was a performer by trade and lacked any meaningful background in nature studies.

“I think it is so important for whoever is hosting an animal show to be an animal expert, to be working with animals,” Maxey opined.

Experts did appear on Linden’s program, but not with top billing. And Wild Kingdom and Wild America aside, the rest of the ’80s were nearly empty in this genre altogether. Moreover, nature had nearly no small-screen spotlights that would have garnered a TV-Y label in the upcoming ratings era.

Then Congress took its first meaningful initiative on the matter at large. Two decades after PBS took flight — thereby fulfilling Fred Rogers’ famous plea for funding toward wholesome programming — the Children’s Television Act of 1990 stipulated a measure of “educational and informative” (E/I) shows. A network’s license renewal was to hinge, in part, on meeting a minimum percentage of E/I-caliber airtime.

In its toddlerhood, the CTA arguably dawdled via listless FCC enforcement and the mainstream, three-letter, single-digit channels meant to embody it. But by 1993, as more millennials grew into consciousness, the act and its intentions came into their own.

That year Hanna abdicated his position as director of the Columbus Zoo — which promptly anointed him as its director emeritus — and took his forte national. Already familiar among late-night viewers through his recurring visits to David Letterman’s studio, he was ready to go before full families on weekend mornings.

“Jack’s calm demeanor and curiosity about the animals he saw on the show — and occasional ‘dad jokes’ — made him a role model for me” – Clark DeHart

Jack Hanna’s Animal Adventures came to life and to living rooms in the fall of 1993, following the previous autumn’s one-off ZooLife with Jack Hanna special.

Those who took charge of syndicating the show for a given market ought to have breathed easier. The decade’s defining regulation had essentially opened the door for a definitive, pioneering edutainer.

The CTA, DeHart says, “is one of the primary reasons why we have wildlife hosts like Jack Hanna.”

With an E/I emblem stamped on the screen’s bottom-right corner, Animal Adventures signified its role in CTA compliance. But viewers barely noticed the superimposed symbol. They were too mesmerized by the sights and sounds of Hanna’s globetrotting exploits, fun fatherly persona, and occasionally fate-tempting presentations.

“Jack’s calm demeanor and curiosity about the animals he saw on the show — and occasional ‘dad jokes’ — made him a role model for me,” said DeHart.

That cucumber conduct and commitment to the animals also put Hanna’s selfless grit on display. For McKinney, those moments offered a potent lesson on the field’s risks and rewards. She, for one, decided it was worth it.

“Jack Hanna could be dripping with sweat and surrounded by a mob of mosquitoes and barely notice because he was so focused on releasing this rehabilitated orangutan back into the wild,” she marveled.

Sharing the floor with like-minded humans was another crucially exemplary habit on Hanna’s part. And it only began with Scardina’s recurring Animal Ambassadors segment.

“Jack wasn’t a perfectionist; he was never trying to impress anyone,” Arne said. “He had a genuine and authentic interest in learning from others and wasn’t afraid to ask questions.”

Furthering that point, when visiting a zoo beyond his home base, Hanna did not dominate his portions of the episode. He let the specialized keepers dish up their expertise and enthusiasm for the creatures before them. His interviews also shed light on behind-the-scenes personnel and their positions at the park.

“Jack knew what he was doing,” said Maxey, who has had Arne and a blue whale-length succession of other scholars on his podcast. But as the medium between the viewer and on-location residents, he appropriated the former’s hunger for mind-blowing facts and “allowed the other people to be the expert.”

Furthering his polite-guest precedent, the viewers’ host never presumed permission to interact with his own host’s companions. (After all, no other visitor to an Alaska simulation exhibit would dare toss salmon to the bears unauthorized.) That said, he invariably got the greenlight upon request, and used it to enrich everyone’s lesson.

“Jack Hanna could be dripping with sweat and surrounded by a mob of mosquitoes and barely notice because he was so focused on releasing this rehabilitated orangutan back into the wild.” – Molly McKinney

From watching Hanna and others, McKinney concluded the ideal nature host was “a real, thinking, breathing person who asks questions and isn’t afraid to go off-script when we don’t understand or admit if we didn’t know a factoid.”

Venturing out from her current base in Charlotte, McKinney puts that principle into practice through her program, The Southern Weekend. While not all destinations feature animals, the show frequent farms, ranches, sanctuaries, and zoos.

On a visit to the Split Creek Goat Farm in South Carolina, McKinney asked before handling an egg from the hen house. She stated it was her first time doing so, then uncorked bonus facts by pressing owner Jessica Bell about the distinction in colors. Together with her audience, she listened and learned that a given breed of chicken produces eggs with the same hue as its earlobe.

While feeding the giraffes at a Columbia, South Carolina, zoo, she set the zookeeper up to relay a smattering of giraffe-tongue fun facts. At an alligator ranch, she absorbed the finer points of the reptile’s nasal sensitivity. She also represented the audience’s astonishment when she cupped her gaping face after a trained daredevil’s hand withdrew from the crocodilian’s closing jaws in the nick of time.

“What’s especially interesting about this line of work is that you need to appeal to both human audiences and non-human show participants,” she said.

For that reason, Hanna’s “calm-yet-assertive energy and delivery style” was crucial to interactive, hands-on hosting. McKinney went on to call him and his contemporaries “crystal-clear role models.”

Whether an E/I stamp followed them or not, more explorers started meeting the criteria while servicing young animal admirers. They also made the ’90s kids’ titular decade finish strong and set an encouraging tone for when the idolizers matured.

Arne, who would start college in 2001, is on the more seasoned side of her generation. As she crossed the threshold to teenhood, she singled out Hanna, Corwin, and Irwin as her top virtual teachers. In them she saw a string of guides assuring her “that there is no shame in having fun while learning.”

Good nature galore

In 1996, Animal Adventures grew far less lonely in its specialty, as PBS Kids introduced Kratts’ Creatures. The full 50-episode series premiered over that summer, then reran after school every day for a couple of years thereafter.

In contrast to the majority of an episode of its nighttime brethren, Nature, Kratts’ Creatures gave its target audience a constant, oomph-laden sense of interaction. Like Animals, Animals, Animals, it dished up scoops of cartoons, but most of the reel captured the title tandem’s travails.

The Kratts set foot on North American, Central American, Australian, and African landscapes —except for when they plunged into seascapes. At every location, they did not so much break humanity’s fourth wall into the wilderness as omit its construction.

And following the genre’s newfound “self-deprecation” motif that Critterman later spoke of, older brother Martin was the designated butt of all jokes for staged or embellished mishaps. For DeHart, who grew up in a small biological fraternity himself, that unique aspect was the weekday sundae’s cherry.

“Kratts’ Creatures mixed scientific information with brotherly hijinks,” he said. “The show had a fun way of explaining animal adaptations to kids.”

To that point, another tongue-in-cheek segment saw Martin looking out to a tundra in a director’s chair and calling, “Places, everybody!” Fudging the facts on how animals assumed and assimilated to their positions on the planet was played for easy laughs. It deliberately went against the gripping unpredictability of the natural world that made “Animal Bloopers” stand out in Maxey and McKinney’s ZooLife video stashes.

In that sense, Martin’s director bit was on the same plane as the show’s recurring “Stupid Things Not to Do with Animals” feature. Or Going Wild with Jeff Corwin’s episode-starting disclaimer with stock footage of an orangutan cautioning against animal aggravation.

“Steve (Irwin) was a force of nature. He blew all of our minds and helped us see magic in animals not considered lovable.” – Stephanie Arne

These were playful PSAs that complemented the actual interaction in the program, as the hosts reminded everyone about their requisite training. Corwin himself regularly explained what he knew and needed to remember to avoid an abrupt end to “our adventure.”

The disciples at home learned best of all that if nature obstructs the story or experience human visitors have in mind, let it.

“One of the biggest challenges in wildlife filmmaking is, of course, trying to ‘get the shot,’” McKinney says. “But something I’ve always tried to stay mindful of, that I think I’ve developed from years of watching experts like Jack Hanna and Jeff Corwin be respectful of the creatures in their segments, was that it’s not our place to make another creature uncomfortable just to get the shot.”

That principle contrasts with some problematic programming in this century. Without naming names, Maxey noted the hosts he has seen “putting animals in weird, dangerous situations” for the sake of “sensational, reality-type television.”

Fortunately in the ’90s, there was little, if any, temptation to compromise. Starting no later than the Kratts, more experts were getting more shots as cable adapted to TV’s edutainment ecosystem. Sandwiching the Kratts’ big break, a program and network bearing captivating series suitable for all ages launched with Wild Discovery and Animal Planet in 1995 and 1996, respectively.

The first month of Animal Planet saw the pilot of one of its eventual staples, Crocodile Hunter, premiere on the sister Discovery Channel. Delayed gratification from Down Under reached America, as Steve and Terri Irwin broadcast their unique honeymoon diary from 1992.

Steve Irwin, who died tragically in a September 2006 work-related accident, stood out among novel ’90s nature hosts by never residing on a designated kids’ network or block. Nonetheless, there were enough kids who craved more nature knowledge and appreciated the common threads between the Crocodile Hunter host and others. The differences jutted not as a knock on anybody else, but as something extra.

“Steve was a force of nature,” said Arne. “He blew all of our minds and helped us see magic in animals not considered lovable.

“He wasn’t intentionally goofy. He was just fascinating enough in every animal interaction to make you giggle while simultaneously teaching a tough concept or showing empathy.”

The Irwins’ show emerged in earnest through a 1997 New Year’s Day special and the full-fledged series’ inception that spring.

That fall the Disney Channel started rolling out Corwin’s first series as the first half of an hour-long Sunday-night block, Disney’s Magical World of Animals. (Going Wild preceded actor Benjamin Brown playing a fictional studio-bound sage on Omba Mokomba. The scripted call-in program relayed rounds of animal trivia.)

After a two-year stint with Disney to close the ’90s, Corwin shuffled to Animal Planet. With The Jeff Corwin Experience, his position on TV effectively matured alongside his first target demographic. Similarly, as more millennials attained late-night viewing privileges, they could see more of Hanna with Letterman.

Arne was drawn to Corwin’s sophomore series, in particular, by the host’s cultured approach to his on-the-fly narration in the field and acquired bilingual habit in Hispanophone countries. In addition, the fun side didn’t ebb. Corwin would humorously quote or otherwise reference a movie to help his viewers feel the atmosphere he was in.

“The Jeff Corwin Experience was fun because it was about discovering new things through a goofy lens,” Arne said.

The devotion to this new breed of celebrity — and, more critically, their cause — thus proved itself anything but a phase. Around, perhaps shortly before, and certainly after Y2K, there were those who were moved to join the team and make good change.

Swimming among sharks became a part of Molly McKinney’s life when she was in grade school. (Photo by Steve McCullouch)

Prompted to preserve

While the official and unofficial E/I programs did not sugarcoat the status of endangered species and habitats, young McKinney’s appetite for nature shows took her from TV-Y to TV-PG territory on National Geographic and Discovery.

There her passion poured out through tears as segment after segment addressed pollution, poaching, and deforestation. The faraway friends she had made through her favorite virtual teachers were threatened, and she could not shake that off.

“I think that was the first time my parents realized how emotionally involved and invested I was in this movement and that this would play a role in my life somehow,” she said.

Her parents were quick enough to give her a path. In so doing, they let her go from slogging her legs in local streams to immersing her head in salty international ponds.

McKinney had her first TV endeavor even before Corwin or the Kratts followed Hanna’s media footsteps. Her break came at age seven with a scuba-diving journey to a shark-crowded Bahamian locale.

Through her parents’ moral and monetary support, McKinney rose to be an executive producer during an 18-year ride on Aqua Kids. A perky program cohosted by teens for teens and younger audiences, and with the E/I stamp onscreen, Aqua Kids was in gestation when McKinney started emulating Hanna. Her parents’ approval was way ahead of the movers’ and shakers’ comfort broadcasting such boldness.

Per its Facebook page, Aqua Kids was created by the Baltimore-based George and Carol Stover, who wanted to prime the next generation for urgent conservation leadership. As the show’s profile notes, it did not become a full-fledged series right away because “It took 5 years for networks to warm up to the idea of kids swimming with sharks and crawling through swamps.”

That said, the show breathed air in 2005, and installed a revolving door of four cohosts at any given time, including DeHart for three years. When McKinney led the gang onscreen, she anchored a positively motivational intro.

“So, ready to make a difference?” her voice asked offscreen. Then she popped up and went into her best breed of Smokey Bear mode. Pointing to the viewer, she said, “Building a better planet starts with you.”

Working before and behind the camera, she established the other staple in her life. Wildlife and electronic media generally rival each other only in the sense of their importance to her career. In accordance with her Aqua Kids tone-setter, they team up more often than not. But occasionally they go solo for a given project, with her college studies being one such instance.

McKinney obtained a liberal arts education at Fredonia University, majoring in television and digital film production and “feeling like a bit of an outsider in the world of nature programming.”

Traveling for Aqua Kids and passing layovers or refueling upon reaching her destination at airport bars, McKinney learned how far her young life’s work had taken her. “I’d be looking around at all these twentysomething men and realize I had hit a point where I understood shark behavior better than my own species.”

DeHart had a comparable epiphany when a guest speaker visited his school and laid out a collection of bones. He was the only student to correctly decipher them as fragments of a camel skeleton.

Growing up in Blacksburg, Virginia, DeHart singled out African safaris and whale watching as the most captivating Animal Adventures episodes. Whether it was across the nearest ocean or along his continent’s other coast, the subjects were exotic and Hanna’s access his envy.

“Grizzlies and orcas seemed so wild to me at the time,” he said, “and still did when I was able to fulfill my dream of traveling to Alaska in my early 20s while filming with the series Aqua Kids.”

As a career breakthrough, Aqua Kids was all but destiny for DeHart. Growing up he keenly looked forward to visiting SeaWorld and Discovery Cove in Orlando after seeing Hanna swim with the dolphins.

Mind you, this was well before 2013’s Blackfish did its part to instill growing pains to nature-loving ’90s kids. But even with the revelations of careless captivity’s adverse effects, DeHart and his contemporaries stress the same benefits of zoos and related institutions that Hanna showcased to them.

“(Hanna) has been so important for the animal world and for the zoo world. He has been a great spokesperson,” said Maxey. He then acknowledged, “There are a lot of people who are anti-zoo” and allowed that “there are bad zoos, but there are also great zoos…donating millions of dollars for conservation and wild habitats, and he was a fantastic voice for that.”

“Despite the current questionable ethics of some well-known animal attractions,” added DeHart, “most places provide viewers with the opportunity to see animals that the average person is unlikely to see in the wild.”

“(Hanna) has been so important for the animal world and for the zoo world…there are bad zoos, but there are also great zoos…donating millions of dollars for conservation and wild habitats, and he was a fantastic voice for that.” – Corbin Maxey

And before upgrading his own interactions to the creatures’ domain, he made the most of his locale and built matching familiarities with his natural and societal environments. That grasp pulled him to a wildlife science major at his hometown’s signature institution.

Dating back 95 years, Virginia Tech’s College of Natural Resources and Environment touts its history “of researching and teaching critical issues involving the conservation and use of natural resources.” Although in practice, there was once more emphasis on the latter point.

DeHart saw his predecessors in the program taking an imperious approach to wildlife, whereas his generation has been inquisitive. They do not take themselves as seriously compared to nature’s constituents, much less their commitment thereto. Their upbringings via Hanna and the like moved their free thumb back to the conservation scale.

“The program used to have a higher percentage of students who had hunting and angling interests as their reason for applying,” said DeHart. “When I was a student, more of my peers cited non-consumptive recreation, zoos and aquariums, or wildlife TV programs as the reason for attending.”

DeHart was still completing his wildlife science bachelor’s when he joined Aqua Kids. Going on the small screen meant building on a slew of appearances at local schools, where he imparted his passion and proficiency as a budding wildlife documentarian. He also did videography for the show, and has since made capturing images the core of his career. His first two jobs out of college were behind the scenes at National Geographic.

As added proof Maxey has made it, notable NatGeo personnel have joined his podcast. But like Hanna himself, Maxey went straight to late night as a launching pad for a never-planned TV career. His parents had accommodated his desire to work with nature by putting up, by his count, more than 60 exotic and mostly cold-blooded creatures in a bonus room in their cabin. (“God bless them,” he said.)

That menagerie was the basis for the Cyprus Hill Reptile Rescue, a nonprofit Maxey established when he was 12. Within two years, his mother secretly entered him for a teen talent show hosted by Jay Leno. He missed the cut, but got an upgrade of a consolation prize when Leno invited him to be a guest on a full Tonight Show segment.

By the time he graduated from Boise State University — where he went with intent “to solidify myself as an expert” — Maxey added The Today Show to his repertoire, hitting the same two time-honored checklist boxes as Scardina. In between he frequented local studios for individual news segments and anchored shows of his own.

Arne took a little longer to establish her media credentials, but her second-nature tendency to share animal wisdom was self-evident at South Dakota State University. It showed in a research paper breaking down a Crest White Strips commercial that used — or, arguably, exaggerated — chameleon camouflage behavior to establish the product’s prowess.

Arne could not help but infuse natural sciences into this humanities assignment. “Although I was meant to explain my understanding of the psychology behind the advertisement,” she said, “I spent most of the article explaining how chameleons use their limited camouflage to communicate with the world around them and not actually match everything they touch.”

It was an appropriate topic for Arne to express herself with, as she hardly hid her unique expertise around campus. Beyond lecture and homework hours, while her classmates unwound over MTV, she watched reruns of Corwin and Hanna. When everyone reconvened for dinner, she relayed the fun facts with the same relatable delivery as her idols.

“I am sure I was annoying,” she recounted, “but they always laughed and said, ‘Whoa! I didn’t know that! One day you are going to be a wildlife host, too!’”

Arne insists she shrugged off that prophecy at the time. But now that she has fulfilled it she credits the “loving support system” her peers provided.

Wild Kingdom provided that payoff. After its second life (2002-2011) on Animal Planet ended, the franchise took to YouTube in 2013.

Arne enjoyed a five-year run spearheading Wild Kingdom before assuming her current spot with CuriosityStream. In between, she packaged a short reel rife with up-close underwater encounters with mammals, reptiles, and fish.

Toward the montage’s conclusion, she resurfaces from a revelatory, emotionally evocative interaction. What she once learned from the Crocodile Hunter, she has relearned and relayed to others as a Shark Angel.

“Just when you think you know the way that sharks are,” she tells the camera, “they’re looking at you. They really look at you.”

Then she proceeds to invite fellow devotees to “share your talent and knowledge and ideas” to preserve and improve the wild.

More hands holding the reins

When asked to compare and contrast today’s scope of wildlife media offerings versus that of his youth, Maxey made the most millennial statement.

“Oh man,” he said, “I wish we could go back to the ’90s.” In the present day, “everybody and their mom has a platform, which is a good thing and a bad thing.”

On the downside, Maxey says he sees would-be Jack Hannas on Instagram who “don’t own a dog or a cat.” Those scrappers are, at best, unknowingly and helplessly Hal Lindens of the social media age.

But while the amateurs consume a share of cyberspace and attention, there are enough pros making the most of the same outlets. Arne, who currently has three pitches pending for kid- or family-targeted nature shows, accentuates the present-day plus points.

“I am quite envious of the educational programming available to kiddos today,” she said. “There are nature shows by a variety of humans at many lengths and learning styles on iPads.”

She added, “I believe my understanding of the world would be 10 times better if I had what kids have access to today.”

Between the Internet and the living-room screen, Arne and Maxey’s generation is representing itself opposite the influencers who have hardly gone away.

“There’s so much amazing content out there with Jack,” Maxey marveled. Per IMDB, 46 programs credit Hanna for more than 550 combined appearances as “self” or in “archive footage.”

Animal Adventures kept churning out new episodes for Generation Z to grow up on. Hanna has since hosted and executive produced Wild Countdown and Into the Wild over the last decade-plus. And he kept showing up on news and talk shows, including The Late Show until Letterman’s retirement in 2015.

Meanwhile Maxey and the Kratt brothers alike are on Seth Meyers’ all-time guest roster. Corwin still produces and presents, most recently as the star of ABC’s Ocean Treks.

Terri Irwin, daughter Bindi, and son Robert remember Steve along with their Animal Planet audience. Crikey! It’s the Irwins is technically a reality series, but without the human-forced sensations.

The Kratts have adapted their approach to young viewers through Wild Kratts, which practically evokes their first show’s PBS contemporary The Magic School Bus. Many parents of the current program’s viewers are around the right age to remember the dawn of the E/I era and televised animal edutainment.

Self-titled “dad blogger” Michael Cusden, for one, marveled in a 2015 post at his then-five-year-old son’s knowledge of bears, sharks, and Madagascar’s fauna, as well as the youngster’s enthusiasm for the TV show’s associated online offerings. With the help of Wild Kratts, his missive continues, he is raising “a junior Jack Hanna.”

“Since the first episode of Jack Hanna’s Animal Adventures, the message is still the same. We need to take care of our natural world. The torch has been passed to my generation, and I can’t wait to see what we accomplish together.” – Clark DeHart

But Maxey cannot stress this point enough: “There will never be another Jack Hanna.”

Not that such a notion is tripping anyone up. In his closing monologue for Goodman’s 2013 Dallas-Fort Worth PBS special, Critterman Kleven stated, “Animal Edutainment to me is something that I hope will continue on even long after I’m gone. We have to find balances out there in the world for us and for animals. We need this planet to live on, can’t live here without them. So I’m continuing to, hopefully, inspire each generation as they come up, and hopefully someone will follow in my footsteps and continue to do that as well.”

In a quintessential rebuttal to the lazy, entitled, words-over-actions millennial stereotype, Hanna’s students are stampeding on their own intersecting paths. When Hanna gave the Columbus Zoo and his fan base his six-month’s notice in mid-June, Arne took to Facebook and summed up her takeaways from following him.

The statement read, in part: “It’s not an easy journey; it’s full of hard break (sic) and disappointment but the Hanna family stayed positive, optimistic, and engaging the whole way through their career as they educated the world about the importance of the natural world.”

Arne’s contemporaries are all speaking the same language, if not the same dialect, as they step into a bigger role. With an ever-expanding means of producing and disseminating content, McKinney sees one X-factor in sheer willpower.

“I think we have the best chance yet at educating, entertaining, and inspiring the next generation to put in the uncomfortable work required to create a cleaner, healthier, sustainable, and happy world for our children and those to come.”

As daunting as it may seem to replace a giant of Jungle Jack proportions, DeHart is swift to note the wealth of specialists emulating at least one aspect of Hanna’s repertoire. If one is not darting overseas, emboldening their image in popular media, or imparting information in more intimate settings, they are each doing at least one of the above.

“I’m not in front of the camera like I used to be,” he said for his part. “But I still use my experience to craft films about wildlife research and conservation.

“Since the first episode of Jack Hanna’s Animal Adventures, the message is still the same. We need to take care of our natural world. The torch has been passed to my generation, and I can’t wait to see what we accomplish together.”

Follow Al Daniel on Twitter @WriterAlDaniel