Desert Penguins

With so many cute, informative and well produced animal shows available to our kids on Animal Planet these days, anyone billing himself as "The Penguin Man", as Dr. Tom Keating does here, is going to need a degree from charm school as well as film school, and a bag of tricks to boot. One wishes Keating had the instinct for entertaining and comedic performance that seems to come so naturally to his subject, the endangered Humboldt penguins found in Punta San Juan, a headland along the Peruvian coast. Unfortunately, this listless video features mostly long and medium shots of distant penguins, unexciting narration, Muzak on the soundtrack, no maps, poor location sound and little or no behavioral analysis from Dr. Keating's voiceover narration. On the bright side, we are told that the program was made with the permission of the Peruvian government's "Guano Extraction Agency," which sounds like a hardship posting for out of favor officials and ex-rebels. Not recommended. Aud: E, I, P. (R. Ray)