#dinosaur documentary

[majingojira]

The Dinosaur Renaissance

I managed to dig up a documentary on dinosaurs no one has heard of (ITV's "The Dinosaur Trail" 1983) and it's so far the only post-1979 Documentary I've been able to locate that doesn't really take into account the Dinosaur Renaissance. It's very odd, to say the least! See for yourself, it's on YouTube!

[tofuingho]

When I was in university, I used to watch documentaries about dinosaurs and stuff when I was having one of my insomnia episodes.

You know those ones where they use cg to illustrate what they think the dinosaurs' lives might have been like?

Yeah, well, there's one where they decided to animate what they thought dino sex was like.

And that's what was playing when my mom came into the living room in the morning.

[jogabsha]

FAVORITE DOCUMENTARIES PLAYLIST!!

here's a list that has chased by dinosaurs, sea monsters, dinosaur revolution, and walking with monsters!

[joakinmar]

Prehistoric Planet season 2 teaser by Apple TV. On screens on May 22.

[fluffyboopz]

I’ve just started watching Prehistoric Planet and all I can think of is David Attenborough hearing the pitch for the show like “Wait. You mean we don’t have to sit in the jungle for two months this time? I’m in.”

[fuzzyspiderpawz]

I refuse to acknowledge any other depiction of Mononykus this one wins this is it this is the best one everyone else go home the artists and animators for Prehistoric Planet won go home everybody

Cutiepie — Velociraptor is out, Mononykus is in!

[roman-empire]

Does anyone know what this piece of media was called or how to find it? Similar to the "walking with" series, maybe around the same time or a few years after.

It was a Dino show done like a documentary, but really focused on "following" on character- some kind of therapod hunter who got hit in the face with a sauropod's tail when he was young and broke his jaw. He survived with a permanently crooked jaw

I was going back and watching some of these nostalgic paleo shows but I can't find this one but I REMEMBER that detail

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

UM???

[zoeyirl]

The best movie ever made actually

[cressidium]

Gorgonopsid in Life on Our Planet (2023)

[atomic-chronoscaph]

The Animal World - View-Master (1956)

[majingojira]

What are the most popular Paleo Documentaries?

This question recently hit me due to a talk on Twitter, so I thought I'd look through all the documentaries I've seen and reviewed/logged and try and determine what, roughly were the most popular documentaries for their time periods and what made them so popular.

First, let's go through the "Dark Ages" of Paleo Docs -- past the silent era, and into the talkies/early color stuff. Back when dinosaurs were thought of as evolutionary failures.

Before the Dinosaur Renaissance, there are very few documentaries (32 between 1919 and 1979, 1 of which is just lost, and 4 of which have no archived digital version), so being notable doesn't require as much.

There are documentaries from the silent era, and most of them are... not great. Or at least, rather dull or very short.

Two of them (Prehistoric Animals (1938) and A World is Born (1955)) just recycle footage from The Lost World (1925) and Fantasia (1940). Literally, A World Is Born is just "The Rite of Spring" sequence from Fantasia with narration.

This leaves the 'shorts' Monsters from the Past: The Story of the Great Dinosaurs (1922), Pathé Review: Monsters of the Past (1923), and Fifty Million Years Ago as the only black and white era films of note.

That all are silent films says something about how expensive making dinosaurs is.

Monsters from the Past (1922) is notable for being one of the first documentaries on dinosaurs, possibly the oldest surviving from the United States. Footage from it gets used in a LOT of documentaries to show 'old timey' dinosaur hunting.

Pathé Review is the first documentary to use original stop motion. It's not very good stop motion, but it's good to know how far we've come. Also, it's one of the earliest scenes of Tyrannosaurus rex battling a Triceratops. Only Along the Moonbeam Trail (1918) predates it.

Fifty Million Years Ago is a broader exercise in stop-motion animation showcasing dinosaurs. It also employs cut-out animation for ancient insects. It's the first real animated attempt at showcasing life.

And part of it is missing.

Being a first at something is worth noting in my book. The first actual 'journey through time' style documentary was Uit den Schoot der Aarde/From the Bosom of the Earth (1919) internationally (also, the oldest surviving paleo-doc I know of), and Evolution (1923) (the first American take on it, and one of the longest of its time).

Once things move more to Color in full, things get a little more interesting.

I'd say there are 2.5 of note.

The oldest of them is The Animal World (1956) by director Irwin Allen. This is notable because of 2 things. First, the opening of this documentary on animal life has a prehistoric sequence with special effects from Ray Harryhausen and Willis O'Brien. This sequence went on to be used in other films, including Trog, Americathon, and Odd Jobs. It is also in TV shows like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Married... with Children.

The spread of the dinosaurs in this documentary goes on from there, with close-ups and stills showing up in books, and even a view master slide show (which was featured in Jurassic World).

It's widespread, from a well-known genre creator, featuring the work of two special effects titans. That's read as 'popular' in my book (even if the sequence itself didn't see wider release until the DVD era as a bonus on The Black Scorpion DVD -- today, it's part of the Warner Archive).

The other 'popular' documentary from this time period is Wah Chang's Dinosaurs - The Terrible Lizards (1970). Special Effects technician best known for his work on The Time Machine, The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao, Dinosaurus!, Jack the Giant Killer, and the original Star Trek made this documentary short feature using some of the models used in Land of the Lost.

It also got WIDE redistribution in the 80s and 90s as part of public television broadcast filler and as part of educational VHS tapes.

The ".5" comes from the Horizons documentary episode "The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs" (1977) for being the first documentary on the Dinosaur Renaissance, and the first appearance of Deinonychus.

That's a pretty important step, and leads us to: the Dinosaur Renaissance proper. This lasts from 1980 through to 1992.

In this time period, I'd suggest that the most popular documentaries were Dinosaur (1980), Dinosaur! (1985), the Gary Owens/Eric Boardman series (Dinosaurs (1985), Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs, Dinosaur (1985), More Dinosaurs (1985), Son of Dinosaurs (1988), Prehistoric World (1993), The Return of Dinosaurs (1993)), A&E's Dinosaur (1991), and The Dinosaurs! (1992).

Dinosaur (1980) is a Wil Vinton animated piece and was part of museum theater showings for several decades. The characters of "Herb" and "Rex" would go on to be recurring characters in other Wil Vinton claymation specials, including A Claymation Christmas (1987) and Festival of Claymation (1987).

Dinosaur! (1985) was hosted by Christopher Reeves (an avowed lover of Dinosaurs) and produced by CBS. It began as a short film from Phil Tippet called Prehistoric Beast which got a lot of talk going, leading first to this special, and then to his being hired for Jurassic Park. The effects shots from this special were used in dozens of documentaries, educational CD-roms, and more. It also won a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Special Visual Effects (beating out Ewoks: The Battle for Endor -- which Phil Tippet also worked on!). It had a VHS release in 1993 and even got re-aired on the Discovery Channel when Christopher Reeves passed in 2004. The Gary Owens/Eric Boardman series of Documentaries on Dinosaurs is so iconic that not only does it have DVD release, but also a soundtrack release. It's that iconic. They were part of the original run of Disney Channel 'we need programming' stuff, and they landed quite well. Of them, only the last, which skews younger, doesn't hold up.

A&E's Dinosaur! (1992) is hosted by Walter Cronkite. Do I really have to elaborate? The puppeteering was decent, but not spectacular. Still, it's a pretty decent documentary bolstered by the host. As many cable prestige pieces, it had a VHS release.

The Dinosaurs! (1992) from PBS was made by my local PBS affiliate (WHYY-TV), and was made available on both VHS and Laserdisc, and even got a reissue in 1998 and 1999. That's a solid run for a PBS documentary! The animated segments, which are immaculate, were all done in pencils and were featured in museums (like the Swedish Museum of Natural History), CD-Rom games, and more. The documentaries hold up very well bolstered by the animation.

In 1993 came Jurassic Park, upending pop culture's perceptions of Dinosaurs. This lead to TLC producing Paleoworld (known as Jurassica! in Europe). There were such a glut of Dinosaur Documentaries that people had to do a LOT to get one to stand out from the crowd.

And few did.

Part of this was due to man of the documentaries being part of documentary series. From Bill Nye the Science Guy to Henry's Amazing Animals to National Geographic Explorer, there were a LOT of Dinosaur Documentaries running around in this era. From 1993 through to 1999, there were (counting individual episodes) 124 Paleodocs.

Of these, I'd propose only the following having a lasting impact: The Ultimate Guide: T. rex, Muttaburrasaurus: Life in Gondwana, Nova "The Real Jurassic Park", Once Upon Australia.

The Ultimate Guide got a lot of re-runs, and stop motion effect re-uses throughout the 90s and 2000s. A VHS release was more standard for the time, but still notable.

Muttaburrasaurus and Once Upon Australia are Australian documentary/museum film shorts that have a lot of stop motion animation. They got some air internationally on TLC back in the day when they were actually educational, but that's the limit of their notoriety, beyond the novelty of their focus on Australian paleofauna.

I'm generally reluctant to include episodes of long-running documentary series in this analysis because they are part of long-running documentary series. Still, perhaps because it is such a direct tie-in to Jurassic Park, "The Real Jurassic Park" is a standout since it has actual scientists speculating on the possibility of bringing back dinosaurs AND how handling them in a Zoo-like environment would go. That latter part is still fascinating to listen to. It has a VHS and DVD release. I'm also reasonably certain it's included in some DVD/Blu-Ray releases of JP itself.

But not until Walking with Dinosaurs did the FX used in Jurassic Park become cheap enough for the BBC to use in a miniseries. And that was definitely a game changer, setting a standard going forward for future high budget documentaries.

And stock footage for BBC Horizons to exploit endlessly.

The entire Walking with series and its spinoffs are simply wonderful. Chased by Dinosaurs, Walking with Beasts, Walking with Monsters, Walking with Cavemen, and Sea Monsters. The latter, in particular, is one of the best overall. All of them have DVD releases and Nigel Marvin's work here managed to get him tapped for the video game Prehistoric Kingdom.

Of the hundreds of other documentaries, I'd say only a few standouts: T. Rex Autopsy, Dino Lab, Jurassic CSI, Titanoboa: Monster Snake, and Amazing Dino World.

T. Rex Autopsy has a unique gimmick that makes it memorable, as well as decent reruns.

Dinolab actually had a sequel made to it, and is decent for what it is, gimmick wise.

Jurassic CSI rides the coat tails of trends title-wise, but the host keeps it lively.

Titanoboa covers a unique animal and its ecosystem extremely well.

Amazing Dino World lives and dies by the quality of its FX, really, and those FX are very, very good. Colorful, standout, and FLUFFY! It's not perfect, but it was a good step forward compared to its earlier contemporaries.

Now, I'm being overall rather generous with this. I mean, people also remember Clash of Dinosaurs and Jurassic Fight Club for how annoyingly bad they were.

But those who think those were the worst has never sat through Dino Brained.

Or, for those who love "So Bad it's Good", there's always Dinosaur Quiz.

But this is all just my opinion, what are your thoughts?

Think I missed something? Do you think Dinosaurs: Fun, Facts, and Fantasy deserve a better rap? Or are your nostalgia goggles dipped in The Infinite Voyage's "The Great Dinosaur Hunt"?

[wayward-delver]

Following in the footsteps of Prehistoric Planet is an upcoming documentary named T-Rex. Which plans to put the most recognizable yet misunderstood dinosaur in a spotlight that allows people to understand it for the animal it was and not the monster it is.

[madame-helen]

[joakinmar]

Prehistoric Planet season 2 official trailer.

[bestfictionaldinosaur]

Mononykus [Prehistoric Planet] vs. Smoking Utahraptor [Walking With Dinosaurs]