Dinosaur Planet: A Retrospective Review

 

Dinosaur Planet (2003) Miniseries Review

Dinosaur docudramas have experienced a resurgence in recent years, with Apple TV’s three seasons of Prehistoric Planet, BBC’s “reboot” of Walking with Dinosaurs (in name only), and two shows from Netflix: Life on Our Planet, and, most recently, The Dinosaurs. When I was a kid, the two main TV networks in the business of dino docs were BBC and Discovery Channel, with a clear difference in quality and style between them. BBC made hit after hit, but Discovery was more hit or miss. One of their early 2000s triumphs, though, was a four-episode miniseries advertised as an epic primeval drama to rival even BBC’s Walking With…shows, originally airing in the US around Christmas in 2003 and the following year in Canada, when I first saw it. Dinosaur Planet, though a relic of an earlier period in paleo-TV, is still interesting to look back on, and at the time, it was one of the best of its kind.

Each episode focuses on a different dinosaur protagonist in a different place and time period, though all of them occur during varying points in the Cretaceous period. “White Tip’s Journey” follows a female Velociraptor in the Mongolian desert trying to join a new pack and raise her young. “Little Das’ Hunt” is about an adolescent Daspletosaurus and his pack following a herd of Maiasaura living among many other species on the Elkhorn Range as a volcano threatens to erupt. “Alpha’s Egg” shows the hatching and maturing of a South American longneck Saltasaurus in tandem with her primary predator, an Aucasaurus called Dragonfly. Finally, in “Pod’s Travels” a Pyroraptor gets stranded at sea and washes up on a European island with dwarf versions of the species he’s used to living with, making the usually small hunter a giant outcast.

I think it’s telling of the show’s quality that many fans cite different episodes as their favourites; there doesn’t seem to be any clear consensus on what the best episode is. I remember the specific order in which they aired in Canada because I recorded each episode on VHS and watched them over and over again before I ever bought the DVD. First was the White Tip episode, which I think is the most well-rounded in terms of storytelling, environmental depiction, and dinosaur interactions, then Das’ episode, which was my favourite as a kid, then Alpha’s episode, which used to be my least favourite, and Pod’s episode last, which is not the best in terms of environmental depiction, but does have perhaps the most sympathetic “character” of them all.

One of Dinosaur Planet’s biggest scientific and aesthetic triumphs over its contemporaries was its depiction of feathered theropods. I remember being shocked and taken aback when I first saw White Tip because it was the first time I had seen a full motion Velociraptor on my TV screen that didn’t look like the lanky reptilian design copied repeatedly from Jurassic Park. I wasn’t sure I liked it at first, but once I watched the episode, I bought into this far more realistic version, and it started a mind shift for me, in terms of how I viewed these particular dinos. By the time I saw “Pod’s Travels” I had accepted feathered dinosaurs, but it would be quite a long time before people who were not nearly as obsessed with dinosaurs as I was got with the program…and then Jurassic World did the paleontology community no favours by bringing back the same featherless, inaccurate raptor designs from the first three movies. Some of the Dinosaur Planet CGI is a bit iffy at times, but it’s pretty visually consistent, and a few shots from certain episodes are actually quite impressive. The one I distinctly remember being used in the advertisements was the shot of the Tarascosaurus from Pod’s episode roaring as blood seeps from its jaws.

For all its scientific accuracy and bold creative choices, though, it still gets a lot of things wrong that could have been avoided even with the scientific knowledge of the time, and the series as a whole is emblematic of a running fault through all of Discovery’s dino docs. No, I’m not even talking about how the predators are always roaring and chasing after anything that moves and battling purely for dramatic spectacle, I’m talking about cutting away from the ancient recreations to feature a person talking about them. I find it less distracting in Dinosaur Planet compared to other Discovery documentaries like this from around the same time, but it still frequently interrupts the pace of the show and feels tonally dissonant. BBC’s dino docs always stayed in the setting of the prehistoric world and worked the science in through narration alone, relying more on visual storytelling and education, but Discovery Channel never committed to that same format. Even as a kid, that was why I found Walking with Dinosaurs superior, and BBC documentaries in general far more interesting and rewatchable compared to American ones.

Some of the scientific inaccuracies range from postures and movements to names and designs for certain species, with some creature models being recycled between episodes. The one error that used to really bug me (and still does) is the presence of grass, particularly in Pod’s episode. In the behind-the-scenes documentary included on the Walking with Dinosaurs DVD, it’s explained that grass hadn’t evolved yet during the Mesozoic era, so the filmmakers were careful to choose real world locations that closely resembled prehistoric conditions, with the most accurate plant-life possible. The Dinosaur Planet creators did not have the same eye for detail, and while many of the locations are quite impressive, it’s more akin to Jurassic Park with choosing plants, to quote Ellie Sattler, “because they look good.” It may have also been a budgetary issue; sometimes CGI was used to alter the environments, as well, which can make some shots look overly artificial. Of course, these relatively small details aren’t going to bother the majority of viewers (especially in 2003), but a lack of exciting dinosaur action and interesting interactions would have, and they didn’t skimp on those parts of the show in the least.

To get into each episode a bit more, one of the reasons “Alpha’s Egg” was not my favourite was because of how slow it often felt compared to the other episodes, given the main dinosaur is a plodding sauropod. It has one of the slowest chases I’ve ever seen in a show like this: two carcharadonotsaurs pursuing Alpha’s herd across the plains. It also comes off as a little hokey to have one particular predator growing up alongside one particular prey animal and building up to their inevitable clash as adults as a form of tension. It just didn’t feel that believable to me, even as a kid, but when I look back on this episode now, I find it actually has a lot of highlights, such as the horrific massacre of the baby saltasaurs early in the episode and the final clash between Alpha and Dragonfly at the end. While the intermingling of Alpha and Dragonfly may be a bit manufactured, I do kind of like the parallel stories as a way to alternate between seeing two different species in the same environment.

Even though Alpha’s wasn’t a favourite, I still enjoyed every episode of Dinosaur Planet as a kid, but now, “Little Das’ Hunt” doesn’t thrill me the same way on a repeat viewing. I loved seeing all the new Cretaceous species, including Daspletosaurus, which was a tyrannosaurid that lived before the more famous T. rex. On that note: I like that Dinosaur Planet gives a sampling of some very popular dinos like Velociraptor and Iguanodon throughout but mainly showcases species that were far less known at the time. Little Das is an inexperienced hunter and, like in “Alpha’s Egg”, his story is tied to Buck and Blaze, two inexperienced young duckbills. The episode has some other supporting roles with the flying Quetzalcoatlus and a pack of Troodon, but it’s mainly focused on the stop-and-start pursuit of Daspletosaurus hunting the mixed herd of duckbilled Maiasaura and ceratopsian Einiosaurus.

While I do still enjoy this episode, especially with the devastating volcanic eruption in the climax wiping out everything on the Elkhorn Range, there are a few silly moments throughout, mainly from Das being clueless, and it’s a bit tedious, with the pursuit drawn out for nearly the entire runtime. This episode has some of the best visual effects, though, with the Daspletosaurus looking nearly as good as the T. rex from Jurassic Park in some medium daytime shots. The Troodon designs look kind of cursed, though, and of all the dino protagonists from the show, Das gets highly anthropomorphized and isn’t as endearing, comparatively, to White Tip or Alpha or Pod. All of the show’s predatory leads are given excessive humanistic qualities, really, which I think makes the show work better for younger viewers, though it doesn’t shy away from some of the bloody violence, which newer dino docs seem to be averse to showing.

There’s something very charming about Pod’s episode with the way it almost becomes a prehistoric version of Gulliver’s Travels. We see him in his normal environment before a tsunami wipes out his family and home and he washes up on a new island that he must explore and figure out, taking the audience along on the adventure. There’s an animatronic puppet used for when Pod is clinging to life on a log adrift at sea, which is one of the only moments where practical effects were used over CGI, and it’s quite noticeable because he looks so different from the computer model. This is another area where Walking with Dinosaurs had a major leg up over even the best of Discovery Channel’s dinosaur recreations. BBC consistently used an effective blend of computer animation and practical effects to bring creatures to life, whereas Discovery relied primarily on CGI, which never quite reached the same quality or believability. Though the effects in Pod’s episode are not among the best, the pacing, variety of species, and interactions are all great, making it one of the most consistently entertaining episodes.  

I can’t finish this review off without addressing one last majorly notable trait of Dinosaur Planet: the narration. The paleontologist it cuts to before commercial breaks is Scott Sampson, and he provides some fairly interesting insights in each story, but the dramatic recreations are narrated by American actor Christian Slater, who has some rather memorable lines in a couple episodes. I wouldn’t say he does a bad job, but sometimes what he says kind of shatters the illusion of being back in the Cretaceous and sounds unintentionally cheesy or silly. In the White Tip episode, after a male Oviraptor tries to win over a female, Christian chimes in to say, “Gotta give him credit for trying!” It’s quirky narration, but not always unwelcome. It almost makes it feel like he’s watching alongside the viewer and making commentary, such as in the Das episode when Das loses track of his mother and sisters. “Hunting for your family is a major pain. How could they run off like that?” Auditorily speaking, the soundtrack and sound effects are the best parts, with some roars reused from the earlier Discovery show When Dinosaurs Roamed America, but many of the roars I heard for the first time in this show, and would recognize in numerous other shows to follow as Discovery recycled them to no end.

Dinosaur Planet is a pretty epic dinosaur docudrama, yet it’s almost more intimate at times than the original Walking with Dinosaurs or other more contemporary shows like it, with its close focus on four well-characterized dinosaurs and their struggles to survive. It gets a bit fantastical in some respects and obviously looks dated in comparison to the visual designs and animation quality of newer shows, but I find it’s still worth coming back to in the same way that Walking with Dinosaurs still is, too, despite not carrying the same gravitas. The episodes are a bit longer with a bit more filler, but the blending of science with focused storytelling gave Dinosaur Planet a unique enough angle that it still stands out as an accessible, compelling prehistoric miniseries in its own right.