National Geographic's Beauty and the Beasts: A Leopard's Story [VHS]

Product Description
Predator versus prey in a deadly battle on the African plains. Leopard and warthog: Two unlikely creatures linked by fate on the African savanna. One is predator, the other, prey. This intimate film presents remarkable close-up footage of the leopard, perhaps the wildest of the great cats and its odd-looking neighbor, the warthog. Their parallel lives include age-old scenes of mating, birth, and raising young. But when these lives intersect, the outcome is always the same: The formidable leopard outranks the warthog on the food chain. The night is full of other killers on the African plains. Leopard and warthog are just players of an ongoing struggle to survive, played out at the Mala Mala Game Reserve in South Africa. One of nature's most magnificent natural settings sets the stage for the many dramas in BEAUTY AND THE BEASTS: A LEOPARD'S STORY.
Amazon.com
The parallel stories of a mama leopard and her two cubs and a mother warthog and her brood are tracked in this 60-minute video safari in the Mala Mala Game Preserve in South Africa's Kruger National Park. It's a story of predator versus prey, "lethal beauty" versus "the most astonishing object to ever disgrace nature," according to Academy Award-winning actor James Coburn's rugged narration. (Of course, a generation of kids have grown up with the lovable Pumbaa as their warthog role model, thanks to The Lion King. At the risk of spoiling the ending, parents can rest assured that, oddly, the warthogs all survive.) Cackling hyenas and marauding lions enter the fray and prove as dangerous to the mother leopard as she is to the warthog family. Viewers are not spared the brutality of this truly wild life, and so there are several vivid death scenes. Incongruously, one of them is probably the video's most breathtaking sequence, in which one of the leopard cubs grown up attacks an impala and the two cleave together spiraling through the air in a doomed dance. --Kimberly Heinrichs