Zoo Parade

Storyline

Zoo Parade is an American television program broadcast from 1950 to 1957 that featured animals from the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. The program's host was Marlin Perkins, the Zoo's director. Perkins went on to host the program Wild Kingdom. Jim Wehmeyer has described the show: "A precursor of sorts to the regularly featured animal segments on The Tonight Show and other late-night talk shows, Zoo Parade was a location-bound production during which Perkins would present and describe the life and peculiarities of Lincoln Park Zoo animals." Marcel LaFollette has written, "Production approaches that are now standard practice on NOVA and the Discovery Channel derive, in fact, from experimentation by television pioneers like Lynn Poole and Don Herbert and such programs as Adventure, Zoo Parade, Science in Action, and the Bell Telephone System’s science specials. These early efforts were also influenced by television’s love of the dramatic, refined during its first decade and continuing to shape news and public affairs programming, as well as fiction and fantasy, today." The show won a Peabody Award in 1951, and was nominated for Emmy Awards four times.