The Ultimate Prehistoric Documentary Thread

[Lord Agragax of Lunaxoatl]

If you haven’t noticed, some of us Dino-fans (namely @Infinity Turtle, @Lizards of Renown and @Imrahil) have been clogging up Scalenex’s latest Short Story Contest threads with posts concerning our obsessions with documentaries revolving around prehistoric life, so I’ve developed this thread for all future discussions about our fave tv programmes about the extremely distant past! Feel free to post all manner of stuff about how much you love your top natural history programmes here!

As I was the first to create this thread, I will post my favourites first:

I eagerly await everyone else’s voices!

 

[Lizards of Renown]

If you haven’t noticed, some of us Dino-fans (namely @Infinity Turtle, @Lizards of Renown and @Imrahil) have been clogging up Scalenex’s latest Short Story Contest threads with posts concerning our obsessions with documentaries revolving around prehistoric life, so I’ve developed this thread for all future discussions about our fave tv programmes about the extremely distant past! Feel free to post all manner of stuff about how much you love your top natural history programmes here!

As I was the first to create this thread, I will post my favourites first:

​

I eagerly await everyone else’s voices!

This is brilliant!

Unfortunately, I can't remember the titles of any of the programs I used to watch when I was a kid.

I guess Jurassic Park doesn't count?

 

[Infinity Turtle]

Huzzah!!

(Nigel's first appearence in this universe I believe- predating Prehistoric Park by several years)


^Some of you may recognise this dinosaur size chart (@Rednax ) which is from the 'Sea Monsters' portion of the Chased by Dinosaurs 3-parter:

Some lesser known perhaps...:

I literally only just managed to track down this one after months of "What's that one where the thing falls into a hole and can't get out and then dies?" so if you also have that exact memory, then well done.

^This one is an off-shoot of Walking WIth Dinosaurs

^ When Dinouars Roamed America (we used to borrow this from a friend)

There are many more, but for now I'll leave you with this...:

I really don't know how we stumbled upon this in our youth but my gosh. What a rollarcoaster...

 

[pendrake]

Look for PBS EONs on YouTube. They are usually 11-12 minutes long focused on a single topic.

 

[Lizards of Renown]

Okay, so my program would be something with David Attenborough for sure, even though I still can't remember it.

I'll do some research and find some of the old programs.

Gotta say that I do love his narration of these nature program type things.

 

[Killer Angel]

Okay, so my program would be something with David Attenborough for sure, even though I still can't remember it.

This one is pretty interesting. On mobile you can rotate the Camera 360° with touch screen and it's pretty amazing, i have no idea what you could see on a pc screen

 

[Imrahil]

Amazing find!

Most 360° YouTube clips can be rotated with a mouse click and swiping the cursor around.

Grrr, Imrahil

 

[Infinity Turtle]

Just started rewatching ‘Chased By Dinosaurs’ (with Nigel Marvin) and I’ve made some mini apple pies. I’m all set for this self isolation...

 

[Lizards of Renown]

Okay, so @Infinity Turtle @Lord Agragax of Lunaxoatl @Imrahil

Check out Australia: The Wild Top End

While not prehistoric, there's some great Croc footage and a bird that is a direct Dino descendant...

 

[Lord Agragax of Lunaxoatl]

a bird that is a direct Dino descendant...

Well, pretty much all birds are dinosaur descendants, because birds evolved from raptorid dinosaurs that started to use their feathers for first gliding and then powered flight, but I know what you mean, some birds like Ostriches and Emus look more prehistoric than others

 

[Lizards of Renown]

some birds like Ostriches and Emus look more prehistoric than others

My point exactly.

There is a bird, with a cone head that has arguably the deepest bird call in the world. Check it out.

@Infinity Turtle so Australia and New Zealand are both on my "Must Travel To Some Day" list. Absolutely stunning.

 

[Infinity Turtle]

Australian megafauna is truly incredible. When you look at surviving megafauna today, namely giraffes, elephants and the like, we've kinda gotten used to them. Things like Emu, Cassowary and kangaroo are still technically megafauna, but since people think everything in australia is big/dangerous, they're kind of disregarded.

My point exactly.

There is a bird, with a cone head that has arguably the deepest bird call in the world. Check it out.

@Infinity Turtle so Australia and New Zealand are both on my "Must Travel To Some Day" list. Absolutely stunning.

I was just listening to some cassowary calls and my brother said it sounds like a velociraptor. So point proven i guess...?

Cassowaries are kind of terrifying...



An art project I'm working on at the moment has given me a lot of free reign, so I'm researching Australian megafauna and dinosaurs and exploring a world in which they were still alive in the late 1800s/early 1900s (in Australia, of course). Australovenator is arguably one of the coolest predators ever, giant wombats (diprotodons) and massive kangaroos reaching over 2m are just a few of the incredible creatures that existed in Australia. Though most dies out many years ago, some of our 'prehistoric' animals were alive less than a hundred years ago, such as the Thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. In New Zealand, Moas also survived for quite a while, only dying out 600 years ago ish.

One of the biggest dinosaur 'trails' in Australia is in central Queensland and going there was unforgettable. If you ever get the chance to come to Australia and you're into camping/roughing it, a trip to central Australia is well worth it! (particularly for dinosaurs...)

I haven't been to the Top End (the Northern Territory) but one day it'd be really cool.

 

[Killer Angel]

Things like Emu, Cassowary and kangaroo are still technically megafauna, but since people think everything in australia is big/dangerous, they're kind of disregarded.

Well, Cassowary is big and dangerous, so it fits perfectly australian style.

 

[Lord Agragax of Lunaxoatl]

Thought I'd Necromance this thread in light of the emergence of the BBC's sequel to Walking with Dinosaurs - what do you all think of it? How does it stand compared to other prehistoric documentary favourites?

Spoiler: Here are my thoughts after seeing one episode

The Good:

• The dinosaurs themselves: I certainly have no complaints regarding the CGI the new series uses, even though there are some who are whining about it because they don't think it looks as good as that used in Prehistoric Planet (which I haven't seen and won't see so long as they lock it behind a streaming service ). I'm known around here for being happy to enjoy a vast range of CGI stuff without noticing its age, but even I can see that the CGI is a significant improvement over many of the earlier documentaries. Also, one thing this one seemed to manage to maintain from the original was placing the CGI dinos amid real locations, something I will admit Planet Dinosaur did not do (and many CGI-phobes still lampoon it for... again, all very petty from my point of view, but people with a grudge will always target the most superficial things first). Also, kudos for following Prehistoric Planet in doing more to explore dinosaur life outside of hunting - given that modern-day ostriches and emus very often get the fathers to raise their offspring, the idea of a male dinosaur being the principle protector and caregiver for youngsters is not unreasonable, especially in species where the males may be larger and more aggressive (and thus more willing to savage anything that may harm the young) than the females.
• The ideas conveyed: The episode I watched was the second one, with Sobek the Spinosaurus (an appropriate name for more than one reason), and I find it very interesting how they've portrayed the Spinosaurus as quite a slow and lumbering creature upon land, with a gait more like a hadrosaur and quite short stumpy legs, with a massively long flat paddle-like tail to propel it through the water and with the full-on ability to swim underwater like a crocodile, with limbs tucked in to aid in streamlining. Indeed I wouldn't be surprised that this was the case with the real animal, for dinosaurs and crocodiles were both from the Archosaur group of reptiles and quite closely related. Ever since the general public first got to see a Spinosaurus in Jurassic Park III, it's quite indicative of the progress made in learning more and more about the real creature and its lifestyle to see how the portrayal of it has changed from being another land predator that could supposedly K.O. T-Rex (a trope subversion I personally liked but looks more and more inaccurate), through to Planet Dinosaur's version being happy to swim on the surface of the water but still staunchly remaining a bipedal predatory dinosaur, to this series' depiction of it openly starting to cross the evolutionary divide between dinosaur and crocodile.
• The narration: Some people have voiced issues with Bertie Carvel's narration simply because it's different from Kenneth Branagh's, but, like the CGI, I found his narration to be one of the least of the series' problems. His diction was clear and his English was correct - that's all I need to be satisfied with a quality narrator for a British dinosaur documentary.

The Bad:

• The lack, censorship and sanitisation of fight scenes: The one episode I watched had very little in the way of fight scenes, and aside from a decent sequence near the end showing our Spinosaurus catching an Onchopristis crocodile-style and quickly getting attacked by another Spinosaur trying to steal his catch off him, most of the opportunities for a dinosaur rumble were either reduced to roar-offs, or, if something had to die, it was very conveniently censored (in one instance, rather embarrassingly, with a cut to pterosaurs flying scared out of the trees - a prehistoric version of a very standard trope of depicting death). While I'm certainly not saying that it should be wall-to-wall dinosaur fights, and as I have already mentioned it was nice to see the documentary explore more non-fighting aspects of prehistoric life, it still feels as though it has gone too far in the latter aspect and has very much watered down the necessary harshness of nature that would have been as prevalent 65+ million years ago as it is now. The few scenes of confrontation there are are largely played very safely and in a very squeaky-clean and sanitised manner, and it's pretty obvious that they were desperate to avoid upsetting any kiddies - which seems rather unnecessary when you consider that the original WWD, Prehistoric Park and Planet Dinosaur are still merely PG in classification even today and all managed to get away with showcasing a lot more prehistoric violence without offending anyone. Moreover, this lack of conflict makes the very few scenes with any form of confrontation a lot more predictable, because very soon you start to instinctively know that not much in the way of bad stuff will happen. After watching the episode of the new WWD, I was immediately prompted to rewatch the first episode of Planet Dinosaur, featuring many of the same creatures in exactly the same area of Africa, and the contrast was incredibly stark - with the latter being pretty much the Rogue One of dinosaur documentaries, gritty with a capital 'G' and with no dinosaur being safe from harm, one could immediately sense a bit of 'chalk and cheese' syndrome.
• The pacing: Very much interlinked with the lack of fight scenes above, the drama being largely robbed from the new WWD series very much showed in the episode's pacing - nearly all the time things progressed on a glacial level, with a Lord of the Rings-level quantity of walking shots and virtually none of the suspense and tension from the original series or any other of the great prehistoric documentaries to balance the more mundane moments out. Again, this all contributes to making it feel 'safe' and non-threatening, something you'd put on for one of those faddish 'mindfulness' sessions or a very young kiddies' playgroup.
• The conjecture: Though I mentioned that a good few of the new ideas conveyed in the series were worthy of my compliments, there were others that were not, and simply made me wonder why they bothered to include them. For instance, a segment referring to the possibility of Spinosaurus having webbed feet - yes, a possibility maybe, but is there any actual evidence on their toe-bones to suggest as such? Certainly didn't look like it, and given that Sobek the Spinosaur wasn't even depicted with webbed feet, what was the point of even bringing that up? Not to mention killing said Spinosaur off from a comparatively minor neck wound like a chump in a Padme-style death plot, just because it was believed that it died young with no definitive evidence of damage to his neck bones (when a much more likely cause would have been disease). And depicting Onchopristis as a Frankensteinian amalgamation of a sawfish and a skate, again with no real evidence to prove it... why?
• The lack of a good theme tune: This might sound particularly petty of me, but all the best prehistoric documentaries, I've found, always had excellent theme music that was so evocative of the subject material and fires up my imagination even now. We all know Walking with Dinosaurs had a recognisable theme, as did its sequel and prequel series, not to mention Prehistoric Park and Planet Dinosaur. Yet this series' intro is all kinds of bland, and very much borrows cues from so many other modern documentaries of just having a spoken intro followed by the displaying of the title, and that's it. In particular I was disappointed to see they didn't even adopt any musical or visual cues from the original WWD intro, which would have been a solid way to pay homage to it from the start. Another massive downgrade.

The Downright Ugly:

• The Palaeontology Segments: By far the worst thing about this attempt at a sequel to THE definitive dinosaur documentary was its breaking of the one rule that made the original so iconic. Just as Jurassic Park broke the mould by depicting dinosaurs alongside and interacting with 20th Century humans, Walking with Dinosaurs broke the mould by removing humans from the equation entirely, and placing them at the front and centre of a David Attenborough-style wildlife documentary, as if the film crew were right there among the dinosaurs in their own time, rather than bringing them forward to the present day, and delivering the footage straight to your TV screen. Nothing like it had ever been seen before, and rightly propelled it to a coveted place in television history. Meanwhile, this new version pretty much does the opposite of that, in that it just joins the ranks of a number of other faceless dinosaur documentaries that combine footage of real palaeontology with the occasional CGI footage of the dinosaurs the scientists are discovering. Indeed, out of the fifty minutes of the episode I watched, at least half of it was spent just watching palaeontologists brush dust off bones, offer their opinions on what they meant, and periodically show-and-tell a particular find to the exclamations of "Amazing!" and "That's immense!", serving as nothing more than padding, probably to avoid spending more money making more CGI dinosaur scenes. Don't get me wrong, Palaeontology is a fascinating study, and if you really want to be a dinosaur expert you need to know the ins-and-outs of digging them up... but having continual time-jumps from the Mesozoic to the 21st Century AD and back again is jarring (made all the more painful when ultra-modern hi-tech kit like drones is seen in the same programme as a 100 million-year-old dinosaur), and it utterly flouts the golden rule of the original to feature no humans at all apart from narration. While this would be fine and dandy for a documentary of any other name, we want to watch Walking with Dinosaurs, not Walking with Palaeontologists. If anyone had been really serious about making a true, tribute-paying successor to the one series that made it its mission to avoid this, they would have made sure not to go down this route - which suggests to me that nobody was serious about making a tribute to the original in the first place. On the contrary, breaking the no-humans rule feels more like desecration. This alongside the limited and much more sanitised dinosaur footage turns this new series from the inheritor of the original's prestigious reputation to just another ten-a-penny dino documentary to watch on a lazy afternoon while mentally switching-off, and I noticed one comment hypothesising that this production was never originally intended to be Walking With Dinosaurs 2 but a completely different series with a focus on the palaeontology side, and that some bright spark simply suggested to give it the Walking With Dinosaurs name to try and draw greater viewing figures in light of the original's success... and after seeing this one episode and all its flaws, I wouldn't be at all surprised if this was the truth behind it. Hell, if you have to include references to especially recent discoveries, Planet Dinosaur achieved it in a much better way - to simply pause the dinosaur action for a moment and depict the discoveries purely with images and diagrams, with the narrator explaining it all (as the late John Hurt did very well in Planet Dinosaur) - it gets the message across, with no time-jumps or breaking of the no-humans golden rule. Indeed, in many regards I would say Planet Dinosaur paid more of a tribute to WWD than this new series has.

In short, this is not Walking With Dinosaurs, any more than the film produced in 2010s bearing the same name was, and though I would still say this new series is better than that film, that's not saying much, and it merely serves as another tarnish to the once pristine legacy of the original. By all means watch an episode to get an idea of what it's like... but you've been warned .