Squids . . . of the Future!

So, over the holidays, did anyone else endure the bizarre Discovery Channel / Animal Planet special The Future Is Wild? According to that little show about the evolution of life on Earth 100-200 million years from now, everything’s going to turn into some kind of squid. Squids on land, squids in the sea, squids for you and squids for me. I kid you not, the whole show really seemed to be steered by unnamed “experts” who have a tentacle fetish.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the production values were amazing – a deceptively slick-looking mix of CGI, live-action, and simple shots of stuff like churning water to suggest the movement of giant squids, all earnestly narrated as though we’re pretty sure that Earth’s ecosystem is, even now, gearing itself toward squid. (And what of humanity? Oh, we ditched this mudball centuries ago, establishing colonies elsewhere, and we sent a probe back, through whose eyes all these multifarious squid-descendants are seen for the purposes of this special. Silly…don’t they know we’re going to evolve into Vorlons or something?)

With that in mind, I have some predictions of my own. Call it an inkling of our squid-filled future, with predictions aplenty of calamari calamity:

• In the future, Giant Land-Based Squids will evolve beyond the need to add neon lighting to their cars’ undercarriages and wheel rims.
• In the future, Intelligent Tree-Swingin’ Squids will have on-board GPS navigation. And a built-in sun roof.
• In the future, Large Island-Sized Sea Squids will be able to extend their own safety railing as needed to ensure the security of their passengers.
• In the future, various factions of squids will fight a global holy war in a tragic dispute over whether or not Sigmund the Sea Monster was truly the messiah of squid-dom. Then maybe, after years of suicide ink attacks and pointless squishings, they’ll decide that this is a silly thing to fight over since they’re all stuck on the same little ball of mud in space, and establish peaceful relations conducive to the betterment of all squidkind. Ah, what the hell am I saying? Their squiddy leaders, in a vainglorious display of ego and power, will probably wipe their populations out too. And perhaps they’ll leave some monument to announce the winners, losers, edited highlights and final score to the next life form that evolves from what’s left, assuming the world isn’t completely sterilized in the wake of their foolishness.
• But at least they will have outgrown their collective, pop-cultural love for professional squid wrestling.

About the time they got to the sixth or seventh iteration of big squishy squid species, I just started chuckling my way through the rest of the show. When they got to the elephant-sized one that traps and eats the young of the tree-swinging squid species (“I’m gonna eat yer baby! Get in my belly!”), I was howling with laughter. This was a show that definitely merited the Crow T. Robot / Tom Servo touch.