Free Survivor Tribe Swatches for Adobe Illustrator

I am very excited that a new sea­son of the great­est show in the his­tory of Tele­vi­sion has returned. No, not Heroes or Lost, it’s Sur­vivor of course!

In  honor of the sac­ri­fice of my Thurs­day Nights and count­less hours oth­er­wise spent on pro­duc­tive enter­prises now devoted to con­tem­plat­ing  the fate of strangers eat­ing insects halfway around the globe;  I am giv­ing away my col­lec­tion of Sur­vivor Tribal color swatches for Adobe Illus­tra­tor for free. As a fan/addict of the show I’ve been col­lect­ing the col­ors of the tribes or teams and cre­at­ing swatch pal­lets for them. These swatch palettes have the  color of each tribe up through the last sea­son, Sur­vivor: Gabon.  View the swatches in the list view in Illus­tra­tor and you will see that each swatch has the name of the sea­son and the name of the tribe that the color once proudly represented.

DOWNLOAD SURVIVOR SWATCHES!

Swatches for Illus­tra­tor / Adobe Cre­ative Suite ASE swatch palettes.

Enjoy the swatches, but let me digress a bit on why I find this pro­gram so inter­est­ing.
Why do I like this silly, con­trived show so much?  I’ve often won­dered that myself. Why devote so much men­tal energy guess­ing the effect of every con­ver­sa­tion, chal­lenge, reward, moon phase, tidal fluc­tu­a­tion or ascend­ing astro­log­i­cal aspect will have on the out­come of the game? Why fol­low the out­come of a show that I have no stake in? Why do I do it? Addic­tion to a triv­ial show? Prob­a­bly, but I’ll try to ratio­nal­ize it, if for no other rea­sons than my amuse­ment and to think about Sur­vivor even more.
The con­clu­sion I’ve come to is that Sur­vivor com­bines sev­eral ele­ments that I find irre­sistible. These irre­sistible ele­ments that Sur­vivor com­bines are:

• The roman­tic notion of escape
•    The exotic
•    Voyeurism
•    Cannibalism

Escape

In an age of anx­i­ety men seek a refuge. Because of some deep urge, con­stant through­out his­tory, trou­bled men tra­di­tion­ally dream of islands, pos­si­bly because of the small­ness of an island invites the illu­sion that here the com­plex­i­ties of con­ti­nen­tal soci­eties can be avoided, or at least con­trolled. This is a per­ma­nent, world-wide dream.“
- James A. Mitch­ner & A. Grove Day, Ras­cals in Par­adise, Tur­bu­lent adven­ture and bold courage on the South Seas.

Illu­sion of Paradise

Sur­vivor is endowed with the roman­tic ideal of escape. The show is a game, but the mythol­ogy of the show is no mere game. It begins with the “exile” of 16–20 west­ern “cast­aways” or “sur­vivors” to an idyl­lic trop­i­cal island or other exotic locale; and we the audi­ence go along for the ride. If you could draw blood from Sur­vivor and exam­ine its DNA, you would find the works of Daniel Defoe, Robert Louis Stephen­son, Jack Lon­don, Her­man Melville and Joseph Con­rad form­ing the rigid base pair­ings of the show.

The idea of escap­ing the world to craft a new civ­i­liza­tion in par­adise is very invit­ing. If you think I’m been bit grandiose here, you may be right, com­par­ing as show like this with giants of lit­er­a­ture; how­ever the show does coat tail off of many of the ideas and images in the works of those mas­ters. After all, it’s telling that the pre­cur­sor to Sur­vivor was a Swedish pro­gram called Expe­di­tion Robin­son, ala Robin­son Crusoe.

The Exotic

Sur­vivor is typ­i­cally set on a trop­i­cal island in the South Pacific, though some­times the cast­aways find them­selves marooned in the vast jun­gles of the Amer­i­cas, Africa or Asia.  These exotic locales feed into this feel­ing of escape.

Escap­ing to a deserted island is one thing, but the exotic isn’t com­plete with­out the will­ing wahine and the noble sav­age. Indige­nous cul­tures are present in the show, but often in  the lim­ited short­hand of the romance of colo­nial­ism. Every sea­son some of the cast­aways win a chal­lenge and are fer­ried to a vil­lage by the pro­duc­ers and par­tic­i­pate in some sort of con­trived bac­cha­nal.  The iconog­ra­phy of the native cul­tures are used not really to illu­mi­nate, but to be used as set pieces for the con­trived drama for the show.

Idol from Sur­vivor Fiji

A designer I really love the pop-exotic art direc­tion in the show and the pop cul­ture exotic flair. In fact, I have a 4 foot tiki statue in my back yard! Sur­vivor has always had a won­der­fully kitschy tribal coun­cil set where the can­ni­bal­ized mem­bers of the show are digested into the jury. The set is full of imagery rife with the exotic idols, fire pits, rat­tan, wicker, native(ish) art and the ubiq­ui­tous bam­boo.  The show changes it’s sets and iconog­ra­phy to suit the theme of each show. Be that pirates, African Tribes­men or South Seas can­ni­bals, the dec­o­ra­tions fit the theme and high­light the roman­tic exotic ideal of that environment.

The most vivid “prim­i­tive” icon is the “immu­nity idol,” a totem that keeps the player or team safe from going to tribal coun­cil and get­ting voted off the island. The idol itself is usu­ally a styl­ized vision of some prim­i­tive god and it lives some­where halfway between the real­ity of the local cul­ture and the idea of the exotic enchanted land where that par­tic­u­lar sea­son is set. A style that has it’s DNA, not  in the native styles of where ever the show is located, but in the Disney’s Adven­ture­land,  Trader  Vic’s  restau­rants and glo­ri­ous mid­cen­tury Poly­ne­sian– Pop ephemera. The immu­nity idols them­selves are fan­tas­tic pieces of art that look as if they should grace the cov­ers of the great Exot­ica leg­ends Lex Bax­ter or Mar­tin Denny, or be ren­dered in glo­ri­ous two dimen­sions by SHAG. Hope­fully they are being pre­served for future Urban or pop cul­ture Arche­ol­o­gist; pre­served for a future Sven Kirsten.

The Voyeur and Grub worms or another rea­son to hate Kobe Bryant.

Kobe Shoots the worm.

Sure it has an exotic loca­tion, but what makes it a fun is the addi­tion of two other ele­ments, first it is a real­ity show, so there is a strong voyeuris­tic ele­ment to it. It is inter­est­ing to see peo­ple osten­si­bly like you or me and putting them in such a strange  and stress­ful sit­u­a­tion and see­ing how they react. I first dis­cov­ered Sur­vivor not because of any fore­sight but because of Kobe Bryant. I acci­dently found Sur­vivor half way through the first sea­son in Bor­neo. I was watch­ing the NBA finals and being dis­gusted that the Lak­ers were blow­ing out my man Reg­gie Miller’s Pac­ers, I turned the chan­nel and saw a guy eat­ing a bug. Now this caught my atten­tion!  So you can blame my devo­tion to Sur­vivor to equal parts Kobe Bryant’s jump shot and the epi­curean delight of grub worms. All those Thurs­days lost thanks to that jumper and that bug.

Can­ni­bal Con­tes­tants

The show is a com­pe­ti­tion, that is why I think it became so pop­u­lar. It had escape, exotic loca­tions cou­pled with the voyeuris­tic car wreck. But we’d see all that before.  Sur­vivor was the first real­ity show, as far as I can remem­ber, that turned the con­tes­tants into cannibals.

The Lotu, or the Wor­ship, was pro­gress­ing slowly, and, often, in crab­like fash­ion. Chiefs, who announced them­selves Chris­tians and were wel­comed into the body of the chapel, had a dis­tress­ing habit of back­slid­ing in order to par­take of the flesh of some favorite enemy. Eat or be eaten had been the law of the land; and eat or be eaten promised to remain the law of the land for a long time to come.“
–Jack Lon­don, Whale Tooth

Soy­lent Green Burger?

The premise is very inter­est­ing. First, the con­tes­tants have to work together to cre­ate some sort of com­mu­nity and find com­fort in the wild. Of course it isn’t a real sur­vival sit­u­a­tion, the pro­duc­tion com­pany won’t let them actu­ally die, but they do let them get very, very uncom­fort­able. In a pseudo-survival sit­u­a­tion like this how do peo­ple react? Do they band together or save them­selves at any price. In the real world peo­ple most often band together. How­ever, the insid­i­ous genus of the show comes into play here,  since only one indi­vid­ual can win. In the real world groups win, but this is a micro­cosm of the world, so how does an indi­vid­ual impose their will with­out alien­at­ing every­one?
This makes  one sur­vivor Out Wit, Out Last and Out Play and thereby can­ni­bal­iz­ing friend and foe alike. To win you have to can­ni­bal­ize other mem­bers, but doing it in such a way that they will still vote for you as mem­bers of a jury that pick the win­ner 2–3 final­ists.  Kill and eat your rivals but be nice about it. To win sur­vivor, like chess you have to sac­ri­fice peo­ple on your own side. That is a dif­fi­cult thing to do on many lev­els. Watch­ing it unfold tells some­thing about the human con­di­tion. What I am not totally sure, since the show is on many lev­els arti­fice, to answer that I’d have to stop pay­ing atten­tion to all the eat­ing of bugs.

My visions were of ship­wreck and famine; of death or cap­tiv­ity among bar­bar­ian hordes; of a life­time dragged out in sor­row and tears, upon some gray and des­o­late rock, in an ocean unap­proach­able and unknown. Such visions or desires– for they amounted to desires– are com­mon, I have since been assured, to the whole numer­ous race of the melan­choly among men…“
–Edgar Allen Poe: The Nar­ra­tive of Arthur Gor­don  Pym