Walking Away From ‘Walking With Dinosaurs’
I love ‘Walking With Dinosaurs.’ No, not that movie from 2013; and spoilers, no, not the series from 2025. I’m talking about the original 6-part miniseries from 1999, developed by Tim Haines and his talented team. It was a revolutionary show on several levels. Apart from ‘Jurassic Park’ and its sequel ‘The Lost World: Jurassic Park’ (the only two ‘Jurassic’ films out at that time), dinosaurs had never looked so fully realized; especially for television. The show presented stories of different dinosaurs with incredible effects, majestic cinematography, real atmospheric locations, and an unbeatable music score that will haunt you long after it’s over. Some elements of the series were, of course, imagined. A few liberties were taken. But everything was based on real science at the time.
The series’ primary goal was simple: transport the viewer to the time of the dinosaurs. It did this by creating the illusion that a camera crew had gone back in time and captured footage of dinosaurs living their lives, like a true nature documentary. To complete the illusion, Kenneth Branagh narrated the series with an appropriate David Attenborough-like aplomb. If you were channel surfing at the time, and didn’t know any better, you would have thought you were watching any other nature documentary from the BBC. “Wait a minute, those are dinosaurs!”
One of the stand-out episodes of the original series was the heartbreaking tale of the Ornithocheirus. It begins on a somber note immediately: we see the giant pterosaur dead on a beach, making us already aware of where this episode is heading. Then it immediately backtracks to its journey across various landscapes toward its mating grounds. Along the way, we encounter other dinosaurs it comes across or flies over; but the entire episode is drenched in this somber tone, complete with chilling strings in its music score that feel like something out of ‘Schindler’s List.’ When we finally reach the mating grounds with the Ornithocheirus, it is overcrowded and hard to find anywhere to land to attract a mate. Despite his grandeur, he was too late. He is pushed to the side, unable to attract anyone. Then, we end where we started… him dead on the beach. The only silver lining is that he will “become food for the next generation,” as we see his eyeball eaten by one of its younger kind. It was dark, heartbreaking, art. And it felt real.
The original 1999 series was, of course, a huge hit. It spawned two sequel series (‘Walking With Prehistoric Beasts’ and ‘Before The Dinosaurs: Walking With Monsters’), special episodes, and several spinoffs featuring the loveable Nigel Marven going back to the time of the dinosaurs himself in ‘Chased By Dinosaurs’ and ‘Prehistoric Park.’ The latter also brought the dinosaurs to the present in a more educational and kid-friendly version of the ‘Jurassic Park’ concept but without anything (truly) going wrong. In a way, it was an early version of the first half of ‘Jurassic World.’
But then, 2013 happened. Coincidentally (or not), that was the same year ‘Jurassic Park’ celebrated its 20th anniversary by re-releasing the film in theaters in 3D. So, if it seems like releasing a movie called ‘Walking With Dinosaurs’ to theaters the same year was a cash grab (of Universal’s cash grab), it most likely was. The movie was purely in name only, apart from featuring dinosaurs. It began with a human family doing what human families do, until we randomly go back in time to a dinosaur story without the humans… where the dinosaurs talk. However, their lips don’t move when they talk the way they do in Disney’s ‘Dinosaur;’ instead, it’s just voiceovers of overly-quirky performances by John Leguizamo and Justin Long. Now, I love both those actors in other productions, but they didn’t belong in this one. Gone was any of the seriousness or grandeur of the 1999 series’ stolen name.
For this film, we got admittedly great special effects mixed with a typical ‘Land Before Time’ story, bad humor, annoying voiceover performances, and not much else. Some may claim that the 3D Blu-Ray’s exclusive “Cretaceous Cut” bonus feature fixes most of the problems by removing the voices and the pointless human family elements, but instead you are left with a silent film that still includes goofy editing choices (such as a dinosaur falling in a river, then the film rewinds to “play that again” because falling is funny). It’s an improvement, but it still isn’t a great movie or anything like the original series.
Now, it’s 2025. The BBC decided to bring ‘Walking With Dinosaurs’ back from extinction to coincidentally (hmmm…) release just a month before the latest ‘Jurassic World’ film. This time, it is back on television screens in the form of a 6-part miniseries again, with a focus on telling multiple dinosaur stories in their world. Sounds good, right? But not so fast… none of the original creators of the series returned for this one. And we were already wronged in 2013. Who’s to say we wouldn’t be wronged again? No one is safe.
Sadly, ‘Walking With Dinosaurs’ 2025 may have some impressive dinosaur recreations & interesting science, but it totally misses the point of the original 1999 program. Again.
While this new series forgoes “talking dinosaurs” and returns to well-read narration by Bertie Carvel, that’s pretty much the last of the positives I have. The series makes a grave mistake that is noticed immediately: cutting to and from paleontologists every five minutes from the dinosaur stories. It becomes incredibly jarring, not only because it happens but in its frequency. We are never allowed to be part of the prehistoric past.
The original series never did this. It was purely a window into the world of the dinosaurs. That’s it. There was a special “Making Of” episode that also aired (and included on home media releases) that features paleontologists and the real inspirations for what was depicted. I feel like that’s what should have been included instead, or at the very least, something akin to what ‘Prehistoric Planet’ did and include a 5-minute segment at the end of each episode with a paleontologist focus. The shocking thing is: ‘Walking With Dinosaurs’ 2025 still includes such a segment at the end! Not only do they keep interrupting the stories they are trying to tell with them, but then they include them again as a post-script? Why have both?!
Each episode of the new series is about an hour long, whereas the original show’s episodes were about 30 minutes each. Given that about half of the runtime in each episode is dinosaurs, and the other half is paleontologists: this feels like two different 30-minute shows put into a blender and released as a full hour. Why present it this way? It’s jarring in both ways you can try to appreciate it: seeing the dinosaurs in their world and trying to learn more of the real science behind them.
The way this show is presented is just so jarring and unfocused that I don’t see how it could please anyone. Fans of the original show will likely hate this combined format as much as I do, and newcomers will wonder what the fuss was all about. At best, it makes use of its special effects well (when they are there). At worst, it creates ADHD disorders in its presentation. Remember the original series’ episode with the Ornithocheirus that I mentioned? If they had taken an additional 30 minutes of paleontologist interviews and mixed it with its story, it would have totally ruined that episode. There would have been no way of feeling anything about what was going on, because it would have been interrupted as if by commercials; only more frequent. Any art that may have been there is undone by this format.
When I think of ‘Walking With Dinosaurs,’ I think of being transported to their world, led by a commanding and informative voice, reveling in the atmosphere around them, and forget for several hours that none of what I am seeing is real. We aren’t allowed that in this new 2025 series. We are forced to watch something that is, in the end, nothing more than yet another low-concept dinosaur documentary series due largely to its presentation. To call this ‘Walking With Dinosaurs’ is entirely undeserved.
I may be overreacting. Maybe some don’t understand how magical it was to watch that original series, or its sequels and spinoffs. I didn’t think they were concepts created by Tim Haines that would be hard to replicate, but apparently that’s not the case since it’s been twice now that they failed to recapture anything close to what made it good. I will be honest: I only watched the first episode. I almost couldn’t even do that, but I thought it would only be fair to at least see it through. I can’t imagine the rest of the series changing its established format. There may be a good show somewhere in there, but it would take a complete re-edit and re-assignment to make that happen. It’s not worth even taking the time to wonder when they didn’t even take the time to understand the assignment.
We’ll always have the original ‘Walking With Dinosaurs’ from 1999 (still available on DVD, Prime Video, & Fandango At Home), but it’s sad that we clearly can’t go back to the world it created. At least, not from the owners of its IP. It’s time to walk away from ‘Walking With Dinosaurs.’
