One season that featured a lot of "Survival in the Wild" was Fiji where the Ravu tribe was reduced to licking leaves to avoid dehydration and make fire without flint. They basically had nothing. However, that didn't increase viewers' satisfaction and Fiji is considered one of the worst seasons ever.

Survivor IS about Survival in the wild. It's just that it isn't edited that way. The cameras focus so much on the strategy because the deprivation gets old quick. However, tell your friends to watch Micronesia. That season showed that a lot of the "game" still gets decided by the ability of some players to stick it out in the wild.

I think people want to see them be SUCCESSFUL at surviving off the land, not wither and die. There has to be a balance.

I've always thought it would be neat to see them go into it with just what they had in their carry-on luggage when they step off the plane. Giving them a knife, a pot, and a flint every season (and little else) gets old and isn't very realistic (there's usable trash on most beaches--yes, even remote ones--unless production goes in and cleans it up before filming begins). Imagine the fights over the pack of honey roasted peanuts someone shoved in their pocket rather than eating on the plane.

Mix up the theme. Give them a plane wreck; we've had the "sinking ship" theme repeatedly. Maybe we'll never get Survivor "Arctic Circle" or "Alaskan Winter", but "Alaskan Summer" or "Andes Mountains" might be fun, with scantily clad days and chilly nights (and maybe altitude sickness as a replacement for non-stop rain).

Thanks to tribephyl for the sigpic!

I would love to see them film a season during the summer solstice in Alaska or Northern Canada. It will never happen.

As for survival motifs, a lot of that depends of course on where they play the game. Borneo, the first season, was good for sourcing fish, rats and tapioca, that was pretty much it. Africa was filmed at a bad time of year in a location where they were prohibited from hunting, a wildlife preserve. Amazon, despite being a lush location for foraging, was so potentially lethal that foraging would have been ill-advised for anyone without intensive special survival training. Sometimes they have wild chickens, sometimes they have coconuts, sometimes they have termites.

An interesting location might be Robinson Crusoe Island or neighboring Alejandro Selkirk Island. Alexander Selkirk was marooned on Robinson Crusoe I. (obviously, at the time it had a different name), his story provided the real-life basis for the Defoe masterpiece. (Unlike Crusoe, who was shipwrecked and initially was able to salvage some provisions from the wreckage, Selkirk was intentionally marooned at his own request with a few provisions. Wild goats inhabited the island, having been established there by sailers in order that passing ships could stop and hunt fresh meat.)

LAST EDITED ON 07-27-11 AT 05:29 PM (EST)

>I think people want to see
>them be SUCCESSFUL at surviving
>off the land, not wither
>and die. There has to
>be a balance.

This guy was quite successful at Surviving off the land:

Earl was right there with him and won the game. Still, Fiji isn't considered a great season.

As for the Survival motif, it is there every season but it's often reduced to the first episode when they build shelter and get used to their surroundings. After that, it depends on how often it rains.

In its editing, Survivor is much too limited to the game. Winning the reward challenges, finding the idol clues and the idol itself and then the build-up to the vote takes all the airtime. Look at the first few seasons: After the IC was won, we barely had 2 or 3 confessionals and we'd be off to TC. There, Jeff wasn't so much a DAW and his interventions were quite short. It gave us time to see the camplife.