#walking with

"additionally, is there anything that the Time Haines documentaries get wrong that we knew was wrong then but they just put in anyway for some reason?"

There is *so much* in the walking with series that is wrong, both at the time of making and today. In fact, this is practically a dissertation level analysis required.

The biggest things:

they did not feather their dinosaurs. they should have. yes, even in 1999.

their tyrannosaurus model is a joke

Utahraptor SHOULD NOT BE IN EUROPE tf

torosaurus? a rare ceratopsian? instead of triceratops? you're just being needlessly edgy

Unholy Mammal Bias Batman

Humans did not become bipedal because of grass. We spread across Africa because of grass, but we were bipedal before then

oh yeah, Grass evolved in the Cretaceous after all

The Maastrichtian wasn't a "dying world". there was a slight decrease in megafaunal diversity. This happens all the time, and dinosaurs had bounced back from such a dip before. This is also very North America centric - other continents had no such dips. Nonavian dinosaurs would not have gone extinct without the asteroid.

they skip the paleocene and are extremely lopsided in how they present the Cenozoic

"Imagine you could travel back in time, to a time long before man."

Walking With (Mother T. rex) – Long before Hank and his clan swam across the sea, this mother T. rex tried her best to rear her young among the dangers of the late Cretaceous. She manages to protect her nest from an egg-stealing Didelphodon, resulting in three babies successfully hatching. All does not go well for the runt of the litter, but the other two get to show their curiosity, much to a local snake’s annoyance. Sadly, unlike in Prehistoric Planet, the end of the story for this T. rex family is not a happy one. After the mother is killed defending her babies from an Ankylosaurus, the asteroid arrives, ending the age of the non-avian dinosaurs.

Fossil Specimen (Sue FMNH PR 2081) – Arguably the most famous of all T. rex specimens. Discovered in 1990 through impressive luck and observation by the fossil’s namesake, Sue Hendrickson, Sue is also one of the best T. rex fossils, being 90% complete by bulk. Following a lengthy dispute over ownership, Sue was put up for auction, inciting fears that the fossil would end up in a private collection. With the help of various donors, Sue was purchased by the Field Museum in Chicago, and has been a fixture there ever since. Sue’s bones show signs of various injuries, including a parasitic infection in the skull. In 2018, Sue was moved to a new room at the Field Museum, featuring an updated assembly and an informational exhibit featuring the world in which Sue lived.

Anon, I definitely appreciate the recommendation, don't get me wrong, but -

Not only is Walking With Dinosaurs my actual favorite piece of media ever, the thing you'd find the closest to my heart if you cut it open, but I literally would not be able to talk to you right now if it wasn't for it. Allow me to explain:

To say that dinosaurs were one of my very first obsessions (or hyperfixations) is to understate the hell out of just how utterly strongly I loved dinosaurs and acted on it, and I don't state more because I don't quite feel like revealing the face and name of who's writing this just yet. I grew up watching dinosaur documentaries (and documentaries in general) more so than even cartoons, and I was definitely extremely obsessed with dinosaurs before WWD arrived in my life.

But all of the documentaries I had watched to that point, whether I caught them on tv or DVD or casette, had all been dubbed in Portuguese (since, y'know, I live in Brazil and all). But when my mom brought over Walking With Dinosaurs, there was no Portuguese dub option, so I had to watch it with subs on.

And I watched this series so, so many times, that I picked up the basics of English from it. I started watching other documentaries I had with English subs, and then movies, and then I started taking English classes and the works to tune it, and I was speaking English at an adult level at age 12 (likely earlier, but my memories are spotty and the oldest email I have from a conversation overseas dates from that age) and I kinda just never stopped writing and thinking and talking to myself in English since then.

I never really had an easy time picking up other languages when I tried them, but it was specifically because of Walking With Dinosaurs that I picked up enough English to become proficient at it early on, and that's informed a lot, pretty much everything, of my life ever since. To be honest I still speak with a slight British inflection, because Kenneth Branagh was my frame of reference for the English language. So trust me, I have absolutely seen Walking With Dinosaurs, maybe as much as anyone can possibly see it short of gluing it to the eyeballs 24/7. I've also watched all of the other Walking With series and spin-offs (and yes, even that horrid film, I refuse to discuss it further) like The Ballad of Big Al and Walking With Monsters and Walking With Beasts and of course all of the Nigel Marvin spin-offs, including Prehistoric Park. I've been wanting to give the extended Walking With universe a rewatch recently.

But every year, without fail, I make it a point to rewatch Walking With Dinosaurs. Doesn't matter when or how, my DVDs of it don't really work anymore, but I find a way to rewatch it. I know exactly what's gonna happen every year and it's impact has never been diminished. Every year, I get chills when Brachiosaurus shows up looming over the teenage Diplodocus pack and the music just SWELLS in dread and awe alike. I dread the scene of the Cynodonts eating their baby to spare it from the Coelophysis pack. I eagerly await the nefarious joy of just waiting for Liopleurodon to pounce out of the water to eat the theropod, because fuck off if that's physically impossible, that scene absolutely still kicks ass. I'm writing this post while listening to Islands of Green because you bet the soundtrack to this series lives rent free in my head as well. I can immediately hear the specific sounds and roars of each animal in it just by thinking of them.

I cry every year when Ornithocheirus dies alone after such a grueling journey just to fulfill a biological drive he cannot resist, and I still cry when the baby T-Rexes try to get their dead mom to wake up just as the meteor strikes and swipes them all away to nothingness, not even joking I'm actually getting chills right now just describing that scene and the "This is the end, of the age of the dinosaurs" line, God. Every year I find some new moment in the series that makes me incredibly emotional in a way it hadn't before, whether it's the Postosuchus getting eaten from the inside out after being toppled by a minor injury, or the forest fire that tears through the jungle and leaves charred dinosaurs behind. I'm getting chills just listening to the end credits theme right now.

Even today, there has never been anything in media that's ever made dinosaurs feel more real than Walking With Dinosaurs did, and that was the trick that all of it's imitators failed to understand: Even through it's dramatic soap opera lenses, it depicted dinosaurs not as great and glamorous movie monsters, but as real animals, no more or lesser than the ones living on the planet now. It doesn't make dinosaurs exciting by showing them as some mythical fantasy cooler than our current reality, it made dinosaurs exciting by showing they WERE reality, and reality can be just as cool and exciting and mythical as anything fantasy can give you, if not more so, if you stop to look at it with the same unclouded fascination and curiosity you'd reserve for something not real.

There was a time where I distanced myself from my love of dinosaurs for, a lot of reasons really, but I'm thankful that I never succeeded in making it go away, that I got to watch Jurassic Park at a movie theater a couple years recently and cry at the reveal of the Brachiosaurus in a way I never did in the over three dozen times I watched the movie at home, that I got to finally read Raptor Red, that I still get all these feelings over just thinking about Walking With and it's spin-offs.

More than maybe anything else, I think this series is what informs my storytelling and my sense of adventure. Everyone has that story, that adventure, either one or several, that's imprinted on them from an early age and subsequently defines everything they do or undertake as storytellers no matter how distanced from it. And I think if I was to point at anything from my childhood, I would point to Walking With Dinosaurs and the lives it depicted, regardless of how real or accurate they were.

Even right now, the fact that I'm typing this out to talk to you, that I'm confident enough in my English skills to even record audio in English for coming projects, that I made this entire blog full of essays in English about things I find creatively inspiring, is owed in no small part to my childhood adoration for Walking With Dinosaurs, the bedrock of what I am as a creator, and even if the show didn't have that particular impact on me, I'd still carry it to the rest of my life.

Everything about this show is ingrained into my bones and soul, maybe as deeply as anything is ever going to be.

Hmm. Who did I find it most difficult to work with?

Animators! Definitely animators!

You know? “Chase this dinosaur”, “Chase that dinosaur!” You’d swear we couldn’t act!