Mesozoic Mind

Well, Walking with Dinosaurs 2025 came and went. The reboot to the icon of palaeodocumentaries, promising a new take that would appeal to audiences not versed in the nitty gritty by showing dig sites in action to show how palaeontology works alongside the usual nature doc-style life reconstruction sequences. It .... was .... Not very good. While no one ws expecting it to surpass the original, so much seems to conspire to make it subpar. There's a reduced budget compared to the original, so there aren't that many species, and to choose active dig sites only limited the sites, meaning half the series is Cretaceous North America. Conbine that with being made in the fog of COVID and at a time when nature docs are bing underfunded by a society caring only for sating the rich, and you thus get a series which feel thin and empty, not really a succesor to the classic. But which reaches the heights of what came before it and which plunged deeper then even the movie? Let's find out....

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...

What if the dinosaurs never died out? Its a question we all have asked, with awsnsers ranging from comic scenarios to serious speculative evolution projects, and even documentaries have dipped into it.  My Pet Dinosaur is an episode of the long-running BBC science series Horizon  that answers exactly this question and how humans (if we'd even be around) would interact with them. It features palaeontologists like Don Lessem, Phil Currie, Kristie Currie Rogers, Larry Witmer, and Greg Erickson as talking heads, with one Mark Everest behind the camera. (Link; apologies for mirroring) * Not to be confused with a 2017 australian movie of the same fiom which I have intent on seeing let alone reviewing. The episode begins with a trip to Alberta's Dinosaur Park to determine how likely dinosaurs would survive given how they were doing at the time, which was very good. It also tackles the temperature of dinosaurs and the implication it would have for them to survive the ice age: but of ...

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...

(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...

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...