Mesozoic Mind

Hello, and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind. Let's begin again, to close out winter with an ice age palaeodoc! L.A. 10,000 BC is another one of those forgotten documentaries from the early 2000's. Naturally its from Discovery Channel. Man, I really need to branch out more and watch other docus not owned by a certain conglomerate now.... The docu's premise is of using Hollywood stuntmen (Greg Fitzpatrick, Cheryl Lawson, and Richard Bucher) to demonstrate how ancient Indeginous people would have survived and even hunted the megafauna in Reality show-style challenges. Wow, the 2000s were something else.  We first see three people, played by the stuntmen, having bad days as the narrator talks up how no matter how bad it seems to get these days, the past was way more difficult when all the megafauna were still around... and then its completely forgotten. It's a shame, as I feel like a potential set up of snooty rich folk getting a taste of real survival would be a novel premis...

Happy holidays everyone! What better way to celebrate the festive season at Mesozoic Mind then a christmas film about prehistory? Well options are VERY limited, so the only thing I can find is something from the time-honoured tradition of crappy, cheap animated christmas specials,  The Christmas Dinosaur (2004). Created by the sadly now-defunct PorchLight Entertainment, it tells the story of a young dinosaur-obsessed kid named Jason Barnes who decides sneak into the Christmas presents gifted to him, only to discover the one for him isn't the toy he wanted, but a real egg that hatches into a Quetzalcoatlus . Which is you know, not a dinosaur? Even the target audience knew better, not to mention the film keeps flip-flopping on calling it a dinosaur versus (correctly) a pterosaur. Anyways, he adopts it as a pet, and has fun with it as it grows up while having to dodge his parents and his nosy, grumpy neighbour to keep them from finding out about the flapling, but when Spot gets lone...

Hello, and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind. Today, we're starting a new themed month, Nostalgiavember, about many prehistoric-related entities of my 2000's childhood I enjoyed and loved or simply fondly remembered, even more then usual. I'm talking web videos, books, and movies, rather then the usual array of docs I usually deal in (which are already nostalgic themselves). Our first subject is a very short documentary, simply titled Dinosaur World . It's not to be confused with the unfinished BBC game, the chain of parks, or really, any other work with that title. The video was uploaded in Youtube’s golden age of 2007 but was actually made around 2004, and created by some young British kids named Sam Hart and Tony Hart (and thus are likely brothers or at the very least related from what I can tell), following in the footsteps of a grand british tradition. I hope both Harts have grown up and live good lives now even in troubled. Back on topic, it was made when independent ...