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Post by Exalt on Sept 8, 2023 22:06:07 GMT 5
I think that I saw the omnibus version as a kid, but the other one more recently. That might explain a memory discrepancy for me...
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Post by dinosauria101 on Sept 8, 2023 22:12:20 GMT 5
True, Dimetrodon is quite popular. That being said I don’t think a large share of the general public knows (or at least, knew back then) when exactly it lived, and that it wasn’t a dinosaur.It is for that reason that I think WWM would have been useful to educate them on what they have heard of from the Palaeozoic. It's explicitly and clearly about what was BEFORE the dinosaurs, and this together with the inclusion of Dimetrodon certainly helped teach a lot of general public viewers what it was and was not. That sounds about right. Nostalgia plus endearing good parts is a very impactful combination - even the endearing good on its own. Thank you! Somebody gets it - and on a level I didn't to boot. I would have never thought of those adjectives, it just came across to me as missing the point. I think he was a critic of journalism or similar. Wikipedia does not explicitly state what he was a critic of, but it says he was both a journalist and a critic. Same - in fact, beyond bold: straight up inappropriate! Don't critique what you don't know about, should be a principle people like A. A. Gill live by. And this would have been obvious to anyone who knew about the nature of documentaries. Gill is just proving my point, lol. I couldn't access the full review (although I would very much like to!), but yes, it does seem like he was going off of exclusively gut feeling/opinion. As true as WWM's facts are, they are going to be hard to believe for someone uneducated and accustomed to the way things are today. Seems like he never heard that truth is stranger than fiction! There may be some nationalism here (which is unsurprising given the arrogance). He was from England so it's possible he had that mindset. I think this stems from his personal opinion and lack of education PLUS the fact that none of those were made. Had they been made when he wrote his review, it may very well have been different - despite his lack of education - thanks to multiple much worse documentaries being available. Oh, it's just that he told me on Discord he wasn't an expert on the Palaeozoic - although he might be on the level of one now that he's hunted down all those papers. |
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Post by Infinity Blade on Sept 8, 2023 22:34:13 GMT 5
Well I would argue that InfinityBlade is actually quite an expert in what he’s reviewing, esp. compared to the vast majority of people who review such documentaries (such as the example above). Oh thank you! Sometimes I wonder if I’m being rigorous enough in my research for my reviews, but good to know I’m apparently better at it than most. |
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Post by Infinity Blade on Sept 8, 2023 22:42:21 GMT 5
-I'm surprised that you didn't say anything about the size of Meganeura given the recent-ish discussion we had about it on here. The line about it being the size of a falcon seemed ripe for a rebuttal. -How exactly was Lystrosaurus THAT dominant? Were there fewer insects at this time or something? Wouldn't that many animals being from a decently sized group of herbivores throw the ecosystem out of wack? -One of my biggest criticisms is how they go "actually, synapsids declined. DINOSAURS." it's so poorly elaborated upon. The Meganeura stuff seems to be a sticky topic, so I tried to avoid it and really focus on the wingspan, since everyone seems to agree that that’s really the only regard in which it is exceptional. I think Lystrosaurus was that dominant simply because the P-T extinction killed off so much life that in the aftermath, there was literally nothing but Lystrosaurus and the few other survivors to fill in the void. |
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Post by theropod on Sept 8, 2023 23:52:09 GMT 5
Well I would argue that InfinityBlade is actually quite an expert in what he’s reviewing, esp. compared to the vast majority of people who review such documentaries (such as the example above). Oh thank you! Sometimes I wonder if I’m being rigorous enough in my research for my reviews, but good to know I’m apparently better at it than most. Ehm so at times I have actually read your reviews to help me prepare lectures for university students (matter of fact some of what I read in this last one you wrote will probably help me with one for graduate students this fall semester), so yes lol It is for that reason that I think WWM would have been useful to educate them on what they have heard of from the Palaeozoic. It's explicitly and clearly about what was BEFORE the dinosaurs, and this together with the inclusion of Dimetrodon certainly helped teach a lot of general public viewers what it was and was not. Exactly!
At least a science journalist, one should hope. Though I have to say that many science journalists aren’t worth their salt either.
Yes, I tried to, but couldn’t access it either. Maybe it’s out there somewhere. So not having read the whole thing, of course I’m just criticizing the single-sentence concatenated version. But either that is a very bad review, or a very bad summary of a review.
It does make one wonder if he just couldn’t believe animals as strange as the ones shown in WWM actually existed, and simply didn’t bother to (do his job as a journalist and) do some research, doesn’t it?
Yes, that’s why I say it aged poorly. This makes me curious how different that review would have been in hindsight, having waited a few years to watch some of those other documentaries first.
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Post by dinosauria101 on Sept 9, 2023 4:32:40 GMT 5
At least a science journalist, one should hope. Though I have to say that many science journalists aren’t worth their salt either. That sounds very depressing tbh. I think I remember hearing several years ago something along the lines of what you are saying being the reason for those notoriously poor articles concerning newly published studies - so as much as that concept makes me go "Smh", I can't see any reason to disagree with you. I have an idea: I'll link the article here. If anyone at all can access it somehow, they can comment with the full review. www.thetimes.co.uk/article/coming-up-for-airtime-cqxx56kzp9pIndeed it does! I would be very shocked if he did do any research to begin with: as bizarre and little-known as WWM's animals are, they are some of the primary types of animals you'd read about with some basic Palaeozoic research (never mind the more extensive research you'd need to write a formal review!), so his toy/computer game prototype statement is kind of a dead ringer for doing none. Good question. I gave this some extra thought, and if the near-certainty of doing no extra research remained consistent, I actually think it's possible the review for WWM would not have been much different even if it were made after those actual awesomebro documentaries came out. As much as these documentaries actually deserve to be called out as having a 9 year old American boy audience, they have plenty of very believable and stereotypical stock dinosaurs that would fall very much in line with what an uneducated reviewer thinks to be the case and therefore would likely cancel out the awesomebro factors that were present. Plus Clash of the Dinosaurs had a handful of decidedly non-awesomebro things (reproduction in dinosaurs, not-helpless hadrosaurs, feathered Deinonychus, birds being dinosaurs, etc) that are likely to deter said uneducated reviewers from calling the program as they did WWM, thanks to their non-awesomebro impact in the media. By the way, there is some stuff in your prior comment that I thought I replied to but must not have. It is as follows: I did allude to this a little bit in my final verdict but it probably could benefit from elaboration. The level on which it is plain wrong is beyond absurd: unless you're living under a rock, formal and smooth English-accented narration, zero 'awesomebro' language, and frequent coverage of non-awesomebro topics like herbivorous diets, parental care, etc is beyond obviously non-awesomebro. And A. A. Gill clearly wasn't living under a rock despite his lack of Palaeozoic education. Just unbelievable to me. However, I did not process that what you said earlier was about so many palaeontologists having WWM as a favorite. Having been as unnerved as I was by the low views Wikipedia cites, that's amazingly encouraging to hear!  I think the reason the animation has aged so well even compared to WWD and WWB is because - as Wikipedia alludes to - 2005 had more advanced CGI than 1999 and 2001. This means that while the same realistic models, backdrops, etc that CGI can't get could still be used for WWM, the smoothness of movement and such that CGI can get was able to get to work even more. In fact I would say WWM's animation has aged SO well that it's still a significant step-up from a certain 2022+present-day still-obviously-animation-despite-marketing-as-100%-real documentary (you'll hear more about that documentary vs WWM when I write it its own entertainment-based review), despite being from 2005. It's the ultimate measuring stick nowadays, and that WWM comes out on top is a testament to the quality. |
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Post by theropod on Sept 9, 2023 5:45:06 GMT 5
RE: Smoothness of movement
I think this is actually something all the Walking With…-series did amazingly well, better than almost every other paleo documentary with the exception of Prehistoric Planet. What I think is considerably better in WWM (despite the lower budget, but, as you say, mostly because of being newer than the others) is the level of detail of the models.
You can really spot what I mean when you view these documentaries in some low-res youtube clip vs full hd (if there even is such a thing of those old documentaries, but anyway, I mean full resolution of the footage. In low resolution, all the animals look incredibly believable, because they move very well, and you can’t see much detail of the models. In high resolution, you do notice the models in WWD and WWB are from 1999 or 2001 respectively, and, accordingly, they do look a bit unfinished from a modern perspective (though for the time they were really good).
But imo the effects of how much effort they put into getting the movements right made them feel more real than many animals from documentaries from the 2010s that had much more detailed and textured models, but just didn’t manage to give them a sense of weight and appropriate flexibility. It can be essentially like watching very grainy, poor-resolution footage of a real animal vs higher-res footage of a stop-motion animal…the former has less detail, but it still seems more real.
I’m not sure what you are alluding to here, Prehistoric Planet?
I guess here we’d have to agree to disagree.
I loved the walking with series, but I think it has to be admitted that the production values in that series cannot seriously compete with those of PP. PP was actually the first documentary since the Walking with Series (and the other BBC documentaries loosely connected to it, like Seamonsters, Chased by Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Park) that I felt managed to make the animals move as smoothly, naturally and convincingly as they did back then on walking with…. But, unlike in WW…, the models on PP are also very detailed (to the point of virtually being photorealistic) and anatomically accurate (although that’s certainly mainly the benefit of two decades of additional research and an arguably more competent and influential team of scientific advisors than on WWD).
What I think the Trilogy of Life still shines in is that it has an overarching story of portraying the evolution of life on earth, and each episode also has its own plot, subordinate to and supporting the main ark, but still playing out over the course of an entire segment. The half-hour segments are still sufficiently long to have a proper narrative ark that one could get invested in, which I sort of prefer in terms of writing.
In comparison, PP was great in its own way, but it chose to more closely replicate the narrative structure of other major BBC nature docs, like Planet Earth, which essentially means being composed of a large number of short segments loosely linked by topic or environment, but not forming a larger narrative. And the individual short stories are generally too brief to really have the same king of impact as the longer stories on WWD. I think in an extant nature documentary, this structure makes a lot of sense, because you can’t get real animals to follow a script that neatly plays out over a set duration, and even if you could it might feel fake. But with CGI animals in a paleo doc, everyone already has suspension of disbelief, and we can make these animals do whatever we want, so why not have the episodes show appearances from a lot of animals from the same ecosystem, all contributing to a larger story?
Also PP was so far set entirely in a single time stage (which I personally was rather disappointed by, having previously mistaken some footage of Dreadnoughtus in the trailer for Apatosaurus, and hence initially expecting it would show a larger span of time), the Maastrichtian, which, while certainly deserving its popularity due to being the peak of documented diversity in the Mesozoic, has also been adapted so often (because everyone always wants to show a T. rex) that it’s getting a bit stale. I would prefer to get to see different time periods, perhaps some that haven’t been shown as often as the Campanian and Maastrichtian. Of which there are a lot. Hopefully we’ll get to see them in the future. Anyway, I ventured pretty far off-topic here.
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Post by dinosauria101 on Sept 9, 2023 6:09:31 GMT 5
RE: Smoothness of movement I think this is actually something all the Walking With…-series did amazingly well, better than almost every other paleo documentary with the exception of Prehistoric Planet. What I think is considerably better in WWM (despite the lower budget, but, as you say, mostly because of being newer than the others) is the level of detail of the models. You can really spot what I mean when you view these documentaries in some low-res youtube clip vs full hd (if there even is such a thing of those old documentaries, but anyway, I mean full resolution of the footage. In low resolution, all the animals look incredibly believable, because they move very well, and you can’t see much detail of the models. In high resolution, you do notice the models in WWD and WWB are from 1999 or 2001 respectively, and, accordingly, they do look a bit unfinished from a modern perspective (though for the time they were really good). But imo the effects of how much effort they put into getting the movements right made them feel more real than many animals from documentaries from the 2010s that had much more detailed and textured models, but just didn’t manage to give them a sense of weight and appropriate flexibility. It can be essentially like watching very grainy, poor-resolution footage of a real animal vs higher-res footage of a stop-motion animal…the former has less detail, but it still seems more real. I will have to get around to doing so, thanks for the tip! And I think the WWM camera abuse takes advantage of that as well: it may be the very reason why WWM really amps things up. Both of those are correct. It is Prehistoric Planet I am referring to, and we will very much have to agree to disagree. I would have a LOT to say about everything you said about it, but I really don't want to prematurely spoil those entertainment-based PP reviews and final verdict I mentioned. They would cover what I would have said to what you said - in fact, if you'd like I can tag you and address those parts of your comments in my final verdict to compare and contrast with a different opinion than mine. Plus, we can keep this thread on topic that way! |
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Post by theropod on Sept 9, 2023 6:58:31 GMT 5
Yes, please do!
Don’t get me wrong, if you prefer the Trilogy of Life to Prehistoric Planet entertainment-wise, I think that’s a perfectly reasonable position to have (one I might even be inclined to share; I may indeed also find Walking With… more entertaining than Prehistoric Planet overall, although both were very entertaining in their own way (tbh I find it hard to even compare them, due to their differences in format). In general, I would put the strength of Prehistoric Planet more towards the educational value than the pure entertainment value, though it has both.
I just can’t really get behind the statement that the CGI for any of the Walking With series represents a "significant step up" as compared to PP. While walking with monsters really has excellent CGI, I still don’t really see it as the equal of PP in terms of photorealism, let alone surpassing it.
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Post by Exalt on Sept 9, 2023 7:49:18 GMT 5
One lamentable thing is that despite having the largest time period to cover, WWM got half the runtime of the other two.
Unless there are good reasons for that in the science itself.
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Post by dinosauria101 on Sept 9, 2023 8:32:16 GMT 5
One lamentable thing is that despite having the largest time period to cover, WWM got half the runtime of the other two.
Unless there are good reasons for that in the science itself.
Personally, I found the shorter total runtime completely acceptable given the presentation of the content. The fact that it's an omnibus to be watched all at once lead - at least from my end - to equivalent satisfaction for its format vs the distinct half-hour episodes of WWD and WWB. You may have also noticed I had something to say in my review about nearly everything that happened and its associated soundtracks. I felt as though the frequency of entertaining or at least noteworthy things was extremely high, and this certainly made up for the shorter runtime - while I have no way to prove this, it may be that they put a comparable amount of entertaining/noteworthy things to WWD/WWB in WWM on purpose to make up for less time. |
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Post by dinosauria101 on Sept 9, 2023 19:15:17 GMT 5
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Post by Infinity Blade on Oct 7, 2023 22:05:35 GMT 5
Final verdict: Image by Estrella Vega. No single image I can find online of WWM comes anywhere close to encompassing the breadth of life and time that the series actually covers, so you'll have to settle for this (pretty nifty) art (this is from an illustrated book series on the Paleozoic). To make a documentary dedicated to the entire Paleozoic, especially one that has story segments of the fauna living in it (so like WWD or WWB), isn't exactly an easy task. It isn't just the sheer length of the era that makes it hard to cover, but also the amount of stuff that actually happened. The emergence of basic body plans used by all life living today, multiple mass extinction events (including three of the five major traditionally recognized ones) inciting biotic turnovers (finally ending in the seeds for today's dominant animal clades), and even just the formation of the coal deposits that started our industrial revolution all happened during this massive stretch of time. So then the question is, how well does Walking with Monsters cover the Paleozoic (and the immediate aftermath thereof)? The best way I can characterize it is like this: if WWM were a person (bestowed with Branagh's voice, I suppose) trying to tell us all about life before the dinosaurs, he'd arguably have the general idea right. He'd certainly be on to something. But there's also plenty of room to refine everything he says (especially nowadays, since it's been nearly two decades). The evolution sequences are a major example (something I consider more important than the show getting a certain animal's size wrong or something of that nature). While they're arguably good enough to make the average non-paleontology enthusiast viewer get the point on how our ancestors evolved, many of them are also misleading when there's no real good reason for them to be. Cephalaspis lived in a time when jawed vertebrates were already a thing, why depict it evolving into a jawed vertebrate? And should it perhaps be made more clear, just for a (brief, very doable) moment, that the jaws evolved from gill arches? I would argue so. A diapsid like Petrolacosaurus evolving into a synapsid like Edaphosaurus? Dimetrodon evolving into a gorgonopsid (okay, therapsids did evolve from sphenacodonts, but still)? Diictodon evolving into Lystrosaurus when one of the most important things you could ever know about the latter is that it survived the Permian extinction?? Again, sure, the audience may still get the right general point, but I can still see no real benefit to misleading the audience with implausible, if not impossible, evolutionary transitions like these. There's also major stuff that the series leaves out. The Ordovician is completely skipped (in fact, the first transition skips from the Cambrian to what's supposed to be the veeeerrrry late Silurian), as is the mass extinction that capped off the period. The Late Devonian extinctions don't even get a mention. And yes, I get that time and budget constraints are a thing (so don't you "ackchyually" me, nerd). But here's the thing: by not covering these, the program misses out on things that can beef up its narrative. You think the big mean poopy pants arthropods were hard on our ancestors? Try an ice age freezing 85% of all life to death (and then suffocating and poisoning it when the ice retreated). Or the first land plants flourishing, dying, decomposing, and leaving their nutrient-rich remains to algae, strangling 75% of all life in the seas. If our ancestors didn't make it through either of these, I wouldn't be here writing this final verdict, nor would you be able to read it. My point being, if you want to do the Paleozoic, you should have some of these major mass extinctions to juice up your "struggles of our ancestors" narrative. There are some animals that I thought would have been cool to see explored more (or at all) as well, particularly the trilobites and therapsids between the early and late Permian, but okay, I understand that would require more money to generate models (although, they had the perfect chance to elaborate on trilobites in the very first segment!). For the time, I think Walking with Monsters did a reasonable job in introducing life before the dinosaurs to any audiences (it even ties into its previous series on dinosaurs at the very end). It certainly works well as beginner material. And aside from introducing me to more Paleozoic life (including things I hadn't know of before, like gorgonopsids or pareiasaurs), it has its fair share of drama, action, and even some rather emotional scenes that make for good entertainment. Above all else, I want to make this clear: I am glad Walking with Monsters exists (so yes, in simplified terms "walking with monsters good"). Keep in mind, the original plan was for the BBC to do a documentary on space exploration (called " Walking with Spacemen"). Think about that for a second: their supposed logical next step in the Walking with series after Walking with Cavemen was to do a series about a hypothetical future where some dudes go on crewed missions to planets in our Solar System, NOT to go back and visit the alien but 100% real lifeforms that called our planet home longer than Walking with Dinosaurs and Walking with Beasts/ Cavemen combined. Not to put down anyone whose interests lie in astronomy, and " Walking with Spacemen" eventually became its own thing ( Space Odyssey), but you guys: the BBC did not originally care to do a Paleozoic series. If they had gone the direction they originally wanted, our best Paleozoic representations in animated media would probably still be a bunch of animated Dimetrodons standing in the background with dinosaurs. With all that said, it's been 18 years, and WWM is still arguably our best and one of the very few representations of Paleozoic life out there, certainly in animated media. Is this the best we can do with the Paleozoic? I sure hope not. If nothing else, the very existence of Walking with Monsters should make you want to strive for more and even better.
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Post by Exalt on Oct 7, 2023 23:55:58 GMT 5
Final verdict: The Late Devonian extinctions don't even get a mention. And yes, I get that time and budget constraints are a thing (so don't you "ackchyually" me, nerd). But here's the thing: by not covering these, the program misses out on things that can beef up its narrative. You think the big mean poopy pants arthropods were hard on our ancestors? Try an ice age freezing 85% of all life to death (and then suffocating and poisoning it when the ice retreated). Or the first land plants flourishing, dying, decomposing, and leaving their nutrient-rich remains to algae, strangling 75% of all life in the seas. If our ancestors didn't make it through either of these, I wouldn't be here writing this final verdict, nor would you be able to read it. My point being, if you want to do the Paleozoic, you should have some of these major mass extinctions to juice up your "struggles of our ancestors" narrative. The Hyneria when the egg evolution sequence starts up: |
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