Joe ran for president in 2016 and also for OK governor in 2018. Both seemed like publicity stunts but he did hire a guy to help run his run for governor.
Big cats will rip your arm off, and their owners will too.
They could have shaved an hour off the total runtime by eliminating all the repeated recorded warnings that an inmate from the Grady County Jail was calling.
My thoughts:
[ul]
[li]Joe is both extremely canny and a blithering idiot. If he hadn’t poked the bear (Carole) so many times via social media, I don’t think he would have gotten convicted.[/li][li]Lowe (along with his pet henchman Grady) definitely set Joe up. Grady took the money for the “hit” then just wandered over to South Carolina for a paid vacation. You could tell how disgusted he was having to say he “chickened out” on camera.[/li][li]Carole killed her second husband. Really, is there any doubt about that?[/li][li]Carole is also a massive hypocrite; her “zoo” looked much worse than Joe’s (or Doc Antle’s, or any other “zoo” we saw). The fact she has millions of dollars and still maintains her “zoo” in such squalor is particularly frustrating, given how much she “looooves” the big cats.[/li][li]I’ve read reports that many of the folks in the documentary (including Doc Antle and Joe’s ex-husband John) aren’t pleased with how they were depicted on camera. Here’s an idea, genius: Don’t be filmed in the first place. Or, if you are, don’t say crazy things, or don’t appear shirtless for the majority of your interviews, or don’t open your mouth if you’re going to later complain about how your teeth (or lack thereof) look.[/li][li]Seriously, Carole killed her second husband. There were many times she had a look on her face that would make Cersei Lannister cringe.[/li][/ul]
Pretty much all of that.
Joe is a reprehensible creature but I think he’s better than Doc Antle, Jeff Lowe or Carole Baskin. Joe said “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest” enough that he should have at least been convicted of terroristic threats but he was totally set up on the more serious charge. I can’t feel too bad about him because his actions led to it but still.
I feel bad for Joe’s employees. Lost souls on starvation wages with no where else to go but they genuinely seemed to care about the animals above everything else. I also feel bad for Carole’s indentured servants working for no money and the hope to get a different colored shirt.
In the big cat world it seems like the most sane one is the convicted drug kingpin who could nonchalantly talk about the murder of a government informant on his property.
Most of Joe’s eventual large scale problems all come back to his obsession with Carole Baskin. Had he not committed the most slam-dunk case of trademark violation in legal history, he would never have owed her a million dollars. Had he not owed her a million dollars, the legal wrangling and him roping his parents into “owning” his zoo would not have happened, and he would not have had to bring in Jeff Lowe or the fat guy with the weird haircut, and he might have been able to run his zoo and make money until he, too, died in a gun-related accident, which based on his much he respected firearms was gonna happen sooner or later.
Joe is not so much an idiot as he is a man with severe emotional stunting. I’m no psychiatrist but literally nothing about him suggests he is stupid, and yet there are so many things about him that say “something is wrong,” if you get my drift. One thing the documentary didn’t mention was that he liked to go on daily rants at his employees that could last two or three hours, just huge stream-of-consciousness tirades. That is indicative not of stupidity, but of serious psychological challenges. I’d also point out that his zoo becoming larger than he could manage, to the point the animals were not bieng cared for, is pretty much identical to the story of any animal hoarder with the more conventional affliction of gathering up cats or birds in a house.
I will grant Carole Baskin is a piece of work too, and was after him, but it’s rather clear she had no effect on the popularity of GW Zoo. People were still going to pet the tigers. He could have kept making money from it and just ignored her, but he was an immature idiot. There are few things more firmly indicative of a person’s emotional maturity than their ability to avoid pointless feuds.
The show kind of glossed over it but Joe didn’t just try to hire Grady, he also tried to hire an FBI agent to kill Carole. I honestly get the sense the show deliberately avoided talking about that to add drama. If the story is “Jeff and Grady say Joe tried to have Carole murdered” the audience is left with some reasonable doubt, because who the hell would trust those assholes? If they had made it clear “oh, and also, Joe offered money to an agent of the FBI and asked HIM to murder Carole,” well there isn’t much else to say at that point.
This was another area where the documentary could have saved a lot of time. Explaining Joe’s attempt to get Grady to kill Carole, and what subsequently happened, should have taken five minutes, and I’m being quite generous. It took thirty or forty, because they kept stating the same facts over and over.
Carole Baskin is many things, but a good actress isn’t one of them.
I have feeling that Carole’s (late?) second husband, Don, is worthy of a Netflix series in his own right.
He married his first wife when he was 17 and she was 14, and she wonders why it eventually collapsed? I do know that child marriage was not uncommon at that time (mid-century).
Did anyone else get pedophile vibes from Doc Antle? Some of his wives/employees said they had been there for years, but didn’t look old enough to have been legal adults when they started “working” for him.
I thought that scene at the end of episode 5 where he reached into a birthing den with a pole and removed a newly born cub was incredibly cruel. Those cubs belonged with their mother, not in a playpen being bottle-fed.
Read somewhere the guy making the reality show for Joe is now in Norway “hiding out” but they did not say why he is hiding.
Quick question- why the obsession with tigers (and to a lesser extent lions)? Or put another way, why not leopards? A bit smaller and a far cooler animal (in the wild at least). The show highlights or mentions black panthers and snow leopards a little bit, but the coolest cats (Leopards) are barely mentioned. I know that Cheetahs are notoriously difficult animals.
Are Leopards harder to raise? Smaller litters so not so much $$$ when selling? Able to climb and thus escape more easily? Or do they attack keepers or otherwise more difficult?
Guides in Africa are definitely more in awe of leopards compared to the larger and dirtier lions. And they are spectacular animals in coloring and have a menacing face… so why not the animal park love?
Tigers are more popular so if you want to have a zoo with visitors they are a safer pick. Tigers are used a lot in ads such as Frosted flakes, tiger paw tires ,etc. Also a lot of sports teams are tigers. Leopards are not as well known.
Is anyone here from the region? If so, what did people think of him, and the park, even before all this went down?
I don’t get it.
So, because of all this publicity there’s a push to get Trump to pardon the guy (why?), the sheriff to re-open the case, plus get a new investigation as to what happened to husband #2.
Now? Do we need these officials to get involved in this side show now???
I’m a little concerned that with Carole Baskin’s portrayal on the show, someone might finish the job.
Carole so reminds me of Hillary Clinton…her manner of speaking and eye rolling.
I would have said that killing your husband and feeding him to a tiger was too bizarre to contemplate. Then I watched the series. Based on how the characters appear, at least in the series, I am no longer sure. They’re all crazier than bedbugs.
I kept thinking about the lion tamer in Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, another movie which I highly recommend. That movie is also about eccentrics, but they aren’t dangerous eccentrics. Contrasting that with the Tiger King, who apparently is, or was.
The lion tamer in F,C,aOoC wasn’t working out his past neuroses. He just was deeply focused on one area of life, and didn’t try to make sense out of the whole world based only on that. He knew, on some level, that he was unusual in his interests. But that was OK.
Interesting how some people can use lion taming, or topiaries, or naked mole rats, or space exploration, to organize their lives, and some follow their obsessions off the deep end.
I find eccentrics fascinating. Of course I come from a family, most of whom could politely be referred to as eccentric, although most of us aren’t dangerous. And others who have very focused areas of expertise that allow them to organize their lives successfully. The Tiger King apparently couldn’t do that.
Very interesting series. I am not sure I should take it as a warning for myself, or not.
Regards,
Shodan
Her current husband would have reminded me of the kindly old pediatrician, that kind of thing, if it wasn’t for those incredibly bizarre wedding pictures.
Here you go. thelostogle.com is a irreverent look at Oklahoma politics, people and happenings.
Go to the SEARCH box and type in Joe Exotic if the above doesn’t take you there directly. They have been covering him for years.
David Spade has a You Tube channel, and he’s done some interview with the cast members; all are interesting, and not always in a bad way. They’re 10 to 15 minutes in length.
And guess who’s got COVID.