Walking with Dinosaurs: Short Bites: A Short Review



Yesterday I have just learnt there is another recut of Walking with Dinosaurs out there thanks to the ever-reliable (sarcastic) TV Tropes. This was a recut that cut each episode down, just as the other Prehistoric Planet did, to focus on the subject species of each episode (naming the episodes after them), trimming out a lot to a ten minute slot (for comparsion, the other PHP cut episodes doen to 20 minutes). For instance, in the episode corresponding to Cruel Sea, Ramphorhynchus is gone, and Eustreoptospondylus only appears at the begining and the very end and goes unnamed, its beachcombing scenes removed entirely, while in the second episode, Brachiosaurus and Stegosaurus are removed, and in the fourth, the same goes for Iberomesornis and its sequence entire, implying he went straight to the mating grounds entirely from North America.

Kenneth Branagh does not return for this bite-sized cut of the series, instead replaced by british actor Sean Barrett. Unlike Ben Stiller, Barrett is much more closer to Branagh in gravitas and seriousness, and does fairly well in it, though nowhere as good as . I kind of wish he got a full documentary to really work with.

Otherwise... there ain't much to Short Bites, basically a Reader's Digest version of WWD. Everything good about WWD is retained here (music for instance), but in its trimmed form the narratives feel very incomplete, because they are exactly. If the documentary cut is supposed to be a profile each namesake subject, I'd suggest just having all of their scenes in it, and maybe a talking head scientist offering further information on them.

While for some it might have been their introduction to the Trilogies of Life, my advice would to just stick with the original 28 minute cuts, which educate and entertain far more.

See Also

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mesozoic Mind's Walking with Dinosaurs fan remake: 2nd Anniversary Special

Image
Two years. Two years at Mesozoic Mind , through ups and downs and bringing you the best I could give you, and expanded my horizons in life, to go where I could only dream of. To celebrate, here's what I made for all of you readers as a gift: remaking Walking with Dinosaurs for the 21st century as I'd do it. Yeah, I know, people stopped doing this kind of thing years ago, but what the heck, I wanted to do it myself, and I only really do the big ones for special occasions like these. The episodes would be quite different from the origials in setting, but would stil have enough rocognisable creature archtypes and plot beats to show which corresponds to which. Although I still see fit to tell you which is which. Also, please forgive any anachronisms in the lineups I have created. I tried my best to avoid them. Also also, the pictures used here serve to get an idea of what things would feel or look like, not be direct representations. Episode One - Archosauria Art by Olmagon Set in
Read more

Dino Lab review - Part one

Image
(Note: video provided may have stuff missing from original cut) In 2005 and 2009, two specials aired on the Discovery Channel, back when it was actually about science and documentaries. These were both called called Dino Lab , and they had a rather novel premise: instead of simply being a doc of talking heads with occasional vignettes of prehistoric life or a nature documentary-style presentation with the occasional talking head, the show has a laboratory in which dinosaurs are brought into and put through experiments for scientists to study. Such a premise is pretty interesting, if an unusual one that invites more questions (where did the dinosaurs come from? Why is the T. rex first not at the lab?). The first special, from 2005,had a special place to me, as the first one was one of the first docs I saw as a kid on TV, when I was very young. I remember seeing both a T. rex on a treadmill and a plesiosaur splashing a guy with water. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll start off with it's
Read more

T. rex: The Ultimate Predator at the ROM - a review

Image
Ah, T. rex. It needs no introduction, and even the youngest nor laypeople not familiar with all but the basics of palaeontology know what it is. It has easily solidified itself as THE dinosaur by default, and has studied countlessly more then arguably any other fossil lifeform on Earth. Ironically, being so well known has meant it's been taken for granted, even called overrated versus other dinosaurs, and many, many misconceptions about it, from like merely a scavenger that couldn't even hunt live prey. This is a shame, as Tyrannosaurus is a pretty cool dino on its own, able to crush bone like no other theropods couldn't and had one of the more fascinating growth stages of any of them. T. rex: The Ultimate Predator , organised by NYC's renowned American Museum of Natural History, which came to the Royal Ontario Museum this month and intends to educate visitors on what is known about the dinosaur, from how it evolved from other dinosaurs to how it lived, and bust those m
Read more