While browsing the BBC website for something else just now (OK, OK, I wanted to know when Torchwood was on, I have this thing for stroppy leather-clad Welsh women with guns) I discovered the first episode of Planet Dinosaur lurking ominously on the iPlayer, so, in the interests of science entertainment science I watched it.
Those of a certain age might recall that I was critical of the BBC’s last major dinosaur series, Walking with Dinosaurs, now (Heavens to Betsy!!) more than a decade old. The main reason was its presentation, as a straight-ahead wildlife documentary. This was good for drama, but the viewer had no way of knowing which elements of the scene were known to be true; which were based on inference; and which were necessarily speculative.
I remember being quizzed by a friend at the time who’d been watching the series with his offspring. “But Dad,” quoth the offspring, “how do they know this?” “I don’t know,” the Dad replied, making a mental note to ask me. I was, after all, a palaeontologist, and a scientist, and therefore Keeper of the Arcane Secrets. I felt sorry to have to disappoint him. “They don’t know this,” I was forced to say, “a lot of it is just guesswork.” Presenting statements of varying degrees of truth on the same level of … er … verisimilitude was, and still is, a disservice to science. The public will be rightly suspicious and will be less inclined to believe anything a scientist says in future, whether the information is reliable or not.
So what of Planet Dinosaur? This series takes advantage of a decade of stunning dinosaur discoveries, and many of the stars of the show will be new to most people. The first episode (of six) concentrates on the Late Cretaceous of North Africa, and the lives of two large predators, Spinosaurus and Carcharodontosaurus. The first has been known since 1912, but the recent discovery of more remains, and the remains of similar dinosaurs in other parts of the world, have painted a picture of currently The Largest Predator Known To Have Walked The Earth(TM). The narration by John Hurt is much better than Kenneth Branagh’s on Walking With Dinosaurs, but these fine actors both have to cope with a script that focuses on a right old attack of the dooms, with lashings of death, killing, death, copious loss of blood, doom, killing, death, nasty long pointy teeth, killing, death, killing and more killing. Where were the dinosaurs that liked to stay home of an evening with their knitting, a mug of Ovaltine and perhaps a nice Catherine Cookson novel from the library? There will perhaps be a respite next week, which promises a rash of small feathered dinosaurs such as Microraptor and Epidexipteryx. We’ll see.
Walking With Dinosaurs used a mixture of CGI and animatronics in real landscapes. Planet Dinosaur is completely computer generated, and this allows for a certain stylistic licence. The animation is fine, as far as one can tell, if not eye-popping, but the completely-CGI presentation allows for some abrupt shifts of camera angle, making quite sure that we are concentrating on the action, and heightening the drama. As such, I ‘read’ the episode less as a straight documentary than as animé, as if it had been adapted from a graphic novel. The experience of watching Planet Dinosaur reminded me of – of all things – the movie 300, about the Battle of Thermopylae. I enjoyed the film, and its stylistic conventions, without knowing – at the time – that it had been an adaptation of a graphic novel.
Does Planet Dinosaur ramp up style at the expense of substance? Happily, the answer is no. Walking With Dinosaurs had a special ‘Making Of’ feature that answered some of the criticisms that people like me (I was not alone) had raised, but Planet Dinosaur has another strategy. Every so often it freezes the action with a kind of animated sidebar presenting actual evidence for some of the action. For example, head-to-head battles between dinosaurs over prey carcasses, or territory, are intercut with quick graphics showing actual fossil evidence for such things. The graphics are rather like animated footnotes. They’re a clean and efficient way of presenting the evidence and don’t interrupt the action unduly, for all that they remind one of the editorial asides in the TV version of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Mrs Crox (who saw the program when it originally aired, a few days ago) summed it up very well – it looks like an animated Dorling Kindersley book of dinosaurs.
We await the next episodes with interest.
Oh excellent. So is it like 300, that the dinos are all buff and sweaty? My wife wants to know.
Buff, not sweaty. And not homoerotic either, as far as one can tell.
Allright then. Along the lines of 300 and Sucker Punch, we were both hoping the dinos would be muscled and scantily clad, but perhaps that wouldn’t be scientifically proven either….
They are indeed muscled and completely nude.
looks interesting!.
(not available in your area, it says: I can not watch the scene of Spinosaurus during two minutes !)
Argh!
I’m so sorry Alejandro – the BBC is a bit snarky about people outside the UK looking at their stuff.
But if the only thing I want to be a noble knight of the order …..of …
THE ORDER OF THE UNICYCLING GIRRAFE.
Alejandro – try http://www.bbc.com, rather than http://www.bbc.co.uk... It doesn’t have all the content, but you might be lucky…
John
Thanks John I will try again.
By the way what is your Linkedin in order to be friends?
Alejandro.
I saw this pop up on the iplayer and I had my reservations – but now I feel I can watch with a bit less trepidation. Thanks!
Ha – I’m old enough to know exactly what you mean about Hitch-hiker’s – exactly what I said to my esteemed spouse x
Excellent. I shall await the DVD/Blu-Ray release of this… although I suspect it will appear on BBC Canada in due course (if I can figure out when, and/or remember which of the multi-hundreds of digital cable channels it is).
Wot Ricardipus sed.
Jurassic Park was on again last week. I still can’t watch it without a) cheering when the lawyer gets eaten while on the loo, b) tensing up when the raptors are in the kitchen, and c) remembering how my then-16-year-old sister insisted on sleeping on the floor of my bedroom when we came back from seeing it at the cinema… (I was 18 and gave her the appropriate level of grief about the incident! She still hasn’t watched it a second time. Mind you she still hasn’t seen Jaws, either, after getting totally freaked out by the sound of the music coming up from the TV (directly under her bedroom) the first time I was allowed to watch it, when she was sent up to her room instead.)
Fun cross-reference – the actor (Wayne Knight, a.k.a. “Newman” on Seinfeld) who played the sneaky traitor guy in Jurassic Park, also appeared (in a similarly slimy role) in the recent Torchwood series, Miracle Day.
Which I am about half way through, having PVR’d all the episodes recently.
Pingback: I predict a riot | Confessions of a (former) Lab Rat
Where were the dinosaurs that liked to stay home of an evening with their knitting, a mug of Ovaltine and perhaps a nice Catherine Cookson novel from the library?
Those are the dinosaurs from which I am descended, undoubtedly. We are a surprisingly successful tribe, with our own Sock Summits, online communities, and yarn crawls.
A much unsung breed.
You only get to do much singing if you put a little something extra in the Ovaltine, in my experience…
Which leads me to mention one of the great unsolved mysteries of the age, that is, the identity of the person who put benzedrine in Mrs Murphy’s Ovaltine. The usual suspect was Mr Murphy, but that doesn’t square with his own separate discovery of nembutal in his overalls.
Just watched episode 2, all about the feathered dinosaurs of China and Mongolia, almost all of which were first
punishedpublished in Your Favourite Professional weekly Etcetera. A lot of fun, but again the episode was based totally on dinosaurs ambushing and eating one another – which, I’m sad to say, made a potentially exciting episode rather dull.“Dinosaurs ambushing and eating one another…”
- Not a reference to the current UK political party conference season surely?
Sorry, couldn’t resist….
But Henry, is not so strange (is very stranger that a paleontologist be sad about these things of everyday), why the life outside now is so ! (including humans).
It is very sad because it is a matter of survival that involves the top of the pyramid.
Austin E., said wisely: “we’re in the same shit”.
Disagree with your criticism of Walking with Dinosaurs … the programme never advertised itself as a documentary; as I recall the narrative was very clear about the fact it was not a documentary. So judging it by the standards of a documentary, as you do, is unfair. It was, and only ever purported to be, an imaginative exercise, exploring the question of what a wildlife documentary about dinosaurs might be like if it were possible to film such a thing. It was extremely speculative, but basically honest about the fact of its speculativeness. On the whole I think it did a good job. Won’t necessarily say the same about its imitators.
(I don’t have a copy of the video, but I do have the book, which states, on the first page of the introduction, “It is not intended to be an encyclopedia, it is an experience.” I swear I recall a comparable disclaimer on the program itself … i.e. that it is not intended to be a documentary.)
We’ll just have to agree to differ. I wasn’t the only person to read it as a documentary- the subject came up on a Right To Reply feature on C4 – and nothing in the program bire any disclaimer. I have seen the videos since dozens of times.