walking with dinosaurs

[urbpan]

We got "Walking with Dinosaurs" from Netflix. It was pretty entertaining. If you are cable-deprived like us, you might not have heard of it. It's a pretend documentary made using "Jurassic Park" style special effects: cgi and puppet dinos superimposed on photographed backgrounds. It was made by the BBC and shown on the Discovery channel in the states.

Sometimes they used some good tricks to make it look more real: flies buzzing around a carcass, camera shake from a "hand held" camera near a giant dino battle, for example. But much more could have been done with those kind of techniques. However, cgi still looks like cgi to me, all pearly veneers and too-liquid movements, and the puppets were beautiful but still moved like characters from "The Dark Crystal."

They showed fascinating dinosaur behaviors--of course completely speculative. No matter how detailed the skin impression or collection of bones, you still can't see how a 65 million year dead animal related to its peers, raised its young, or hibernated. There are educated guesses they can make, and consensus to be reached, but my big problem with this series is that they didn't tell you which was which. There's no indication of what is fact, what is speculation, and what was just made up because it makes for good television. I guess I'm very used to PBS, which is meticulously careful about the truth, opposing viewpoints, and accepted science.

But who cares, right? It's just fun to watch the dinosaurs. The first several Netflix "member reviews" were written by people who don't believe in evolution, and objected to the pro-evolution themes in the show. If the show were forthcoming about what aspects of it were science supported by eviedence and accepted by all scientists (evolution), which were speculative (t.rex was a hunter, not a scavenger), which were complete guesses (colors and voices), perhaps the creationists would be even less happy, but at least they would learn something.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I acquired those tapes in a recent tape dump when my friend Scott dumped a lot of his vhs that he had duplicates of on DVD, The kids love it, and spend a lot more time playing dinosaurs now. I had to carefully explain to them that it was cgi and puppetry, and I think they finally accept that dinosaurs have been dead for a long time. It's a bit like the Santa you and I saw that was wired with a secret walkie talkie and getting info about the kid fed to him by an elf who was interrogating a parent. "Cripes!" you said, "the little buggers will believe in Santa until they.re thirty."

Oh, and changes wouldn't make creationists learn anything, they'd just discount it all because the world is only 6000 years old,

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