On Sunday night, Discovery aired the highly anticipated “Eaten Alive” special, in which conservationist and filmmaker Paul Rosolie went head first into the jaws of a 20-foot anaconda — or at least that’s what viewers were led to believe would happen.
Maybe the show should have been called “Rolling Around in the Mud Alive,” “Constricted Alive” or “Made to Feel Really Uncomfortable … Alive!”
By the end of the two-hour event, one thing was clear: Rosolie, outfitted in a compression suit covered in a generous coating of pig blood, did convince the anaconda to go after him — but he was by no means eaten, alive or otherwise.
For those who’d waited a full hour and 45 minutes into the show to see the stunt start, the bait and switch left them angrier than the anaconda.
That’s a shame, because as the show started, they couldn’t contain their eagerness about it on Twitter:
Jacob Kaiser @jacobmkaiser: If this dude doesn’t end up inside this anaconda, I’m gonna be really upset about the last 2 hours of my life. #EatenAlive
Ken LaVicka @KLV1063: Don’t worry guys, the snake felt like it wasted a few hours of its life, too. #EatenAlive
You can find more tweets if you do a search on the hashtag #EatenAlive.
Well, at least it’s over — for now. After the encounter, Rosolie teased, “Now that I know this suit can withstand the crush, we’re ready to take it to a real giant.”
Whether or not that giant will eat him remains to be seen.
#EatenAlive should have been called #SqueezedAlive instead … False marketing LOL @Discovery
— Zak Bagans (@Zak_Bagans) December 8, 2014
What kind of a world do we live in where the promise of a man getting #EatenAlive by an anaconda on TV goes unfulfilled? — Aaron Sagers (@aaronsagers) December 8, 2014
Misleading title: #EatenAlive. Appropriate title: #BroHuggedByABigSnake.
— nascarcasm (@nascarcasm) December 8, 2014
by Ree Hines