title: Marshall McLuhan

text: McLuhan proposed that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study—popularly quoted as "the medium is the message." McLuhan's insight was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as a clear demonstration of this concept. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles, or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence." More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society—in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example—the effect of television on society would be identical. He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: In the first part of "Understanding Media", McLuhan states that different media invite different degrees of participation on the part of a person who chooses to consume a medium. Using a terminology derived from French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss' distinction between hot and cold societies, McLuhan argues that a cool medium requires increased involvement due to decreased description, while a hot medium is the opposite, decreasing involvement and increasing description. In other words, a society that appears to be actively participating in the streaming of content but not considering the effects of the tool is not allowing an "extension of ourselves." A movie is thus said to be "high definition," demanding a viewer's attention, while a comic book to be "low definition," requiring much more conscious participation by the reader to extract value: "Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than a dialogue."


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: Some media, such as movies, are "hot"—that is, they enhance one single sense, in this case vision, in such a manner that a person does not need to exert much effort to perceive a detailed moving image. Hot media usually, but not always, provide complete involvement with considerable stimulus. In contrast, "cool" print may also occupy visual space, using visual senses, but requires focus and comprehension to immerse its reader. Hot media creation favour analytical precision, quantitative analysis and sequential ordering, as they are usually sequential, linear, and logical. They emphasize one sense (for example, of sight or sound) over the others. For this reason, hot media also include film (especially silent films), radio, the lecture, and photography.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: McLuhan contrasts "hot" media with "cool"—specifically, television [of the 1960s i.e. small black-and-white screens], which he claims requires more effort on the part of the viewer to determine meaning; and comics, which, due to their minimal presentation of visual detail, require a high degree of effort to fill in details that the cartoonist may have intended to portray. Cool media are usually, but not always, those that provide little involvement with substantial stimulus. They require more active participation on the part of the user, including the perception of abstract patterning and simultaneous comprehension of all parts. Therefore, in addition to television, cool media include the seminar and cartoons. McLuhan describes the term "cool media" as emerging from jazz and popular music used, in this context, to mean "detached."


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: This concept appears to force media into binary categories. However, McLuhan's hot and cool exist on a continuum: they are more correctly measured on a scale than as dichotomous terms.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: Some theorists have attacked McLuhan's definition and treatment of the word "medium" for being too simplistic. Umberto Eco, for instance, contends that McLuhan's medium conflates channels, codes, and messages under the overarching term of the medium, confusing the vehicle, internal code, and content of a given message in his framework.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: In "Media Manifestos", Régis Debray also takes issue with McLuhan's envisioning of the medium. Like Eco, he is ill at ease with this reductionist approach, summarizing its ramifications as follows:


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: Furthermore, when "Wired" magazine interviewed him in 1995, Debray stated that he views McLuhan "more as a poet than a historian, a master of intellectual collage rather than a systematic analyst.… McLuhan overemphasizes the technology behind cultural change at the expense of the usage that the messages and codes make of that technology."


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: Dwight Macdonald, in turn, reproached McLuhan for his focus on television and for his "aphoristic" style of prose, which he believes leaves "Understanding Media" filled with "contradictions, non-sequiturs, facts that are distorted and facts that are not facts, exaggerations, and chronic rhetorical vagueness."


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: Additionally, Brian Winston's "Misunderstanding Media", published in 1986, chides McLuhan for what he sees as his technologically deterministic stances. Raymond Williams furthers this point of contention, claiming:


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: The work of McLuhan was a particular culmination of an aesthetic theory which became, negatively, a social theory ... It is an apparently sophisticated technological determinism which has the significant effect of indicating a social and cultural determinism.… For if the medium – whether print or television – is the cause, all other causes, all that men ordinarily see as history, are at once reduced to effects.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: David Carr states that there has been a long line of "academics who have made a career out of deconstructing McLuhan’s effort to define the modern media ecosystem", whether it be due to what they see as McLuhan's ignorance toward sociohistorical context or the style of his argument.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: While some critics have taken issue with McLuhan's writing style and mode of argument, McLuhan himself urged readers to think of his work as "probes" or "mosaics" offering a toolkit approach to thinking about the media. His eclectic writing style has also been praised for its postmodern sensibilities and suitability for virtual space.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: "", published in 1967, was McLuhan's best seller, "eventually selling nearly a million copies worldwide." Initiated by Quentin Fiore, McLuhan adopted the term "massage" to denote the effect each medium has on the human sensorium, taking inventory of the "effects" of numerous media in terms of how they "massage" the sensorium.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: Fiore, at the time a prominent graphic designer and communications consultant, set about composing the visual illustration of these effects which were compiled by Jerome Agel. Near the beginning of the book, Fiore adopted a pattern in which an image demonstrating a media effect was presented with a textual synopsis on the facing page. The reader experiences a repeated shifting of analytic registers—from "reading" typographic print to "scanning" photographic facsimiles—reinforcing McLuhan's overarching argument in this book: namely, that each medium produces a different "massage" or "effect" on the human sensorium.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: In "The Medium Is the Massage", McLuhan also rehashed the argument—which first appeared in the Prologue to 1962's "The Gutenberg Galaxy"—that all media are "extensions" of our human senses, bodies and minds.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: Finally, McLuhan described key points of change in how man has viewed the world and how these views were changed by the adoption of new media. "The technique of invention was the discovery of the nineteenth [century]", brought on by the adoption of fixed points of view and perspective by typography, while "[t]he technique of the suspended judgment is the discovery of the twentieth century," brought on by the bard abilities of radio, movies and television.The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backward into the future. Suburbia lives imaginatively in Bonanza-land.An audio recording version of McLuhan's famous work was made by Columbia Records. The recording consists of a pastiche of statements made by McLuhan "interrupted" by other speakers, including people speaking in various phonations and falsettos, discordant sounds and 1960s incidental music in what could be considered a deliberate attempt to translate the disconnected images seen on TV into an audio format, resulting in the prevention of a connected stream of conscious thought. Various audio recording techniques and statements are used to illustrate the relationship between spoken, literary speech and the characteristics of electronic audio media. McLuhan biographer Philip Marchand called the recording "the 1967 equivalent of a McLuhan video.""I wouldn't be seen dead with a living work of art."—'Old man' speaking


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: In "War and Peace in the Global Village", McLuhan used James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake", an inspiration for this study of war throughout history, as an indicator as to how war may be conducted in the future.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: Joyce's "Wake" is claimed to be a gigantic cryptogram which reveals a cyclic pattern for the whole history of man through its Ten Thunders. Each "thunder" below is a 100-character portmanteau of other words to create a statement he likens to an effect that each technology has on the society into which it is introduced. In order to glean the most understanding out of each, the reader must break the portmanteau into separate words (and many of these are themselves portmanteaus of words taken from multiple languages other than English) and speak them aloud for the spoken effect of each word. There is much dispute over what each portmanteau truly denotes.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: Collaborating with Canadian poet Wilfred Watson in "From Cliché to Archetype" (1970), McLuhan approaches the various implications of the verbal cliché and of the archetype. One major facet in McLuhan's overall framework introduced in this book that is seldom noticed is the provision of a new term that actually succeeds the global village: the "global theater".


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: In McLuhan's terms, a "cliché" is a "normal" action, phrase, etc. which becomes so often used that we are "anesthetized" to its effects. McLuhan provides the example of Eugène Ionesco's play "The Bald Soprano", whose dialogue consists entirely of phrases Ionesco pulled from an Assimil language book: "Ionesco originally put all these idiomatic English clichés into literary French which presented the English in the most absurd aspect possible."


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: McLuhan's "archetype" "is a quoted extension, medium, technology, or environment." "Environment" would also include the kinds of "awareness" and cognitive shifts brought upon people by it, not totally unlike the psychological context Carl Jung described.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: McLuhan also posits that there is a factor of interplay between the "cliché" and the "archetype", or a "doubleness:"


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: Another theme of the Wake ["Finnegans Wake"] that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is 'past time are pastimes.' The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the 20th century, the number of 'past times' that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist's role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of 'doubleness' or 'interplay' because this type of hendiadys dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: Pascal, in the seventeenth century, tells us that the heart has many reasons of which the head knows nothing. The Theater of the Absurd is essentially a communicating to the head of some of the silent languages of the heart which in two or three hundred years it has tried to forget all about. In the seventeenth century world the languages of the heart were pushed down into the unconscious by the dominant print cliché.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: The "languages of the heart," or what McLuhan would otherwise define as oral culture, were thus made archetype by means of the printing press, and turned into cliché.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: The satellite medium, McLuhan states, encloses the Earth in a man-made environment, which "ends 'Nature' and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed." All previous environments (book, newspaper, radio, etc.) and their artifacts are retrieved under these conditions ("past times are pastimes"). McLuhan thereby meshes this into the term "global theater". It serves as an update to his older concept of the global village, which, in its own definitions, can be said to be subsumed into the overall condition described by that of the global theater.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: In his posthumous book, "" (1989), McLuhan, collaborating with Bruce R. Powers, provides a strong conceptual framework for understanding the cultural implications of the technological advances associated with the rise of a worldwide electronic network. This is a major work of McLuhan's as it contains the most extensive elaboration of his concept of "acoustic space", and provides a critique of standard 20th-century communication models such as the Shannon–Weaver model.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: McLuhan distinguishes between the existing worldview of "visual space"—a linear, quantitative, classically geometric model—and that of "acoustic space"—a holistic, qualitative order with an intricate, paradoxical topology: "Acoustic Space has the basic character of a sphere whose focus or center is simultaneously everywhere and whose margin is nowhere." The transition from "visual" to "acoustic" "space" was not automatic with the advent of the global network, but would have to be a conscious project. The "universal environment of simultaneous electronic flow" inherently favors right-brain Acoustic Space, yet we are held back by habits of adhering to a fixed point of view. There are no boundaries to sound. We hear from all directions at once. Yet Acoustic and Visual Space are, in fact, inseparable. The resonant interval is the invisible borderline between Visual and Acoustic Space. This is like the television camera that the Apollo 8 astronauts focused on the Earth after they had orbited the moon.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: McLuhan illustrates how it feels to exist within acoustic space by quoting from the autobiography of Jacques Lusseyran, "And There Was Light." Lusseyran lost his eyesight in a violent accident as a child, and the autobiography describes how a reordering of his sensory life and perception followed:When I came upon the myth of objectivity in certain modern thinkers, it made me angry. So, there was only one world for these people, the same for everyone. And all the other worlds were to be counted as illusions left over from the past. Or why not call them by their name - hallucinations? I had learned to my cost how wrong they were.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: From my own experience I knew very well that it was enough to take from a man a memory here, an association there, to deprive him of hearing or sight, for the world to undergo immediate transformation, and for another world, entirely different, but entirely coherent, to be born. Another world? Not really. The same world, rather, but seen from a different angle, and counted in entirely new measures. When this happened all the hierarchies they called objective were turned upside down, scattered to the four winds, not even theories but like whims.Reading, writing, and hierarchical ordering are associated with the left brain and visual space, as are the linear concept of time and phonetic literacy. The left brain is the locus of analysis, classification, and rationality. The right brain and acoustic space are the locus of the spatial, tactile, and musical. ""Comprehensive awareness"" results when the two sides of the brain are in true balance. Visual Space is associated with the simplified worldview of Euclidean geometry, the intuitive three dimensions useful for the architecture of buildings and the surveying of land. It is linearly rational and has no grasp of the acoustic. Acoustic Space is multisensory.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: McLuhan writes about robotism in the context of Japanese Zen Buddhism and how it can offer us new ways of thinking about technology. The Western way of thinking about technology is too much related to the left hemisphere of our brain, which has a rational and linear focus. What he called robotism might better be called androidism in the wake of "Blade Runner" and the novels of Philip K. Dick. Robotism-androidism emerges from the further development of the right hemisphere of the brain, creativity and a new relationship to spacetime (most humans are still living in 17th-century classical Newtonian physics spacetime). Robots-androids will have much greater flexibility than humans have had until now, in both mind and body. Robots-androids will teach humanity this new flexibility. And this flexibility of androids (what McLuhan calls robotism) has a strong affinity with Japanese culture and life. McLuhan quotes from Ruth Benedict, "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword", an anthropological study of Japanese culture published in 1946:Occidentals cannot easily credit the ability of the Japanese to swing from one behavior to another without psychic cost. Such extreme possibilities are not included in our experience. Yet in Japanese life the contradictions, as they seem to us, are as deeply based in their view of life as our uniformities are in ours.The ability to live in the present and instantly readjust.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: "All Western scientific models of communication are—like the Shannon–Weaver model—linear, sequential, and logical as a reflection of the late medieval emphasis on the Greek notion of efficient causality." McLuhan and Powers criticize the Shannon-Weaver model of communication as emblematic of left-hemisphere bias and linearity, descended from a print-era perversion of Aristotle's notion of efficient causality.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: A third term of "The Global Village" that McLuhan and Powers develop at length is The Tetrad. McLuhan had begun development on the Tetrad as early as 1974. The tetrad an analogical, simultaneous, four-fold pattern of transformation. "At full maturity the tetrad reveals the metaphoric structure of the artifact as having two figures and two grounds in dynamic and analogical relationship to each other." Like the camera focused on the Earth by the Apollo 8 astronauts, the tetrad reveals figure (Moon) and ground (Earth) simultaneously. The right-brain hemisphere thinking is the capability of being in many places at the same time. Electricity is acoustic. It is simultaneously everywhere. The Tetrad, with its fourfold Möbius topological structure of enhancement, reversal, retrieval and obsolescence, is mobilized by McLuhan and Powers to illuminate the media or technological inventions of cash money, the compass, the computer, the database, the satellite, and the global media network.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: In "Laws of Media" (1988), published posthumously by his son Eric, McLuhan summarized his ideas about media in a concise tetrad of media effects. The tetrad is a means of examining the effects on society of any technology (i.e., any medium) by dividing its effects into four categories and displaying them simultaneously. McLuhan designed the tetrad as a pedagogical tool, phrasing his laws as questions with which to consider any medium:


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: The laws of the tetrad exist simultaneously, not successively or chronologically, and allow the questioner to explore the "grammar and syntax" of the "language" of media. McLuhan departs from his mentor Harold Innis in suggesting that a medium "overheats," or reverses into an opposing form, when taken to its extreme.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: Visually, a tetrad can be depicted as four diamonds forming an X, with the name of a medium in the centre. The two diamonds on the left of a tetrad are the "Enhancement" and "Retrieval" qualities of the medium, both "Figure" qualities. The two diamonds on the right of a tetrad are the "Obsolescence" and "Reversal" qualities, both "Ground" qualities.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: McLuhan adapted the Gestalt psychology idea of a "figure and a ground", which underpins the meaning of "the medium is the message." He used this concept to explain how a form of communications technology, the medium, or "figure", necessarily operates through its context, or "ground".


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: McLuhan believed that in order to grasp fully the effect of a new technology, one must examine figure (medium) and ground (context) together, since neither is completely intelligible without the other. McLuhan argued that we must study media in their historical context, particularly in relation to the technologies that preceded them. The present environment, itself made up of the effects of previous technologies, gives rise to new technologies, which, in their turn, further affect society and individuals.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: All technologies have embedded within them their own assumptions about time and space. The message which the medium conveys can only be understood if the medium and the environment in which the medium is used—and which, simultaneously, it effectively creates—are analysed together. He believed that an examination of the figure-ground relationship can offer a critical commentary on culture and society.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: In McLuhan's (and Harley Parker's) work, electric media have an affinity with haptic and hearing perception, while mechanical media have an affinity with visual perception. This opposition between optic and haptic had been previously formulated by art historians Alois Riegl (in his 1901 "Late Roman art industry") and then Erwin Panofsky (in his 1927 "Perspective as Symbolic Form").


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: Also Walter Benjamin, in his "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), observed how, in the scenario of perceptions of modern Western culture, from about the 19th century a shift began from the optic towards the haptic. This shift is one of the main recurring topics in McLuhan work, which McLuhan attributes to the advent of the electronic era.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: After the publication of "Understanding Media", McLuhan received an astonishing amount of publicity, making him perhaps the most publicized English teacher in the twentieth century and arguably the most controversial. This publicity began with the work of two California advertising executives, Howard Gossage and Gerald Feigen who used personal funds to fund their practice of "genius scouting". Much enamoured with McLuhan's work, Feigen and Gossage arranged for McLuhan to meet with editors of several major New York magazines in May 1965 at the Lombardy Hotel in New York. Philip Marchand reports that, as a direct consequence of these meetings, McLuhan was offered the use of an office in the headquarters of both "Time" and "Newsweek", any time he needed it.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: In August 1965, Feigen and Gossage held what they called a "McLuhan festival" in the offices of Gossage's advertising agency in San Francisco. During this "festival", McLuhan met with advertising executives, members of the mayor's office, and editors from the "San Francisco Chronicle" and "Ramparts" magazine. More significant was the presence at the festival of Tom Wolfe, who wrote about McLuhan in a subsequent article, "What If He Is Right?", published in "New York" magazine and Wolfe's own "The Pump House Gang". According to Feigen and Gossage, their work had only a moderate effect on McLuhan's eventual celebrity: they claimed that their work only "probably speeded up the recognition of [McLuhan's] genius by about six months." In any case, McLuhan soon became a fixture of media discourse. "Newsweek" magazine did a cover story on him; articles appeared in "Life", "Harper's", "Fortune", "Esquire", and others. Cartoons about him appeared in "The New Yorker". In 1969, "Playboy" magazine published a lengthy interview with him. In a running gag on the popular sketch comedy "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In", the "poet" Henry Gibson would randomly say, "Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin'?"


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: McLuhan was credited with coining the phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out" by its popularizer, Timothy Leary, in the 1960s. In a 1988 interview with Neil Strauss, Leary stated that the slogan was "given to him" by McLuhan during a lunch in New York City. Leary said McLuhan "was very much interested in ideas and marketing, and he started singing something like, 'Psychedelics hit the spot / Five hundred micrograms, that’s a lot,' to the tune of a Pepsi commercial. Then he started going, 'Tune in, turn on, and drop out.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: During his lifetime and afterward, McLuhan heavily influenced cultural critics, thinkers, and media theorists such as Neil Postman, Jean Baudrillard, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, William Irwin Thompson, Paul Levinson, Douglas Rushkoff, Jaron Lanier, Hugh Kenner, and John David Ebert, as well as political leaders such as Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Jerry Brown. Andy Warhol was paraphrasing McLuhan with his now famous "15 minutes of fame" quote. When asked in the 1970s for a way to sedate violences in Angola, he suggested a massive spread of TV devices. Douglas Coupland, argued that McLuhan "was conservative, socially, but he never let politics enter his writing or his teaching".


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: The character "Brian O'Blivion" in David Cronenberg's 1983 film "Videodrome" is a "media oracle" based on McLuhan.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: In 1991, McLuhan was named as the "patron saint" of "Wired" magazine and a quote of his appeared on the masthead for the first ten years of its publication.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: He is mentioned by name in a Peter Gabriel–penned lyric in the song "Broadway Melody of 1974". This song appears on the concept album "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway", from progressive rock band Genesis. The lyric is: "Marshall McLuhan, casual viewin' head buried in the sand."


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: Despite his death in 1980, someone claiming to be McLuhan was posting on a "Wired" mailing list in 1996. The information this individual provided convinced one writer for "Wired" that "if the poster was not McLuhan himself, it was a bot programmed with an eerie command of McLuhan's life and inimitable perspective."


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: McLuhan is the subject of the 1993 play "The Medium", the first major work from the influential Saratoga International Theater Institute and director Anne Bogart. The play was revived by SITI Company for a farewell tour in 2022.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: A new centre known as the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, formed soon after his death in 1980, was the successor to McLuhan's Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. Since 1994, it has been part of the University of Toronto Faculty of Information. In 2008, the centre incorporated in the Coach House Institute, which was subsequently renamed The McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology. In 2011, at the time of his centenary, the centre established a "Marshall McLuhan Centenary Fellowship" program in his honour, and each year appoints up to four fellows for a maximum of two years.


title: Marshall McLuhan

text: The media room at Canada House in Berlin is called the Marshall McLuhan Salon. It includes a multimedia information centre and an auditorium, and hosts a permanent exhibition dedicated to McLuhan, based on its collection of film and audio items by and about him.


title: What Women Want

text: What Women Want is a 2000 American romantic fantasy comedy film written by Josh Goldsmith, Cathy Yuspa, and Diane Drake, directed by Nancy Meyers, and starring Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt.


title: What Women Want

text: The film earned mixed reviews from critics but was a box office success, with a North American domestic gross of $182 million and a worldwide gross of $374 million against a budget of $70 million.


title: What Women Want

text: Nick Marshall, a Chicago advertising executive, was raised by his Las Vegas showgirl mother. Nick is a chauvinist skilled at selling products to men and seducing women. He expects to get a promotion at the advertising firm Sloane Curtis, but his manager Dan instead announces that he is hiring Darcy Maguire to broaden the firm's appeal to women. Meanwhile, Nick's estranged 15-year-old daughter Alex is staying with him while his former wife Gigi is on her honeymoon with her new husband Ted. Nick embarrasses Alex, who resents his over-protectiveness when he meets her boyfriend Cameron, who is 18 years old.


title: What Women Want

text: Darcy tasks the staff, including Nick, to develop advertising ideas for a series of feminine products she distributes at the staff meeting. While testing a few items at home, Nick falls into his bathtub while holding an electric hairdryer, shocking himself, and is knocked unconscious. The next morning, Nick awakens to discover he has a new gift: he can hear women's thoughts. He has an epiphany, realizing that most women, especially at work, dislike him and consider him sleazy. He makes an impromptu visit to his former therapist, Dr. Perkins (who also disliked him), and she encourages him to use his newfound ability to his advantage.


title: What Women Want

text: Nick telepathically eavesdrops on Darcy and purloins her ideas to use as his own, but gradually becomes attracted to her. Alex resents Nick's years of neglect, but they start to bond while he takes her shopping for a prom dress. After Nick telepathically finds out that Alex intends to sleep with Cameron the night of the prom, Nick attempts to give her some advice. He tells her Cameron is not interested in her for who she is, just for what he can do with her in bed. Alex, thinking Nick is being over-protective and trying to sabotage her prom, rejects his advice.


title: What Women Want

text: Nick and Darcy spend more time together, becoming romantic. However, he steals Darcy's idea for a new Nike ad campaign aimed at women, though he later regrets his actions, especially as it leads to Dan firing Darcy. Nick persuades Dan to rehire Darcy, saying the ad was her idea and is eventually successful.


title: What Women Want

text: Over time, Nick succeeds in repairing his relationships with female acquaintances, especially those at work. Nick loses his gift during a severe thunder and lightning storm while on his way to see the company secretary, Erin, who has been contemplating suicide. He offers her a position for which he had previously turned her down; she accepts. When Cameron dumps Alex at the prom for refusing to have sex, Nick finds and consoles her, cementing their newly-repaired relationship. Nick visits Darcy and explains everything. She fires him, but then forgives him, and they share a kiss.


title: What Women Want

text: "What Women Want" made $33.6 million during its opening weekend. The film topped the box office upon opening, dethroning "How the Grinch Stole Christmas". Additionally, it had the highest December opening weekend of all time, surpassing "Scream 2". This record would last until 2001 when "Ocean's Eleven" took it. For its second weekend, "What Women Want" was overtaken by Helen Hunt's other film "Cast Away". It went on to make $182.8 million domestically and $374.1 million worldwide.


title: What Women Want

text: Rotten Tomatoes gave the film an approval rating of 54% based on 122 reviews, with an average rating of 5.7/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Even though Gibson is a good sport in his role, "What Women Want" is a rather conventional, fluffy comedy-romance that doesn't make good use of its premise." On Metacritic the film has a score of 47 out of 100, based on 33 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". On CinemaScore, audiences gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.


title: What Women Want

text: In a lukewarm review, Kimberley Jones of "The Austin Chronicle" praised Gibson's performance and likened parts of the film to classic screwball comedies, but felt the ending became a "dull, drawn-out morality play". Roger Ebert wrote the movie "doesn't flow so much as leap from one good scene to another over the crevices of flat scenes in between ... it's not boring and is often very funny". Stephanie Zacharek of


title: What Women Want

text: "Salon.com" was critical: "Although "What Women Want" is being marketed toward women, it does nothing but condescend to them."


title: What Women Want

text: For his portrayal of Nick Marshall, Gibson was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy and a Blockbuster Entertainment Award for Favorite Actor—Comedy/Romance. Hunt won the latter award in the Favorite Actress—Comedy/Romance category, while Mark Feuerstein and Marisa Tomei each received a nomination in the supporting categories. It also garnered Tomei a nod for the Satellite Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture, while Ashley Johnson was nominated at the Young Artist Awards.


title: What Women Want

text: For his score, composer Alan Silvestri won the ASCAP Award for Top Box Office Films, it received a Saturn Award nomination for "Best Fantasy Film" from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, US. The film also won the Bogey Award in Platin from the Bogey Awards, Germany. It was also nominated for the Best Casting for Feature Film, Comedy from the Casting Society of America, US. It received the Golden Screen Award in Germany.


title: What Women Want

text: In 2009, the website Pajiba published an article reporting that producer and scriptwriter Peter Chiarelli was working on a sequel, which would re-imagine the concept from the viewpoint of a woman who could hear men's thoughts. Cameron Diaz was courted to star as its lead. The film was released in 2019 as "What Men Want" with Taraji P. Henson in the lead role.


title: What Women Want

text: "Aga Bai Arrecha!" in 2004 is a Marathi film directed by Kedar Shinde from India that is loosely based on "What Women Want".


title: Boa constrictor

text: The boa constrictor (scientific name also Boa constrictor), also called the red-tailed boa, is a species of large, non-venomous, heavy-bodied snake that is frequently kept and bred in captivity. The boa constrictor is a member of the family Boidae, found in tropical South America, as well as some islands in the Caribbean. A staple of private collections and public displays, its color pattern is highly variable yet distinctive. Four subspecies are currently recognized. This article focuses on the species "Boa constrictor" as a whole, and on the nominate subspecies "B. c. constrictor".


title: Boa constrictor

text: Though all boids are constrictors, only this species is properly referred to as a "boa constrictor"—a rare instance of an animal having the same common English name and scientific binomial name.


title: Boa constrictor

text: All subspecies are referred to as "boa constrictors", and are part of a diverse group of New World boas referred to as "red-tailed" boas, comprising species of both Boa constrictor and Boa imperator. Within the exotic pet trade, it is also known as a "BCC", an abbreviation of its scientific name, to distinguish it from other boa species, such as "Boa imperator" or "BCI."


title: Boa constrictor

text: Other common names include "chij-chan" (Mayan), "jiboia" (Latin American), and "macajuel" (Trinidadian).


title: Boa constrictor

text: Several subspecies of "Boa constrictor" have been described, but many of these are poorly differentiated, and further research may redefine many of them. Some appear to be based more on location, rather than biological differences. "Boa imperator", "Boa nebulosa" and "Boa sigma" have been elevated to full species status.


title: Boa constrictor

text: Several other subspecies have been described at different times, but currently, these are no longer considered to be subspecies by many herpetologists and taxonomists. They include:


title: Boa constrictor

text: The boa constrictor is a large snake, although it is only modestly sized in comparison to other large snakes, such as the reticulated python, Burmese python, or the occasionally sympatric green anaconda, and can reach lengths from depending on the locality and the availability of suitable prey. Clear sexual dimorphism is seen in the species, with females generally being larger in both length and girth than males. The usual size of mature female boas is between whereas males are between . Females commonly exceed , particularly in captivity, where lengths up to or even can be seen. The largest documented non-stretched dry skin is deposited at Zoologische Staatssammlung München (ZSM 4961/2012) and measures 14.6 ft (4.45 m) without head. A report of a boa constrictor growing up to was later found to be a misidentified green anaconda.


title: Boa constrictor

text: The boa constrictor is a heavy-bodied snake, and large specimens can weigh up to . Females, the larger sex, more commonly weigh . Some specimens of this species can reach or possibly exceed , although this is not usual.


title: Boa constrictor

text: The size and weight of a boa constrictor depends on subspecies, locale, and the availability of suitable prey. "B. c. constrictor" reaches, and occasionally tops, the averages given above, as it is one of the relatively large subspecies of "Boa constrictor".


title: Boa constrictor

text: Other examples of sexual dimorphism in the species include males generally having longer tails to contain the hemipenes and also longer pelvic spurs, which are used to grip and stimulate the female during copulation. Pelvic spurs are the only external sign of the rudimentary hind legs and pelvis and are seen in all boas and pythons.


title: Boa constrictor

text: The coloring of boa constrictors can vary greatly depending on the locality. However, they are generally a brown, gray, or cream base color, patterned with brown or reddish-brown "saddles" that become more pronounced towards the tail. This coloring gives "B. constrictor" species the common name of "red-tailed boas." The coloring works as a very effective camouflage in the jungles and forests of its natural range.


title: Boa constrictor

text: Some individuals exhibit pigmentary disorders, such as albinism. Although these individuals are rare in the wild, they are common in captivity, where they are often selectively bred to make a variety of different color "morphs". Boa constrictors have an arrow-shaped head with very distinctive stripes on it: One runs dorsally from the snout to the back of the head; the others run from the snout to the eyes and then from the eyes to the jaw.


title: Boa constrictor

text: Boa constrictors can sense heat via cells in their lips, though they lack the labial pits surrounding these receptors seen in many members of the family Boidae. Boa constrictors also have two lungs, a smaller (non-functional) left and an enlarged (functional) right lung to better fit their elongated shape, unlike many colubrid snakes, which have completely lost the left lung.


title: Boa constrictor

text: Depending on the subspecies, "Boa constrictor" can be found through South America north of 35°S (Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Argentina), and many other islands along the coasts of South America. An introduced population exists in extreme southern Florida, and a small population on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands now appears to be reproducing in the wild.


title: Boa constrictor

text: "B. constrictor" flourishes in a wide variety of environmental conditions, from tropical rainforests to arid semidesert country. However, it prefers to live in rainforest due to the humidity and temperature, natural cover from predators, and vast amount of potential prey. It is commonly found in or along rivers and streams, as it is a very capable swimmer. Boa constrictors also occupy the burrows of medium-sized mammals, where they can hide from potential predators.


title: Boa constrictor

text: Boa constrictors generally live on their own and do not interact with any other snakes unless they want to mate. They are nocturnal, but they may bask during the day when night-time temperatures are too low. As semi-arboreal snakes, young boa constrictors may climb into trees and shrubs to forage; however, they become mostly terrestrial as they become older and heavier. Boa constrictors strike when they perceive a threat. Their bite can be painful, especially from large snakes, but is rarely dangerous to humans. Specimens from Central America are more irascible, hissing loudly and striking repeatedly when disturbed, while those from South America tame down more readily. Like all snakes, boa constrictors in a shed cycle are more unpredictable, because the substance that lubricates between the old skin and the new makes their eyes appear milky, blue, or opaque so that the snake cannot see very well, causing it to be more defensive than it might otherwise be.


title: Boa constrictor

text: Their prey includes a wide variety of small to medium-sized mammals and birds. The bulk of their diet consists of rodents, but larger lizards and mammals as big as monkeys, wild pigs and ocelots are also reported to have been consumed. Young boa constrictors eat small mice, birds, bats, lizards, and amphibians. The size of the prey item increases as they get older and larger.


title: Boa constrictor

text: Boa constrictors are ambush predators, so they often lie in wait for an appropriate prey to come along, then they attack a moment before the prey can escape. However, they have also been known to actively hunt, particularly in regions with a low concentration of suitable prey, and this behavior generally occurs at night. The boa first strikes at the prey, grabbing it with its teeth; it then proceeds to constrict the prey until death before consuming it whole. Unconsciousness and death likely result from shutting off vital blood flow to the heart and brain, rather than suffocation as was previously believed; constriction can interfere with blood flow and overwhelm the prey's usual blood pressure and circulation. This would lead to unconsciousness and death very quickly. Their teeth also help force the animal down the throat while muscles then move it toward the stomach. It takes the snake about 4–6 days to fully digest the food, depending on the size of the prey and the local temperature. After this, the snake may not eat for a week to several months, due to its slow metabolism.


title: Boa constrictor

text: Boa constrictors are viviparous, giving birth to live young. They generally breed in the dry season—between April and August—and are polygynous; thus, males may mate with multiple females. Half of all females breed in a given year, and a larger percentage of males actively attempt to locate a mate. Due to their polygynous nature, many of these males will be unsuccessful. As such, female boas in inadequate physical condition are unlikely to attempt to mate, or to produce viable young if they do mate. Reproduction in boas is almost exclusively sexual. In 2010, a boa constrictor was shown to have reproduced asexually via parthenogenesis. The Colombian rainbow boa ("Epicrates maurus") was found to reproduce by facultative parthenogenesis resulting in production of WW female progeny. The WW females were likely produced by terminal automixis (see Figure), a type of parthenogenesis in which two terminal haploid products of meiosis fuse to form a zygote, which then develops into a daughter progeny. This is only the third genetically confirmed case of consecutive virgin births of viable offspring from a single female within any vertebrate lineage. In 2017, boa constrictors, along with "Boa imperators" and Burmese pythons, were found to contain a new set of sex determining chromosomes. Males were discovered to contain a pair of XY sex determining chromosomes, while females have a XX pair. This is the first time snakes were thought to contain male heterogamety, and since then has been found in ball pythons ("Python regius") as well.


title: Boa constrictor

text: During the breeding season, the female boa emits pheromones from her cloaca to attract males, which may then wrestle to select one to breed with her. During breeding, the male curls his tail around the female's and the hemipenes (or male reproductive organs) are inserted. Copulation can last from a few minutes to several hours and may occur several times over a period of a few weeks. After this period, ovulation may not occur immediately, but the female can hold the sperm inside her for up to one year. When the female ovulates, a midbody swell can be noticed that appears similar to the snake having eaten a large meal. The female then sheds two to three weeks after ovulation, in what is known as a post-ovulation shed which lasts another 2–3 weeks, which is longer than a normal shed. The gestation period, which is counted from the postovulation shed, is around 100–120 days. The female then gives birth to young that average in length. The litter size varies between females but can be between 10 and 65 young, with an average of 25, although some of the young may be stillborn or unfertilized eggs known as "slugs". The young are independent at birth and grow rapidly for the first few years, shedding regularly (once every one to two months). At 3–4 years, boa constrictors become sexually mature and reach the adult size of , although they continue to grow at a slow rate for the rest of their lives. At this point, they shed less frequently, about every 2–4 months.


title: Boa constrictor

text: This species does well in captivity, usually becoming quite tame. It is a common sight in both zoos and private reptile collections. Though still exported from their native South America in significant numbers, they are widely bred in captivity. When kept in captivity, they are fed mice, rats, rabbits, chickens, and chicks depending on the size and age of the individual. Captive life expectancy is 20 to 30 years, with rare accounts over 40 years, making them a long-term commitment as a pet. The greatest reliable age recorded for a boa constrictor in captivity is 40 years, 3 months, and 14 days. This boa constrictor was named Popeye and died in the Philadelphia Zoo, Pennsylvania, on April 15, 1977. Proper animal husbandry is the most significant factor in captive lifespan; this includes providing adequate space, correct temperatures and humidity, and suitable food items.


title: Boa constrictor

text: Boa constrictors are very popular within the exotic pet trade and have been both captured in the wild and bred in captivity. Today, most captive boa constrictors are captive-bred, but between 1977 and 1983, 113,000 live boa constrictors were imported into the United States. These huge numbers of wild-caught snakes have put considerable pressure on some wild populations. Boa constrictors have also been hunted for their meat and skins, and are a common sight at markets within their geographic range. After the reticulated python, boa constrictors are the snake most commonly killed for snakeskin products, such as shoes, bags, and other items of clothing. In some areas, they have an important role in regulating the opossum populations, preventing the potential transmission of leishmaniasis to humans. In other areas, they are often let loose within the communities to control the rodent populations.


title: Boa constrictor

text: All boa constrictors fall under CITES and are listed under CITES Appendix II, except "B. c. occidentalis", which is listed in CITES Appendix I.


title: Boa constrictor

text: In some regions, boa constrictor numbers have been severely hit by predation from humans and other animals and over-collection for the exotic pet and snakeskin trades. Most populations, though, are not under threat of immediate extinction; thus, they are within Appendix II rather than Appendix I.


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: The Rescuers Down Under is a 1990 American animated adventure film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and released by Walt Disney Pictures. The 29th Disney animated feature film and the second movie to be produced during the Disney Renaissance, it is the sequel to the 1977 film "The Rescuers", which was based on the novels by Margery Sharp. In "The Rescuers Down Under", Bernard and Bianca travel to the Australian Outback to save a boy named Cody from a villainous poacher who wants to capture an endangered bird of prey for money. Directed by Hendel Butoy and Mike Gabriel (in their feature directorial debuts) from a screenplay by Jim Cox, Karey Kirkpatrick, Byron Simpson, and Joe Ranft, the film features the voices of Bob Newhart, Eva Gabor (in her final film role), John Candy, and George C. Scott.


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: By the mid-1980s, "The Rescuers" had become one of Disney's most successful animated releases. Under the new management of Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, a feature-length sequel was approved, making it the first animated film sequel theatrically released by the studio. Following their duties on "Oliver & Company" (1988), animators Butoy and Gabriel were recruited to direct the sequel. Research trips to Australia provided inspiration for the background designs. The film would also mark the full use of the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS), becoming the first feature film to be completely created digitally. The software allowed for artists to digitally ink-and-paint the animators' drawings, and then composite the digital cels over the scanned background art.


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: "The Rescuers Down Under" was released to theaters on November 16, 1990, to positive reviews from film critics. However, it struggled at the box office, as it opened on the same day as "Home Alone" (which also features John Candy). The film went on to garner $47.4 million worldwide.


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: In the Australian Outback, a young boy named Cody rescues and befriends a rare golden eagle called Marahute, who shows him her nest and eggs and gives him one of her feathers. Later on, he falls into an animal trap set by Percival C. McLeach, a local poacher wanted by the Australian Rangers. McLeach has killed Marahute's mate; realizing Cody has Marahute's feather and must know her location, McLeach kidnaps the boy and throws his backpack to a float of crocodiles. The Rangers find it, and believe that Cody has been eaten.


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: The mouse who was the bait in the trap hurries to an outpost, from which a telegram is sent to the Rescue Aid Society headquarters in the United Nations, New York City. Bernard and Miss Bianca, the RAS' elite field agents, are assigned to the mission, interrupting Bernard's attempts to propose marriage to Bianca. They go to find Orville the albatross, who aided them before, and meet his brother Wilbur, who flies them to Australia. There, they meet Jake, a hopping mouse who is the RAS' local regional operative. Jake becomes infatuated with Bianca and flirts with her, much to Bernard's dismay. He serves as their "tour guide" and protector in search of the boy. Wilbur accidentally bends his spinal column out of shape trying to help them, so Jake sends him to the hospital (an old ambulance). Wilbur refuses to undergo surgery, but his back is straightened as he fights to escape the medical mice. He flies off in search of his friends.


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: At McLeach's hideout, Cody is imprisoned with a number of captured animals after refusing to divulge Marahute's whereabouts. Cody attempts to free himself and the animals, but is thwarted by Joanna, McLeach's pet goanna. Realizing that protecting Marahute's eggs is Cody's weak spot, McLeach tricks Cody into thinking someone else killed Marahute and releases him, knowing that Cody will go to her nest. Bernard, Bianca, and Jake arrive as McLeach departs in his halftrack after Cody. The three hitch a ride on the vehicle and warn Cody upon arriving at the nest, but McLeach captures Cody, Marahute, Jake and Bianca. McLeach then sends Joanna to eat Marahute's eggs, but Bernard manages to trick her using egg-shaped stones. Wilbur arrives at the nest, and Bernard leaves Wilbur to sit on the real eggs while Bernard goes after McLeach.


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: McLeach takes his captives to Crocodile Falls, a huge waterfall at the end of the river he threw Cody's backpack into. He ties Cody up and hangs him over the float of crocodiles, intent on feeding Cody to them to eliminate him as a witness. Bernard, riding a wild razorback pig he tamed using a horse whispering technique he learned from Jake, arrives and disables McLeach's vehicle before he can succeed. McLeach then attempts to shoot the rope holding Cody above the water, but Bernard tricks Joanna into crashing into McLeach, sending both of them into the water. The crocodiles turn their attention to McLeach and Joanna; behind them, Cody falls into the water as the damaged rope breaks. As Joanna flees to the bank, McLeach fends off and taunts the crocodiles, forgetting about the waterfall until it is too late. He tries to swim to shore, but is washed over the edge to his death. Bernard dives into the water and holds Cody long enough for Jake and Bianca to free Marahute, allowing the eagle to save Cody and Bernard just as they go over the waterfall.


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: Bernard, desperate to prevent any further interruptions, proposes to Bianca; she immediately accepts, while Jake salutes him with new-found respect. Safe at last, the group departs for Cody's home. Meanwhile, Wilbur is still sitting on Marahute's eggs; they hatch, and one of the eaglets bites him, to his dismay.


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: "The Rescuers Down Under" features three characters from the first film; Bernard, Bianca and the Chairmouse, all of whom feature the same actors reprising their roles from the original 1977 film.


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: By 1984, "The Rescuers" had become one of Disney's most successful recent animated films, earning $41 million in worldwide box office rentals. Under the new studio management of then-CEO Michael Eisner and studio chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, it was decided that a feature-length sequel should be produced. Shortly after, the success of "Crocodile Dundee" (1986) had enhanced the appeal of Australian culture to a mainstream American audience. The new sequel would be set in Australia, for which writing began in 1986.


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: When "Oliver & Company" (1988) was nearly complete, Peter Schneider, then-president of Walt Disney Feature Animation, asked supervising animator Mike Gabriel if he would consider directing. At the time, Gabriel declined the offer, stating, "Well, after watching George [Scribner], it doesn't look like it would be much fun." A few months later, Schneider called Gabriel into his office, and asked him if he would direct "The Rescuers Down Under", to which Gabriel accepted. After animating the character Tito on "Oliver & Company", which was met with praise from general audiences, Hendel Butoy was added as the film's co-director. Meanwhile, Schneider recruited Thomas Schumacher, who had worked at the Mark Taper Forum, to serve as producer on the film.


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: As the film's producer, Schumacher selected storyboard artist Joe Ranft to serve as story supervisor, believing he had the "ability to change and transform through excellence of idea". Throughout the storyboarding process, Ranft constantly bolstered the creative morale of his crew, but he rarely drew storyboard sequences himself. Ranft also had creative disagreements with the studio's management and marketing executives, including one where he and the story team advocated for an Aboriginal Australian child actor to voice Cody. According to storyboard artist Brenda Chapman, Katzenberg overrode this idea, casting "a little white blonde kid" and giving Cody a matching design.


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: Because of the rising popularity of Australian-themed action films, and with Americans becoming more environmentally conscious, the filmmakers decided to abandon the musical format from the original film. They had decided that the placement of songs would slow down the pacing for the new film. Instead, they decided to market it as the studio's first action-adventure film, with Butoy and Gabriel taking inspiration from live-action films by Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, and David Lean. It would also be the studio's first animated film since "Bambi" (1942) to have an animal rights and environmental message. In December 1988, original cast members Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor were confirmed to be reprising their roles. However, Jim Jordan, who had voiced Orville in the original film, died earlier that same year in April following a fall at his home. In acknowledgment of Jordan's death, Roy E. Disney suggested that the character of Wilbur be written as Orville's brother, to serve as his replacement. Intentionally, the names were in reference to the Wright brothers.


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: Members of the production team, including art director Maurice Hunt and six of his animators, spent several days in Australia to study settings and animals found in the Australian Outback to observe, take photographs, and draw sketches to properly illustrate the Outback on film. They ventured through the Uluru, Katherine Gorge, and the Kakadu national parks, the inspiration for Hunt's initial designs emphasizing the spectrum of scale between the sweeping vistas and the film's protagonists.


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: Serving as the supervising animator on the eagle character Marahute, Glen Keane studied six eagles residing at the Peregrine Fund in Boise, Idaho, as well as a stuffed American eagle loaned from the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History and an eagle skeleton. To animate the eagle, Keane and his animation crew enlarged the bird, shrank its head, elongated its neck and wings, and puffed out its chest. Additionally, Keane had to slow the bird's wing movements to about 25–30 percent of an eagle's flight speed. Because of the excessive details on Marahute, who carried 200 feathers, the character appeared for only seven minutes altogether, during the opening and ending sequences.


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: Furthermore, in order to have the film finished on time, Schumacher enlisted the support of Disney-MGM Studios, which was originally envisioned to produce independent cartoon shorts and featurettes. On their first assignment on a Disney animated feature film, 70 artists contributed ten minutes of screen time, including supervising animator Mark Henn. As one of the film's ten supervising animators, Henn animated several scenes of Bernard, Miss Bianca, and Percival C. McLeach. For the mice characters, Henn studied the mannerisms of Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor during voice recording sessions, and looked to George C. Scott's performance in "Dr. Strangelove" (1964) for inspiration while animating McLeach. To create believable realism for the Australian animals, additional animators traveled to the San Diego Zoo to observe kangaroos, kookaburras, and snakes, while an iguana from Walt Disney World's Discovery Island was brought into the studio for the animators drawing Joanna.


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: "The Rescuers Down Under" is notable for Disney as its first traditionally animated film using only the new computerized CAPS process. CAPS (Computer Animation Production System) was a computer-based production system used for digital ink and paint and compositing, allowing for more efficient and sophisticated post-production of the Disney animated films and making the traditional practice of hand-painting cels obsolete. The animators' drawings and the background paintings were scanned into computer systems instead, where the animation drawings were inked and painted by digital artists. The drawings were later composited with the scanned backgrounds in software to allow for digital compositing like camera positioning, camera movements, multiplane effects, and other camera techniques. Those digital files would then be recorded onto film stock.


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: The film also uses CGI elements throughout, such as the field of flowers in the opening sequence, McLeach's truck, and perspective shots of Wilbur flying above Sydney Opera House and New York City. The CAPS project was the first of Disney's collaborations with computer graphics company Pixar, which would eventually become a feature animation production studio making computer-generated animated films for Disney before being acquired in 2006. As a result, "The Rescuers Down Under" was the first animated film for which the entire final film elements were assembled and completed within a digital environment, as well as the first fully digital feature film. However, the film's marketing approach did not call attention to the use of the CAPS process.


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: The score for the film was composed and conducted by Bruce Broughton. Unlike the vast majority of Disney animated features, the film had no songs written for it (although "Message Montage" includes a quotation from "Rescue Aid Society" by Sammy Fain, Carol Connors, and Ayn Robbins, the only musical reference to the first film). This was the second Disney film not to include any songs, the first one being "The Black Cauldron".


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: The score received positive critical reception, with critics singling out "Cody's Flight" for its sense of majesty, excitement, and freedom. AllMusic gave the soundtrack 4.5 out of 5 stars.


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: In 2002, Walt Disney Records reissued the album on compact disc, including the Shelby Flint songs "The Journey", "Someone's Waiting for You" and "Tomorrow Is Another Day" (from "The Rescuers"). In 2016 Intrada Records released the complete Broughton score, including material (in italics) not used in the movie.


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: During the film's theatrical release, the film was released as a double feature with the new Mickey Mouse featurette "The Prince and the Pauper".


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: "The Rescuers Down Under" was released in the Walt Disney Classics video series on September 20, 1991, in a pan-and-scan transfer, while "The Rescuers" was released on VHS almost a year later on September 18, 1992. Unlike the original film, however, "The Rescuers Down Under" was not included in the Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection line. Both home video releases went into moratorium on April 30, 1993. In its original release, the VHS edition sold 5.2 million units in the United States, generating $72.8 million in revenue.


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: Launching in January 2000, Walt Disney Home Video began the Gold Classic Collection, with "The Rescuers Down Under" re-issued on VHS and DVD on August 1, 2000. The DVD contained the film in its 1.66:1 aspect ratio enhanced for television sets and 4.0 surround sound, and was accompanied with special features, including a storybook and trivia as well as an "Animals of the Outback" activity booklet.


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: "The Rescuers Down Under" was released alongside "The Rescuers" on Blu-ray in a "2-Movie Collection" on August 21, 2012, to commemorate the first film's 35th anniversary in the United States.


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: During its opening weekend, "The Rescuers Down Under" grossed $3.5 million, ranking fourth, after "Home Alone", "Rocky V", and "Child's Play 2", and below the studio's expectations. As a result, Katzenberg decided to recall the film's television advertising. The film eventually went on to make $27.9 million in the United States and $47.4 million worldwide.


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, "The Rescuers Down Under" has an approval rating of , based on reviews, with an average score of . The website's critical consensus reads: "Though its story is second-rate, "The Rescuers Down Under" redeems itself with some remarkable production values – particularly its flight scenes."


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times" awarded the film 3 out of 4 stars and wrote, "Animation can give us the glory of sights and experiences that are impossible in the real world, and one of those sights, in 'The Rescuers Down Under,' is of a little boy clinging to the back of a soaring eagle. The flight sequence and many of the other action scenes in this new Disney animated feature create an exhilaration and freedom that are liberating. And the rest of the story is fun, too." Likewise giving it three stars out of four, Gene Siskel of "The Chicago Tribune" summarized the film as a "bold, rousing but sometimes needlessly intense Disney animated feature" where "good fun is provided by a goofy albatross (voiced by John Candy), one in a long line of silly Disney birds". Janet Maslin, reviewing for "The New York Times", praised the animation and the action sequences, though she remained critical of the storyline, labeling it "a trifle dark and un-involving for very small children"; Maslin acknowledged that its "slightly more grown-up, adventurous approach may be the reason it does not include the expected musical interludes, but they would have been welcome". Also finding error with "such a mediocre story that adults may duck", the staff of "Variety", nevertheless wrote that "The Rescuers Down Under" "boasts reasonably solid production values and fine character voices".


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: "Halliwell's Film Guide" gave it two stars out of four, saying, "[This] slick, lively and enjoyable animated feature [is] an improvement on the original." "TV Guide" gave the film two stars out of four, saying, "Three years in the making, it was obviously conceived during the height of this country's fascination with Australia, brought on by Paul Hogan's fabulously successful "Crocodile Dundee" (1986). By 1990, the mania had long since subsided, and this film's Australian setting did nothing to enhance its box office appeal. Further, the film doesn't make particularly imaginative use of the location. Take away the accents and the obligatory kangaroos and koalas, and the story could have taken place anywhere. Another problem is that 'the rescuers' themselves don't even enter the action until a third of the film has passed. And when they do appear, they don't have much to do with the main plot until near the film's end. The characters seem grafted on to a story that probably would have been more successful without them. Finally, the film suffers from some action and plotting that is questionable in a children's film. The villain is far too malignant, the young vigilante hero seems to be a kiddie 'Rambo,' and some of the action is quite violent, if not tasteless."


title: The Rescuers Down Under

text: Josh Spiegel echoes that point and expands on it, explaining, ""The Rescuers Down Under" tanked with barely $3.5 million in its opening-weekend take, Katzenberg removed all television advertisements for the film. By itself, that's not the worst possible fate, but it proves that he had zero confidence in its ability to perform at a seemingly ideal time of year. Here's the thing: the more demoralizing fact isn't that Katzenberg yanked the marketing. It's that Disney set "The Rescuers Down Under" up to fail, opening it on the same weekend as a little film called "Home Alone", otherwise known as the highest-grossing film of 1990. He may not have been able to predict its long-lasting impact on popular culture, but Katzenberg likely had enough tracking information to tip him off that "Home Alone" would be a monster laying waste to everything in its path. "The Rescuers Down Under" was forced to take the hit, then and afterwards." Conversely, Ellen MacKay of Common Sense Media gave the film four out of five stars, writing, "A rare sequel that improves on the original".


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: The Galápagos tortoise or Galápagos giant tortoise (Chelonoidis niger) is a species of very large tortoise in the genus "Chelonoidis" (which also contains three smaller species from mainland South America). It comprises 15 subspecies (13 extant and 2 extinct). It is the largest living species of tortoise, with some modern Galápagos tortoises weighing up to . With lifespans in the wild of over 100 years, it is one of the longest-lived vertebrates. Captive Galapagos tortoises can live up to 177 years. For example, a captive individual, Harriet, lived for at least 175 years. Spanish explorers, who discovered the islands in the 16th century, named them after the Spanish "galápago", meaning "tortoise".


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: Galápagos tortoises are native to seven of the Galápagos Islands. Shell size and shape vary between subspecies and populations. On islands with humid highlands, the tortoises are larger, with domed shells and short necks; on islands with dry lowlands, the tortoises are smaller, with "saddleback" shells and long necks. Charles Darwin's observations of these differences on the second voyage of the "Beagle" in 1835, contributed to the development of his theory of evolution.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: Tortoise numbers declined from over 250,000 in the 16th century to a low of around 15,000 in the 1970s. This decline was caused by overexploitation of the subspecies for meat and oil, habitat clearance for agriculture, and introduction of non-native animals to the islands, such as rats, goats, and pigs. The extinction of most giant tortoise lineages is thought to have also been caused by predation by humans or human ancestors, as the tortoises themselves have no natural predators. Tortoise populations on at least three islands have become extinct in historical times due to human activities. Specimens of these extinct taxa exist in several museums and also are being subjected to DNA analysis. 12 subspecies of the original 14-15 survive in the wild; a 13th subspecies ("C. n. abingdonii") had only a single known living individual, kept in captivity and nicknamed Lonesome George until his death in June 2012. Two other subspecies, "C. n. niger" (the type subspecies of Galápagos tortoise) from Floreana Island and an undescribed subspecies from Santa Fe Island are known to have gone extinct in the mid-late 19th century. Conservation efforts, beginning in the 20th century, have resulted in thousands of captive-bred juveniles being released onto their ancestral home islands, and the total number of the subspecies is estimated to have exceeded 19,000 at the start of the 21st century. Despite this rebound, all surviving subspecies are classified as Threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: The Galápagos tortoises are one of two insular radiations of giant tortoises that still survive to the modern day; the other is "Aldabrachelys gigantea" of Aldabra and the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, east of Tanzania. While giant tortoise radiations were common in prehistoric times, humans have wiped out the majority of them worldwide; the only other radiation of tortoises to survive to historic times, "Cylindraspis" of the Mascarenes, was driven to extinction by the 19th century, and other giant tortoise radiations such as a "Centrochelys" radiation on the Canary Islands and another "Chelonoidis" radiation in the Caribbean were driven to extinction prior to that.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: The Galápagos Islands were discovered in 1535, but first appeared on the maps, of Gerardus Mercator and Abraham Ortelius, around 1570. The islands were named "Insulae de los Galopegos" (Islands of the Tortoises) in reference to the giant tortoises found there.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: Initially, the giant tortoises of the Indian Ocean and those from the Galápagos were thought to be the same subspecies. Naturalists thought that sailors had transported the tortoises there. In 1676, the pre-Linnaean authority Claude Perrault referred to both subspecies as "Tortue des Indes". In 1783, Johann Gottlob Schneider classified all giant tortoises as "Testudo indica" ("Indian tortoise"). In 1812, August Friedrich Schweigger named them "Testudo gigantea" ("gigantic tortoise"). In 1834, André Marie Constant Duméril and Gabriel Bibron classified the Galápagos tortoises as a separate subspecies, which they named "Testudo nigrita" ("black tortoise").


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: The first systematic survey of giant tortoises was by the zoologist Albert Günther of the British Museum, in 1875. Günther identified at least five distinct populations from the Galápagos, and three from the Indian Ocean islands. He expanded the list in 1877 to six from the Galápagos, four from the Seychelles, and four from the Mascarenes. Günther hypothesized that all the giant tortoises descended from a single ancestral population which spread by sunken land bridges. This hypothesis was later disproven by the understanding that the Galápagos, the atolls of Seychelles, and the Mascarene islands are all of recent volcanic origin and have never been linked to a continent by land bridges. Galápagos tortoises are now thought to have descended from a South American ancestor, while the Indian Ocean tortoises derived from ancestral populations on Madagascar.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: At the end of the 19th century, Georg Baur and Walter Rothschild recognised five more populations of Galápagos tortoise. In 1905–06, an expedition by the California Academy of Sciences, with Joseph R. Slevin in charge of reptiles, collected specimens which were studied by Academy herpetologist John Van Denburgh. He identified four additional populations, and proposed the existence of 15 subspecies. Van Denburgh's list still guides the taxonomy of the Galápagos tortoise, though now 10 populations are thought to have existed.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: The current specific designation of "niger", formerly feminized to "nigra" ("black" – Quoy & Gaimard, 1824b) was resurrected in 1984 after it was discovered to be the senior synonym (an older taxonomic synonym taking historical precedence) for the then commonly used subspecies name of "elephantopus" ("elephant-footed" – Harlan, 1827). Quoy and Gaimard's Latin description explains the use of "nigra: "Testudo toto corpore nigro"" means "tortoise with completely black body". Quoy and Gairmard described "nigra" from a living specimen, but no evidence indicates they knew of its accurate provenance within the Galápagos – the locality was in fact given as California. Garman proposed the linking of "nigra" with the extinct Floreana subspecies. Later, Pritchard deemed it convenient to accept this designation, despite its tenuousness, for minimal disruption to the already confused nomenclature of the subspecies. The even more senior subspecies synonym of "californiana" ("californian" – Quoy & Gaimard, 1824a) is considered a "nomen oblitum" ("forgotten name").


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: Previously, the Galápagos tortoise was considered to belong to the genus "Geochelone", known as 'typical tortoises' or 'terrestrial turtles'. In the 1990s, subgenus "Chelonoidis" was elevated to generic status based on phylogenetic evidence which grouped the South American members of "Geochelone" into an independent clade (branch of the tree of life). This nomenclature has been adopted by several authorities.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: Within the archipelago, 14-15 subspecies of Galápagos tortoises have been identified, although only 12 survive to this day. Five are found on separate islands; five of them on the volcanoes of Isabela Island. Several of the surviving subspecies are seriously endangered. A 13th subspecies, "C. n. abingdonii" from Pinta Island, is extinct since 2012. The last known specimen, named Lonesome George, died in captivity on 24 June 2012; George had been mated with female tortoises of several other subspecies, but none of the eggs from these pairings hatched. The subspecies inhabiting Floreana Island ("G. niger") is thought to have been hunted to extinction by 1850, only 15 years after Charles Darwin's landmark visit of 1835, when he saw shells, but no live tortoises there. However, recent DNA testing shows that an intermixed, non-native population currently existing on the island of Isabela is of genetic resemblance to the subspecies native to Floreana, suggesting that "G. niger" has not gone entirely extinct. The existence of the "C. n. phantastica" subspecies of Fernandina Island was disputed, as it was described from a single specimen that may have been an artificial introduction to the island; however, a live female was found in 2019, likely confirming the subspecies' validity.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: Prior to widespread knowledge of the differences between the populations (sometimes called races) from different islands and volcanoes, captive collections in zoos were indiscriminately mixed. Fertile offspring resulted from pairings of animals from different races. However, captive crosses between tortoises from different races have lower fertility and higher mortality than those between tortoises of the same race, and captives in mixed herds normally direct courtship only toward members of the same race.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: The valid scientific names of each of the individual populations are not universally accepted, and some researchers still consider each subspecies to be distinct species. Prior to 2021, all subspecies were classified as distinct species from one another, but a 2021 study analyzing the level of divergence within the extinct West Indian "Chelonoidis" radiation and comparing it to the Galápagos radiation found that the level of divergence within both clades may have been significantly overestimated, and supported once again reclassifying all Galápagos tortoises as subspecies of a single subspecies, "C. niger". This was followed by the Turtle Taxonomy Working Group and the Reptile Database later that year. The taxonomic status of the various races is not fully resolved.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: All subspecies of Galápagos tortoises evolved from common ancestors that arrived from mainland South America by overwater dispersal. Genetic studies have shown that the Chaco tortoise of Argentina and Paraguay is their closest living relative. The minimal founding population was a pregnant female or a breeding pair. Survival on the 1000-km oceanic journey is accounted for because the tortoises are buoyant, can breathe by extending their necks above the water, and are able to survive months without food or fresh water. As they are poor swimmers, the journey was probably a passive one facilitated by the Humboldt Current, which diverts westwards towards the Galápagos Islands from the mainland. The ancestors of the genus "Chelonoidis" are believed to have similarly dispersed from Africa to South America during the Oligocene.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: The closest living relative (though not a direct ancestor) of the Galápagos giant tortoise is the Chaco tortoise ("Chelonoidis chilensis"), a much smaller subspecies from South America. The divergence between "C. chilensis" and "C. niger" probably occurred 11.95–25 million years ago, an evolutionary event preceding the volcanic formation of the oldest modern Galápagos Islands 5 million years ago. Mitochondrial DNA analysis indicates that the oldest existing islands (Española and San Cristóbal) were colonised first, and that these populations seeded the younger islands via dispersal in a "stepping stone" fashion via local currents. Restricted gene flow between isolated islands then resulted in the independent evolution of the populations into the divergent forms observed in the modern subspecies. The evolutionary relationships between the subspecies thus echo the volcanic history of the islands.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: The five populations living on the largest island, Isabela, are the ones that are the subject of the most debate as to whether they are true subspecies or just distinct populations or subspecies. It is widely accepted that the population living on the northernmost volcano, Volcan Wolf, is genetically independent from the four populations to the south and is therefore a separate subspecies. It is thought to be derived from a different colonization event than the others. A colonization from the island of Santiago apparently gave rise to the Volcan Wolf subspecies ("C. n. becki") while the four southern populations are believed to be descended from a second colonization from the more southerly island of Santa Cruz. Tortoises from Santa Cruz are thought to have first colonized the Sierra Negra volcano, which was the first of the island's volcanoes to form. The tortoises then spread north to each newly created volcano, resulting in the populations living on Volcan Alcedo and then Volcan Darwin. Recent genetic evidence shows that these two populations are genetically distinct from each other and from the population living on Sierra Negra ("C. guentheri") and therefore form the subspecies "C. n. vandenburghi" (Alcedo) and "C. n. microphyes" (Darwin). The fifth population living on the southernmost volcano ("C. n. vicina") is thought to have split off from the Sierra Negra population more recently and is therefore not as genetically different as the other two. Isabela is the most recently formed island tortoises inhabit, so its populations have had less time to evolve independently than populations on other islands, but according to some researchers, they are all genetically different and should each be considered as separate subspecies.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: Phylogenetic analysis may help to "resurrect" the extinct subspecies of Floreana ("C. n. niger") – a subspecies known only from subfossil remains. Some tortoises from Isabela were found to be a partial match for the genetic profile of Floreana specimens from museum collections, possibly indicating the presence of hybrids from a population transported by humans from Floreana to Isabela, resulting either from individuals deliberately transported between the islands, or from individuals thrown overboard from ships to lighten the load. Nine Floreana descendants have been identified in the captive population of the Fausto Llerena Breeding Center on Santa Cruz; the genetic footprint was identified in the genomes of hybrid offspring. This allows the possibility of re-establishing a reconstructed subspecies from selective breeding of the hybrid animals. Furthermore, individuals from the subspecies possibly are still extant. Genetic analysis from a sample of tortoises from Volcan Wolf found 84 first-generation "C. n. niger" hybrids, some less than 15 years old. The genetic diversity of these individuals is estimated to have required 38 "C. n. niger" parents, many of which could still be alive on Isabela Island.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: The Pinta Island subspecies ("C. n. abingdonii", now extinct) has been found to be most closely related to the subspecies on the islands of San Cristóbal ("C. n. chathamensis") and Española ("C. n. hoodensis") which lie over 300 km (190 mi) away, rather than that on the neighbouring island of Isabela as previously assumed. This relationship is attributable to dispersal by the strong local current from San Cristóbal towards Pinta. This discovery informed further attempts to preserve the "C. n. abingdonii" lineage and the search for an appropriate mate for Lonesome George, which had been penned with females from Isabela. Hope was bolstered by the discovery of a "C. n. abingdonii" hybrid male in the Volcán Wolf population on northern Isabela, raising the possibility that more undiscovered living Pinta descendants exist.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: Mitochondrial DNA studies of tortoises on Santa Cruz show up to three genetically distinct lineages found in nonoverlapping population distributions around the regions of Cerro Montura, Cerro Fatal, and La Caseta. Although traditionally grouped into a single subspecies ("C. n. porteri"), the lineages are all more closely related to tortoises on other islands than to each other: Cerro Montura tortoises are most closely related to "C. n. duncanensis" from Pinzón, Cerro Fatal to "C. n. chathamensis" from San Cristóbal, and La Caseta to the four southern races of Isabela as well as Floreana tortoises.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: In 2015, the Cerro Fatal tortoises were described as a distinct taxon, "donfaustoi". Prior to the identification of this subspecies through genetic analysis, it was noted that there existed differences in shells between the Cerro Fatal tortoises and other tortoises on Santa Cruz. By classifying the Cerro Fatal tortoises into a new taxon, greater attention can be paid to protecting its habitat, according to Adalgisa Caccone, who is a member of the team making this classification.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: When it was discovered that the central, small island of Pinzón had only 100–200 very old adults and no young tortoises had survived into adulthood for perhaps more than 70 years, the resident scientists initiated what would eventually become the Giant Tortoise Breeding and Rearing Program. Over the next 50 years, this program resulted in major successes in the recovery of giant tortoise populations throughout the archipelago.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: In 1965, the first tortoise eggs collected from natural nests on Pinzón Island were brought to the Charles Darwin Research Station, where they would complete the period of incubation and then hatch, becoming the first young tortoises to be reared in captivity. The introduction of black rats onto Pinzón sometime in the latter half of the 19th century had resulted in the complete eradication of all young tortoises. Black rats had been eating both tortoise eggs and hatchlings, effectively destroying the future of the tortoise population. Only the longevity of giant tortoises allowed them to survive until the Galápagos National Park, Island Conservation, Charles Darwin Foundation, the Raptor Center, and Bell Laboratories removed invasive rats in 2012. In 2013, heralding an important step in Pinzón tortoise recovery, hatchlings emerged from native Pinzón tortoise nests on the island and the Galápagos National Park successfully returned 118 hatchlings to their native island home. Partners returned to Pinzón Island in late 2014 and continued to observe hatchling tortoises (now older), indicating that natural recruitment is occurring on the island unimpeded. They also discovered a snail subspecies new to science. These exciting results highlight the conservation value of this important management action. In early 2015, after extensive monitoring, partners confirmed that Pinzón and Plaza Sur Islands are now both rodent-free.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: On the southern island of Española, only 14 adult tortoises were found, two males and 12 females. The tortoises apparently were not encountering one another, so no reproduction was occurring. Between 1963 and 1974, all 14 adult tortoises discovered on the island were brought to the tortoise center on Santa Cruz and a tortoise breeding program was initiated. In 1977, a third Española male tortoise was returned to Galapagos from the San Diego Zoo and joined the breeding group. After 40 years' work reintroducing captive animals, a detailed study of the island's ecosystem has confirmed it has a stable, breeding population. Where once 15 were known, now more than 1,000 giant tortoises inhabit the island of Española. One research team has found that more than half the tortoises released since the first reintroductions are still alive, and they are breeding well enough for the population to progress onward, unaided. In January 2020, it was widely reported that Diego, a 100-year-old male tortoise, resurrected 40% of the tortoise population on the island and is known as the "Playboy Tortoise".


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: The "C. n. phantasticus" subspecies from Fernandina was originally known from a single specimen — an old male from the voyage of 1905–06. No other tortoises or remains were found on the island for a long time after its sighting, leading to suggestions that the specimen was an artificial introduction from elsewhere. Fernandina has neither human settlements nor feral mammals, so if this subspecies ever did exist, its extinction would have been by natural means, such as volcanic activity. Nevertheless, there have occasionally been reports from Fernandina. In 2019, an elderly female specimen was finally discovered on Fernandina and transferred to a breeding center, and trace evidence found on the expedition indicates that more individuals likely exist in the wild. It has been theorized that the rarity of the subspecies may be due to the harsh habitat it survives in, such as the lava flows that are known to frequently cover the island.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: The extinct Santa Fe subspecies has not yet been described and thus has no binomial name, having been identified from the limited evidence of bone fragments (but no shells, the most durable part) of 14 individuals, old eggs, and old dung found on the island in 1905–06. The island has never been inhabited by man nor had any introduced predators, but reports have been made of whalers hauling tortoises off the island. Later genetic studies of the bone fragments indicate that the Santa Fe subspecies was distinct, and was most closely related to "C. n. hoodensis". A population of "C. n. hoodensis" has since been reintroduced to and established on the island to fill in the ecological role of the Santa Fe tortoise.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: The purported Rábida Island subspecies ("C. n. wallacei") was described from a single specimen collected by the California Academy of Sciences in December 1905, which has since been lost. This individual was probably an artificial introduction from another island that was originally penned on Rábida next to a good anchorage, as no contemporary whaling or sealing logs mention removing tortoises from this island.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: The tortoises have a large bony shell of a dull brown or grey color. The plates of the shell are fused with the ribs in a rigid protective structure that is integral to the skeleton. Lichens can grow on the shells of these slow-moving animals. Tortoises keep a characteristic scute (shell segment) pattern on their shells throughout life, though the annual growth bands are not useful for determining age because the outer layers are worn off with time. A tortoise can withdraw its head, neck, and fore limbs into its shell for protection. The legs are large and stumpy, with dry, scaly skin and hard scales. The front legs have five claws, the back legs four.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: The discoverer of the Galápagos Islands, Fray Tomás de Berlanga, Bishop of Panama, wrote in 1535 of "such big tortoises that each could carry a man on top of himself." Naturalist Charles Darwin remarked after his trip three centuries later in 1835, "These animals grow to an immense size ... several so large that it required six or eight men to lift them from the ground". The largest recorded individuals have reached weights of over and lengths of . Size overlap is extensive with the Aldabra giant tortoise, however taken as a subspecies, the Galápagos tortoise seems to average slightly larger, with weights in excess of being slightly more commonplace. Weights in the larger bodied subspecies range from in mature males and from in adult females. However, the size is variable across the islands and subspecies; those from Pinzón Island are relatively small with a maximum known weight of and carapace length of approximately compared to range in tortoises from Santa Cruz Island. The tortoises' gigantism was probably a trait useful on continents that was fortuitously helpful for successful colonisation of these remote oceanic islands rather than an example of evolved insular gigantism. Large tortoises would have a greater chance of surviving the journey over water from the mainland as they can hold their heads a greater height above the water level and have a smaller surface area/volume ratio, which reduces osmotic water loss. Their significant water and fat reserves would allow the tortoises to survive long ocean crossings without food or fresh water, and to endure the drought-prone climate of the islands. A larger size allowed them to better tolerate extremes of temperature due to gigantothermy. Fossil giant tortoises from mainland South America have been described that support this hypothesis of gigantism that pre-existed the colonization of islands.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: Galápagos tortoises possess two main shell forms that correlate with the biogeographic history of the subspecies group. They exhibit a spectrum of carapace morphology ranging from "saddleback" (denoting upward arching of the front edge of the shell resembling a saddle) to "domed" (denoting a rounded convex surface resembling a dome). When a saddleback tortoise withdraws its head and forelimbs into its shell, a large unprotected gap remains over the neck, evidence of the lack of predation during the evolution of this structure. Larger islands with humid highlands over in elevation, such as Santa Cruz, have abundant vegetation near the ground. Tortoises native to these environments tend to have domed shells and are larger, with shorter necks and limbs. Saddleback tortoises originate from small islands less than in elevation with dry habitats (e.g. Española and Pinzón) that are more limited in food and other resources. Two lineages of Galápagos tortoises possess the Island of Santa Cruz and when observed it is concluded that despite the shared similarities of growth patterns and morphological changes observed during growth, the two lineages and two sexes can be distinguished on the basis of distinct carapace features. Lineages differ by the shape of the vertebral and pleural scutes. Females have a more elongated and wider carapace shape than males. Carapace shape changes with growth, with vertebral scutes becoming narrower and pleural scutes becoming larger during late ontogeny.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: In combination with proportionally longer necks and limbs, the unusual saddleback carapace structure is thought to be an adaptation to increase vertical reach, which enables the tortoise to browse tall vegetation such as the "Opuntia" (prickly pear) cactus that grows in arid environments. Saddlebacks are more territorial and smaller than domed varieties, possibly adaptations to limited resources. Alternatively, larger tortoises may be better-suited to high elevations because they can resist the cooler temperatures that occur with cloud cover or fog.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: A competing hypothesis is that, rather than being principally a feeding adaptation, the distinctive saddle shape and longer extremities might have been a secondary sexual characteristic of saddleback males. Male competition over mates is settled by dominance displays on the basis of vertical neck height rather than body size (see below). This correlates with the observation that saddleback males are more aggressive than domed males. The shell distortion and elongation of the limbs and neck in saddlebacks is probably an evolutionary compromise between the need for a small body size in dry conditions and a high vertical reach for dominance displays.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: The saddleback carapace probably evolved independently several times in dry habitats, since genetic similarity between populations does not correspond to carapace shape. Saddleback tortoises are, therefore, not necessarily more closely related to each other than to their domed counterparts, as shape is not determined by a similar genetic background, but by a similar ecological one.


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: Sexual dimorphism is most pronounced in saddleback populations in which males have more angled and higher front openings, giving a more extreme saddled appearance. Males of all varieties generally have longer tails and shorter, concave plastrons with thickened knobs at the back edge to facilitate mating. Males are larger than females — adult males weigh around while females are .


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: The tortoises are ectothermic (cold-blooded), so they bask for 1–2 hours after dawn to absorb the sun's heat through their dark shells before actively foraging for 8–9 hours a day. They travel mostly in the early morning or late afternoon between resting and grazing areas. They have been observed to walk at a speed of .


title: Galápagos tortoise

text: On the larger and more humid islands, the tortoises seasonally migrate between low elevations, which become grassy plains in the wet season, and meadowed areas of higher elevation (up to ) in the dry season. The same routes have been used for many generations, creating well-defined paths through the undergrowth known as "tortoise highways". On these wetter islands, the domed tortoises are gregarious and often found in large herds, in contrast to the more solitary and territorial disposition of the saddleback tortoises.