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"Monster Quest" is actually good?

Weak Kitten

Graduate Poster
Weak Kitten
Joined
Sep 1, 2010
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So I had the TV on for noise today and as usual it's on the History Chanel (don't know why, it's rarely history these days) and they are running a "Monster Quest" marathon. I wasn't really paying attention until I noticed that they weren't going with the supernatural explanation. Suddenly I found myself interested.
The first episode I caught was about some sort of long, thin, insect like creatures which can only be caught on film and not seen with the naked eye. They went on to prove that while a creature similar to this did exist in prehistoric times the photographs were nothing more than moving insects caught at a slow shutter speed. They then went on to reproduce the images multiple times together with a high speed camera that revealed what we actually causing the image.
The other shows were similar to the first. A strange creature that has been killing dogs is, as you would expect, a feral dog. A giant bird that people claim to have seen is a either a miss-identified California condor or just a trick of perspective. The show tries to give the cryptozologists some air time but mostly seems to focus on actual animal experts and solid evidence.
This was not what I was expecting at all. From the advertisements I had seen for "Monster Quest" I had assumed it was just another woo loving, scientist ignoring, attention grabber. Are there any other good shows like this that I might be missing due to poor advertisement?
 
Weak Kitten said:
From the advertisements I had seen for "Monster Quest" I had assumed it was just another woo loving, scientist ignoring, attention grabber.
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Don't let the rare skeptical moments fool you, this is a woo loving show. That said, it is more scientific than VH1's "Real and Chance: The Legend Hunters"...
 
from wiki
In a statement made March 24, 2010 on the cryptozoological blog CryptoMundo, MonsterQuest producer Doug Hajicek announced that History Channel had canceled the series mid way through 4th season. Hajicek said, "The official end of MonsterQuest did not happen because of any lack of topics or for lack of viewers. The Network has decided to go another direction to assure their future as a powerful force in television."
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MonsterQuest
 
Huh, thanks Marduk. Looks like what I'm watching is from the first season. If this is anything like most shows of this type it probably got worse as the network pressured them to make it "more exciting" and spend less time and money on research.
 
Weak Kitten said:
Huh, thanks Marduk. Looks like what I'm watching is from the first season. If this is anything like most shows of this type it probably got worse as the network pressured them to make it "more exciting" and spend less time and money on research.
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Personally, I suspect it had less to do with that and more to do with the producers being willing to be skeptical about their least favorite cryptids. Hajicek is a notorious Bigfoot proponent, after all...
 
Interesting point AMM. Personally I have trouble believing in most large cryptids. So many of them are claimed to be in places where a body really should have been found by now, or where I simply cannot believe they fit into the local ecology.

Smaller cryptids and criptids in places like backwoods China or Siberia are a totally different mater.
 
AtomicMysteryMonster said:
Personally, I suspect it had less to do with that and more to do with the producers being willing to be skeptical about their least favorite cryptids. Hajicek is a notorious Bigfoot proponent, after all...
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Dear MonsterQuest Fans,

Like many of you, I am a bit saddened by the official cancellation of MonsterQuest. However, we will continue to produce similar programming in the future as opportunities arise.

Cryptozoology will always be passion for me personally.

The official end of MonsterQuest did not happen because of any lack of topics or for lack of viewers. The Network has decided to go another direction to assure their future as a powerful force in television. We are extremely happy to have been part of the successful growth of the History Channel.

I am forever grateful to Loren Coleman and everyone at Cryptomundo. I also thank the hundreds of researchers, scientists and the courageous witnesses we had a chance to work with over the last four years.

It was an amazing run for the topic of Cryptozoology in prime time.

I am sincerely humbled by the opportunity to have created so much programming on this fascinating topic.

Sincerely,
Doug Hajicek
Producer/ Creator/ MonsterQuest
Whitewolf Entertainment Inc.
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I think it has more to do with the fact that MonsterQuest used hoaxed material like the Gable film which purported to show a half human half canine animal known as the Michigan Dogman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beast_of_Bray_Road
;)

so Hajiceks comment on "a powerful force in television" could be said to mean "by showing material that isn't faked"
:p
 
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Marduk said:
I think it has more to do with the fact that MonsterQuest used hoaxed material like the Gable film which purported to show a half human half canine animal known as the Michigan Dogman
:p
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Wow, that's just...wow. I'm from Michigan and I'd never heard of that. *sigh* And here I was thinking I had found something good, like that September 11th show that was dedicated to tearing down the "truthers".

Every so often something good does come around and reassure you that there are sane humans out there. It's just sadly a rare event.
 
It is hard to find non-woo out there. There are rare moments though. I prefer to frequent the NASA channel if I watch TV at all. Other than a few pre-historic shows, Ninja Warrior, and The Soup, I get bored easily with TV. Also, I have found Myth Busters to be decent.
 
The only MonsterQuest episode I ever watched was the one about "Giant Killer Bees", and it nearly gave me a stroke. Their "bee expert" was actually a professional exterminator who bills himself as "The Killer Bee Guy" and has a vested interest in people being afraid of any kind of honey bees so that they will call and pay a "specialist" (him) to come get rid of them. In the show he repeatedly and obviously provokes colonies to act aggressively and identifies normal honey bee defensive behavior as proof that a given colony are of the Africanized variety. The show's narration also constantly refers to Africanized bees as "giant", or "giant swarms", even though the bees themselves are very slightly smaller than normal European bees...really, it was a complete travesty from start to finish; and I'm glad the show was canceled.
 
The long, insect like creatures I think you are referring to are usually called Rods and have been so thoroughly debunked that I'm surprised they did a show on them. Well, they did the dogman after it was an admitted hoax so maybe I shouldn't be surprised.
 
Starthinker said:
The long, insect like creatures I think you are referring to are usually called Rods and have been so thoroughly debunked that I'm surprised they did a show on them.
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Keep the faith...

Roswell Rods

The evidence reveals why Rods are something "other than" insects, birds or CCD camera artifacts as commonly claimed by "insect theorists."

Looking at all we present here and turning away from the low shutter settings used by debunkers to explain away the Rods, what you get is a difinitive look into a mysterious object that cannot be explained away that easily.
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Destination truth is better. They hunt for ghosts and monsters and supposedly extinct animals that people claim they see but they never find them. What makes the show good is the search. They never find anything.

On one show they came to the conclusion that the Yeti is an ancestral memory of the Giganthropithicus ape kept alive by oral tradition going back thousands of years.
 
I haven't seen it in a while, but National Geographic's "Is It Real?" seemed to be a fairly good skeptical show, from the few episodes I've watched.
 
The problem I have with Monster Quest is that every episode is another Al Capone's Vault. But a dash of logic will tell you that, going into any episode, you already know that they are not going to make some earth-shattering discovery on the show, because if they did, you would have already heard about it. Any real, confirmed, discovery worth talking about would have been all over the news long before the episode aired. Instead we get a bunch of lunkheads walking around at night with infra-vision equipment, basically giving each other the willies every time an unseen animal in the woods makes a noise.

I had it with Destination Truth when they went to Iceland and actually tromped through a meadow at night looking for elves. Elves!
 
I do have some interest in the historic basis of some of these "creature sightings" and the reasons why people continue to believe in them. It's interesting to see what people think is evidence and how they explain away the lack of evidence that really should be there.

Sadly, many of these things seem to come down to "I swear I saw..." or "My grandfather told me that his grandfather said..." situations. Oh, and people not being willing to admit that they may have mistakenly identified something as a monster when it was just a normal animal. I know I'd be spooked and confused if I saw a bear on it's hind legs in the distance at night, or something similar.
 
Lucian said:
I haven't seen it in a while, but National Geographic's "Is It Real?" seemed to be a fairly good skeptical show, from the few episodes I've watched.
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That's the only truly skeptical program on television. It's great. The only problem is that some episodes are listed on schedule guides as part of the Naked Science series, so you really have to hunt for it. But Is It Real? is good programming. The narration is almost cynical at times, but in a very subtle way. Most episodes are crafted so as not to tip their hand too early, and thus keep fence-sitters and possibly even believers from tuning out before bringing down the hammer. I wish they would do more of these.
 
Marduk said:
I think it has more to do with the fact that MonsterQuest used hoaxed material like the Gable film which purported to show a half human half canine animal known as the Michigan Dogman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beast_of_Bray_Road
;)

so Hajiceks comment on "a powerful force in television" could be said to mean "by showing material that isn't faked"
:p
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In all fairness for the show though, they spent the first 3/4's showing how it "couldn't" be faked and had a supposed expert say definitively that it wasn't a primate, followed by the last 1/4 showing exactly how the guy faked everything and having the hoaxers debunk the footage.

This is a MUCH more powerful tool in showing people who believe in bigfoot and the like how silly some of the claims are and that they should utilise critical thinking, rather than just going over the Patterson footage again and again and again with the same old arguments.
 
Yeah, their elite scientific investigations include sending 2 girls into the desert looking beneath small rocks for giant spiders the size of dinner plates capable of eating a dog. And how many scientific programs do you know of that have scientists sporting a Mohawk hair-do?

As for their eyewitnesses and investigators, some would be better off getting treatment for substance abuse.
 
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