Cretaceous Kid

To get it out of the way, on the great grand rating scale of dinosaur documentaries The Dinosaurs sits around where When Dinosaurs Roamed America does, with a sprinkling of Dinosaur Revolution to taste. The science is solid, the models are ugly, the script is messy and we’ll go through these play by play.

It was amazing to hear the words Carnian Pluvial in the show, it was exactly what a new deep time documentary should cover to stand out! Showing an example of the common ancestor of dinosaurs in Marasuchus was also enjoyable, even if they include strange lines such as “a meal worthy of her bloodline” in the narration.

Honestly the narration was the weakest part of the episode for me, it is overly dramatic and repetitive. Take a drink every time Freeman says rise of the dinosaurs and you won’t even be able to say Liliensternus by the end. There’s other strange lines that reference bloodlines, ancient nemesis, and one that mischaracterizes evolution as improvement. Even beyond the narration the script feels over dramatized, the episode itself ends with a Liliensternus facing off a Psuedosuchian, on a cliffside while the earth itself explodes in the background. It is so unsubtle to the point of being shocking! I will allow myself ONE comparison to Walking With Dinosaurs, in the transference of ecological dominance of other reptiles to dinosaurs. WWD has the representative of the old guard (Postosuchus) eaten from the inside out by the new heirs of the Earth. A much more respectful and sad metaphor for the end of the Triassic versus the villainous face off with the psuedosuchian (Smok i think) in TD.

To wrap it up, i think about 60% of the animal models i’ve seen in the show so far are unappealing. They’re not necessarily inaccurate but they all feel off in some way or another outside of Plateosaurus. They have this… cartoonish look to them, they don’t quite feel like real animals and the script was already hurting the show in that department. And while it resembles Dinosaur Revolution in its dramatic tellings of dinosaurian life, it doesn’t even come close to the striking figures the animals cut. Nearly all the animals in The Dinosaurs are a shade of brown, only Procompsognathus sports a bit of rosey pink.

we gotta stop ILM from making any more dinosaur models