Mesozoic Mind

Hello, and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind! We're ending Walking with Dinovember (for realsies this time) with ideas of a trio of docs in the vein of Chased by Dinosaurs , and because stateside there's Thanksgiving weekend, a film appropriate for the holidays. These first two shows would be tributes to nature documentaries of yesteryear, specifically of the kind put out by Steve Irwin, Jeff Corwin, or Austin Stevens that typically aired on Animal Planet where the host goes on safari and interacts with the creatures, often by grabbing creatures and holding them up to the camera. The third... well, you can read it for yourself. Mesozoic Micro Monsters Much like Chased by Dinosaurs, Mesozoic Micro-Monsters focuses on a human host and camera crew traversing Mesozoic in search of a specific creature of interest, much like Chased by Dinosaurs . However, the main difference it as evidenced from the the title, it focuses more on the smaller creatures of the time and area. These are crea...

Welcome back to Mesozoic Mind, and we're concluding what I've dubbed Walking with Dinovember by finishing up the other half-erm, three fifths of the Chased by series, Chased by Sea Monsters *. Like the first two, CBSM features zoologist and TV presenter Nigel Marven and a film crew travelling though time in search of particular species. * Again, not called this back home in Britain, only officially so in US and Canada, where the two are just called "A Walking with Dinosaur Trilogy", but let's face it, the former is way more memorable (even if technically Nigel isn't actually chased by them that much here). This three-part series consists of them in a boat called the Ancient Mariner visiting the oceans of 7 points in time, each labelled as the Deadliest Seas of All Time thanks to the sea creatures which inhabit them. Episodes are " Dangerous Seas ", " Into the Jaws of Death ", " To Hell..... and Back? ". In order visited, the per...

(link for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6KolH0LekY&list=PLzV6yGh6hXDbaa0SvKxy3cywqM--SnWBR&index=1&t=5s&ab_channel=GabrielM.R ) While Walking with Dinosaurs is undeniably a british show, it was not made by them lone: the American Discovery Channel also helped make it. Naturally they aired it stateside, albeit as a single special narrated by Avery Brooks.  However, we're not discussing it. We’re discussing Prehistoric Planet . This was a recut of the series made for younger audiences that aired on Discovery Kids (back when it was just Discovery Channel aimed at kids and not a Hasbro channel) shortened the episodes into roughly 21 minute episodes. There was a season two that did Walking with Beasts , and narrated by Christian Slater (making it the closest to a cenozoic sequel to Dinosaur Planet , but its Lost Media save for the intro ). This was undoubtedly many an american and canadian's introduction to it, but I am not one of them. I discovered the orig...

Welcome back to Mesozoic Mind ! We're continuing the Trilogies of Life this month with another instalment of it: 2002's Chased by Dinosaurs * and 2003's Sea Monsters . I remember watching them as a kid and being obsessed with them. Even today I can practically quote the whole scripts from memory. * Note that they're not called this back home in Britain, only officially so in US and Canada, where the two are just called "Walking with Dinosaur Specials" The biggest difference from the rest of the franchise is that there's a human onscreen hosting it and interacting with the prehistoric life: british naturalist Nigel Marven (who if your like me, is no stranger to this kind of thing ). In many regards, its in the vein of Animal Planet's nature documentaries put out by Steve Irwin (RIP) and Jeff Corwin put out at the time. At the time (and still is), this was pretty novel: on one hand you had a typical documentary with plenty of humans in our time being int...

22 years ago in 1999, in the cultural age of Jurassic Park , the BBC would air a seminal work: it revolutionized how so many people thought about dinosaurs, computer animation, and the genre itself: Walking with Dinosaurs . Across six episodes, we got 28 minutes each of dinosaurs acting as animals in real life do and not as monsters too many of us perceive them as, with not a single cutaway to humanity (unless its the american cut on Discovery Channel, but that's beside point) like the nature documentaries also put out by the beeb's Natural History Unit, all stately narrated by thespian Kenneth Branagh. It even spawned several follow ups that if anything improved on the things that made it good, from sequel series Beasts and Monsters  that showcased the other eras of Earth, Nigel Marvin's Chased by Dinosaurs and Sea Monsters  that gave the show the Steve Irwin treatment with an onscreen human host, and Robert Winston's Walking with Cavemen . But one must ask: which epi...