My mate goes to Starbucks! #1

New Feature time! For a while now, and because I’m an uncultured swine, a good friend of mines has been bringing me Starbucks™ “Pick of the Week” cards. These give you a freebie from iTunes and can be either a book, game, app, TV episode or song.  They can vary wildly. “Combo Crew” a ridiculous clone of Street Fighter using touch controls…Yuck. Broken Sword, one of the best games of all time! Full spectrum, believe me!

I won’t be writing this every week due to time constraints, but, I will be trying to do as many as possible. To start things off with a bang, it’s Bear (mutherfucking) Grylls!

Card # 1: Bear Grylls - Escape from Hell. Series 1, Episode 1 - Jungle

For those of you that don’t know! Bear Grylls is a British writer, TV presenter, and most importantly an Adventurer. He has completed dozens of events for charities and once, and climbed Everest at 23. Having such a ridiculous first name he obviously decided his children should be known as Marmaduke, Huckleberry (and the somewhat normal) Jesse. He’s a bit like a British Steve Irwin, in my opinion, and has starred in several TV series over the years. 

Escape from Hell has Grylls placed in real-life situations faced by survivors of events that pushed them to the limit. Grylls serves the role of narrator, describing the scenes and circumstances in which these incidents took place. He does this extremely well in all honesty. He has a certain presence on screen and given his past when he mentions that these are extraordinary scenarios, you believe him completely.

“Jungle” tells 3 unique stories of people being trapped in the Rainforest under 3 separate sets of circumstances. There are touch points with the survivors themselves, giving a deeply personal touch to the stories, you can see it in the survivor’s faces that it’s pretty tough for them to talk about. The narrative is split comfortably as the episode goes on, jumping equally between the three stories with Bear demonstrating some of the feats the survivors had to achieve to avoid capture or death. Personally, I found the accounts from the survivors to be more interesting and up-front, however, Bear does keep you engrossed in the risk aspect of the stories. You know that they have all survived but he does such a good job of keeping you interested that I found it hard to stop watching.

There’s a couple of cheesy sections to be fair. Bear showing you how to pin the head of a rattlesnake with a long twig so he can jump over it, why not just walk around it man, stop making it complicated! Bear eating a tarantula, frog, bamboo shoot and some leaves. Does that really have to be in there? It felt like more of a time filler and my personal favourite - Bear leaving a picture of his family for fear of losing it, only to return and collect “his most prized possession”. It does well to demonstrate the story of one survivor returning to help his fellow, and also poisoned traveller, but was a bit of a soft touch! He’s Bear Grylls, he should have left a machete that he once used to behead a 20ft crocodile with and later in the episode come back and reclaim “Beatrix” but I digress.

Ultimately it was a fun 45 minutes, and the other episodes of the series have Bear adventuring to other perilous areas of the world such as the artic and the desert and I believe that the series has some legs. I can’t help but think that this could be an interesting documentary series without Bear, but ultimately he’s what separates this from a run of the mill survivor stories show and it’s pretty good fun! It fully aired back in 2013 and that’s one of the beauties for the Starbucks™ system as it can allow extra generation of cash for a once forgotten piece of content. But, if you’re like me and in it for the freebies. This was one of the better ones!