TV REVIEW | Bindi Irwin, 8, picks up where her dad left off after that stingray

June 6, 2007
BY DOUG ELFMAN Television Critic

In "Bindi the Jungle Girl," a snake coils about Bindi's neck but it doesn't get tangled in her pigtails. Bindi is unfazed, radiant, charming, cute, charismatic and more well-spoken than 97 percent of Hollywood and Washington, D.C.

"She's totally harmless to me," Bindi says of one of her endangered pet snakes, and you can see and hear her late father's Aussie excitement spring forth. "But she can actually eat venomous snakes! She has a hundred small sharp teeth, but look at her cute little face with those GORGEOUS eyebrows."

Bindi is 8 years old.

Her father, Steve Irwin the crocodile hunter, helped make "Jungle Girl" happen for Bindi. Filming began before he died. He appears in the new series that starts Saturday on Discovery Kids. In the second episode, taped last year, he's right there next to her, goofing around. Later, a stingray would jam a barb through his warm heart.

Bindi and her mom, Terri, pay tribute to papa Irwin with an Animal Planet special at 8 p.m. Friday called "My Daddy the Croc Hunter." He was my favorite TV hero. To me, his death was the most mournful TV moment of the year. Here was a guy who loved every living creature. He rescued crocodiles and many other unloved, un-cute beings few people on Earth care about. He did it all with bare hands.

It's heartbreaking again to watch the magnificent father and his enchanting daughter so playful together on "Jungle Girl," especially when she speaks in the present tense.

"Just like me, my dad loves pandas!" Bindi says.

Then, he lets a tiger feed on milk, poured by the tips of his fingers.

"Dad's making sure our tigers have a treat, too," she says in narration. "There are only a few thousand left in the wild, and they could all be gone by the time I'm old enough to drive. How sad is that?"

How sad is that?

But by the second episode, mourning fades with the familiarity of this new series. And even in the first episode, it is clear "Jungle Girl" is a high-water mark in both children's programming and nature TV.

Bindi's tree house abounds with her snakes, her pet rat, her pet puppy and her genuine delight. She swings on a rope and lopes like a gorilla -- all the while delivering sharp narration on animal segments about pandas, iguanas, rhinos and the like, which pop powerfully from the screen.

"Jungle Girl" moves fast, as you'd expect of a kid's show, but it's smooth, sleek, stylish and mesmerizing. Like "The Crocodile Hunter," it's environmentally conscious education completely disguised as amazing, upbeat entertainment.

It's the most perfect tree house since "Pee-wee's Playhouse" and Bart Simpson's "Treehouse of Horror," complete with a fantastic theme song punctuated by Bindi calling out blissfully, "Biiiiin-di!"

Just to give you an idea how much the Irwins and their Australian Zoo care about everything with a heartbeat, a lizard goes under the knife, not for being a bad lizard, but to get a life-threatening lump surgically removed from its ill body.

In such moments -- in all moments -- "Jungle Girl" is the sweetest thing, a bittersweet goodbye to a great man and a joyful hello for the love he left behind.