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.

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