PLANET DINOSAUR:
Do you like dinosaurs? Have you wanted to see a nature show/documentary on dinosaurs that don’t look like some cheap cartoon from the 60’s? If you answered yes to one or both of those questions then you will want to watch the BBC special Planet Dinosaur. This documentary/television show is about dinosaurs, what they did, how they lived, hunted, ate, all that you get from watching a nature show. It’s been done in computer-generated graphics with information boxes popping up as the narrator talks about what’s happening. Each of the 6 episodes on the DVD are 30 minutes long with a variety of dinosaurs being talked about by narrator John Hurt.

This show was entertaining and informative while it stayed away from being too graphic. I think kids will love this show because it features some really cool looking dinosaurs (none that I will even attempt to respell here nor even try to speak) while making it all look very realistic. The CGI used here is amazingly detailed that when they zoom in on the dinosaurs you can see the bumps and ridges of the skin. It also shows some brutal battles between these giants that walked the Earth. These fights were quite fun to watch, there’s enough blood being shown to make it have a realistic feel to it but not too much where it would become disgusting.

I was more amazed though with the detail of the CGI being put into use on this show. When in episode 5 “New Giants” was showing the little baby dinosaur it looks so real, even to the point of being this cute little thing, until the truth comes out about the big one that’s stomping about. It’s just so amazing to see this little thing that is 5kg will grow into something that’s 75,000kg, that’s just too huge to really grasp. Almost everything was great about this show except for a few things. One thing that I would have liked to seen was when they would compared the height of a person to the size of the dinosaur being discussed, the person was just a black flat outline, I would have liked to seen a CGI person put standing next to the dinosaur on the ground. This would have given a better comparison where I think it would have really made the size difference easily seen. Also, I didn’t quite like the metric system being used here, I had to do some math to figure out just how big a 12meter long dinosaur was, but since this is a BBC show I just have to deal with it, which wasn’t that bad.