The perennial host and figurehead of Wild Kingdom was zoologist Marlin Perkins. Perkins began his zoo­ logical career as reptile curator at the St. Louis Zoo (Missouri) in 1926. He served as director of the Buffalo Zoo (New York) in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Lincoln Park Zoo  (Chicago)  through  the  1950s, and finally the St. Louis Zoo, a position he held from 1962 until his death on June 14, 1986. Throughout his career, Perkins was drawn to the  medium of  television as a means of promoting a conservationist ethic and popularizing  a  corresponding  understanding   of wildlife and the natural world.

     Perkins initiated his involvement in the production of nature programming in 1945, when television itself was only beginning to work its way into the fabric of American life. Having recently been named director of Lincoln Park Zoo, Perkins began hosting a wildlife television program on a small, local Chicago station, WBKB . He then became the host of 'Zoo Parade in 1949, which began its eight-year run on Chicago station WNBQ before becoming an NBC network show early in 1950. 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 (filmed in the reptile house basement) in which Perkins would present and describe the life and peculiarities of Lincoln Park Zoo animals. Soon after his move to the St. Louis Zoo in 1962, Perkins and 'Zoo Parade's producer-director Don Meier were convinced by representatives of the Mutual of Omaha Insurance Company to create Wild Kingdom. Perkins remained involved with the production of Wild Kingdom until a year before his death in 1986 .

     Unlike 'Zoo Parade' , Wild Kingdom was shot on film almost entirely in the field and featured encounters with wild animals in their natural habitats. Indeed, one of the program's signature features was the footage of Marlin Perkins, or his assistants Jim Fowler and later Stan Brock, pursuing and at times physically engaging with the wildlife-of-the-week, whether that meant mud-wrestling with alligators, struggling to get free from the viselike grip of a massive water snake, running from unexpectedly awakened elephants or seemingly angered sea lions, or jumping from a helicopter onto the back of an elk in the snows of Montana . Edited to emphasize the dangerous, dramatic, or comedic interplay between man and beast, accompanied by the appropriate soundtrack mix of music and natural sound, and always punctuated by the familiar voice-overs of Marlin or Jim, the popular narrative conceit of Wild Kingdom was criticized at times by some zoologists and environmentalists for putting entertainment values before those of ecological education. Yet Wild Kingdom reflected in precisely these ways many of the dominant ecophilosophical and ecological tenets of its day. Set "out in nature," as one reviewer put it, and structured around the actions of protagonists who have left the ordered world of the zoo to explore the unpredictable and often alien natural landscape, Wild Kingdom echoed the conservationist idea of the natural world and the human world as, at best, separate but equal kingdoms.

     Many wildlife/nature series since Wild Kingdom have developed different and less human-centered narrative strategies with which to represent the natural world, strategies that may themselves reflect a contemporary shift away from the anthropocentric essence of conservatism toward a more ecocentrically defined environmentalism. In their day, however, Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler were, in the words of Charles Seibert, "television's cowboy naturalists," and their weekly rides proved to be among the most popular in television history.