General Nature and Paleodocumentary discussion

[Exalt]

You're welcome.

[theropod]

Recently, I made this complaint about first world problems on the other thread:

The only thing that I have somewhat mixed feelings about is that just months after already seeing T. rex and Triceratops get a good share of the screentime on Prehistoric Planet, we are apparently going to get more or less the same again with this one.
I think if they are going to be relatively restrictive with the dinosaur episodes anyway, it would have been interesting to instead see another point in time, and some other dinosaurs that aren’t ALWAYS the focus of documentary portrayals. I mean, I literally can’t count how often Campanian-Maastrichtian North America has appeared on all sorts of paleo documentaries, but it must be dozens of times, whereas most other localities (with the exception of Late Jurassic North America, which is the second-most popular, though it hasn’t really been done justice to the same extend as the Late Cretaceous, with many taxa still remaining undepicted or almost undepicted).

And even though nobody has so far disagreed with me, it got me thinking that I could combine two things I really like, paleo documentaries and statistics, to somewhat quantitatively test this claim.

For that, I have compiled all the time periods and localities (stage and continent-level precision) from all the paleodocumentaries that I could think of. In total, I got 115 depictions of a particular time and place combination (as a proxy for one particular extinct ecosystem depicted in a documentary or documentary series); some repeated multiple times over different documentaries, others only depicted in one or two (each depiction of such a time+place combination is counted as an occurrence).

Now as to the results:

Geography

Unsurprisingly, there is a massive bias towards North America here. And by massive, I mean it is so big that North America features in paleo documentaries roughly as often as the next three most common continents combined.

(note that I counted India and Madagascar separately, due to being faunistically and geographically completely isolated from Asia and Africa for the entire time they are represented in paleodocumentaries)

North American paleoecosystems are featured in Paleodocumentaries more often than Asia and Europe taken together. It gets worse though, as those documentaries that feature it seem to generally be biased towards the higher-profile ones (such as WWD, Prehistoric Planet), while more "obscure" localities, such as Africa, South America or Australia, don’t get this consistent attention from such documentaries, and are only focused on in more obscure and/or lower quality documentaries (e.g. what I’d consider the "highest-profile" paleodocumentary that featured Mesozoic Africa is probably Planet Dinosaur, not exactly up to par with WWD or PP imho).

Stratigraphy:
Here we can see clearly that there is a massive bias towards the Late Cretaceous. If we break it down by stage, it looks like this:






So in general, I would say my suspicion here has turned out to be correct, the Maastrichtian is ridiculously popular (more popular than any other age, second only to counting pleistocene depictions as a single age) age depicted in paleodocumentaries.
For this part I did my best to accurately reflect what age was actually depicted in each documentary (even if the numerical age or statements on screen contradicted it, I used the age that best fit the depicted fauna or formation, e.g. the "Cruel Sea" episode is counted as Callovian/Oxfordian, even though it’s claimed to be 150 Ma on screen, which would be Kimmeridgian, but doesn’t fit the depicted Oxford Clay fauna very well). I initially compiled occurrences of different Pleistocene stages separately, which I believe is fitting, as the temporal resolution of depictions is higher here than in earlier times, but combined them into the single category of Pleistocene due to the comparatively short nature of the age, so this gives a somewhat unfair advantage to the Pleistocene and least to it being the most commonly portrayed category here.


Ecosystems: Combining time and place[/b]
This brings us to our final point, that being the combination of both the time period, and the place, giving us a proxy of which prehistoric ecosystems are depicted how often.

Once again, totally dominated by the Maastrichtian. While I must concede "dozens" to be a slight overestimate on my part, it does come close, with how often Campanian and Maastrichtian North America have featured in paleo documentaries. The Maastrichtian is also notably by far the number one here, despite the Pleistocene having more depictions overall; this is mainly because those for the Pleistocene are much more evenly spread between Africa, Europe, North America and Asia, which each receive a fair bit of attention, whereas the Maastrichtian is hugely dominated by North American faunas.

[/b]

Here’s also a graph showing all the combinations on the epoch level:

Conclusions:
So it can be objectively established that there’s a massive Maastrichtian/North America bias in paleo documentaries.
Regarding the North America bias, I think this can partly be attributed to the dominance of US media, but not completely, since a large share, esp. among high-profile paleo documentaries, are actually british (to be fair there are also paleo documentaries from other countries than the US and UK, but I didn’t count them because A: I couldn’t be bothered to watch them all, B: I only speak English and German, and C: these generally don’t have the high budgets and thus generally have little, if any, animation in them, and rarely anything that could be compared to the depictions of extinct ecosystems this is primarily about). So why the america bias? I think this is more related to a bias towards certain animals (Tyrannosaurs, Ceratopsians, Mosasaurs) that are extremely popular, whose popularity, in turn, is somewhat influenced by the general North America bias in paleontology.


As for the time, of course there are reasons that the Maastrichtian is so popular. It probably does have the highest known fossil biodiversity out of any point in time in the Mesozoic, certainly for the most prominent groups of organisms that get depicted in such documentaries:

But this argument also cuts both ways. We don’t know if the Maastrichtian is inherently a more diverse time period (although that may well be). The diversity documented in the fossil record is instead the result of all sorts of biases, not least among them collection bias. And that is a problem that only gets worse if paleocentric media continue to shine such a strong spotlight on very few staple localities, while exciting discoveries from other time periods (and other parts of the world than North America) get mostly ignored.

To name an example, Argentinosaurus and Giganotosaurus were briefly quite popular for around a decade after the latter’s description, and to this day many people think that they (esp. the latter) were given way too much attention and hype compared to more "traditional" favourites such as T. rex. But, at least in terms of documentary coverage, to say that any other dinosaurs were at any point "stealing the show" from the classic Maastrichtian North American ones is an absolutely ludicrous suggestion, with Cenomanian/Turonian South America being depicted twice (Planet Dinosaur and the Chased by Dinosaurs episode Land of Giants), while Maastrichtian North America is number 1 and features a whopping ten times.
I think besides the valid reasons for the popularity trends (mostly, the better existing fossil record and with higher completeness and diversity) we see here, this does speak to a major bias and skew in perception among many in the community, perhaps including film makers, in preferring to cover the same things over and over again, as well as many people feeling like giving equal attention to something else is somehow overhyping it.

And I’m gonna make a bold statement here: That has to change! The world is bigger than just North America, and earths history consists of more epochs than just the Late Cretaceous, the Pleistocene and the Late Jurassic. Accordingly, Paleo documentaries should also aim to show a more complete picture of prehistoric life. So maybe the next time someone thinks about making another T. rex documentary, they should seriously think whether we need an 11th one, or if maybe there’s some other dinosaur or prehistoric animal out there that needs the attention more.

[Exalt]

There was a time when I was younger where I lamented the prevalence of "Stock dinosaurs" seemingly being used a ton. I don't remember if I had anything in mind that I wanted to see get more exposure though.

[dinosauria101]

theropod, thank you so much for taking the time to analyze that, amazing analysis! I'll have to read it closely.

[theropod]

One more look at the depictions of prehistoric ecosystems in documentaries, this time a historical perspective:

[Exalt]

Are Haast's Eagle and the Moa the only animals to become extinct in the Holocene to be depicted in these?

[theropod]

Well, I didn't actually include the exclusively holocene New Zealand episode of Monsters we Met in this, otherwise that would be the only holocene depiction counted, yes. But Mammoths also only went extinct in the holocene

[Exalt]

I guess I should have double-checked when the Holocene is actually considered to have started. I had heard that pygmy mammoths were still alive when the pyramids were constructed, but I've not seen those, or heard about them appearing.

The two I mentioned also appeared in Natural History Museum Alive, albeit even on that, Haast's eagle was still known as Harpagornis. Although that program shows these creatures divorced from their actual ecosystem...and I just remembered that that also had the Dodo.

[Exalt]

So I got to thinking about the naming bugaboo that we've discussed on here a time or two, and I reached two conclusions:

1. Walking With and Forgotten Bloodlines kind of struck gold on some level.

2. One of the issues I feel, is when you have to make the title more encompassing of everything that you're covering, and also still have a title with some degree of marketability. When Whales Walked is about whale evolution. First Life is about the first life on earth. Those, I presume, are a bit more focused than your Prehistoric Planets. It seems hard to not be generic unless you're going to be like "My episode or special on this formation will be called This Formation Here." It's hard to try and grab people and also avoid seeming sensationalist, I would think. Part of me feels like my brain will explode before I can come up with some good titles.

[theropod]

I’d agree that finding a title that is both catchy and original for a documentary with a both geographically and stratigraphically wide scope is really difficult.

However, I think there are cases where a more focused title could easily have been used for a documentary and instead a random, generic title was used.

Take for example Dinosaur Planet.
This programme was actually called something translating to "The Last Days of the Dinosaurs", in the German version that I watched when I was a kid, instead of "Dinosaur Planet". While this does not fit that well either in this case (as most of it is set in the Campanian, far from being anywhere near the actual last days of the dinosaurs), it is certainly a hell of a lot more memorable and distinct from other documentary titles than "Dinosaur Planet" – perhaps if the documentary were actually set at 66 Ma, it would have been a really good title.

Also, imo "Dinosaur Planet" itself is also not a very fitting title either, as we are shown just four very specific locations, with a heavy focus on storytelling rather than geographical coverage. So comparing it to "Planet Earth"/"Blue Planet"/"Our Planet"/"Prehistoric Planet" (the most recent one I mean lol)-type documentaries, this title doesn’t really describe the content very well.
Honestly something like "Dinosaur Adventures" or the like would have been the most fitting for this series content-wise, although they probably didn’t choose that due to sounding a bit too childish (but imo no more childish than continually using the same four words for every title slightly different or even identical combinations).

Ironically I take less of an issue with "Planet Dinosaur". While still unoriginal and confusing, at least it fits the scope of the documentary decently well. So while a more original name would have been better, I think it’s primarily the overuse of "Dinosaur" and "Planet" elsewhere that’s the issue here. Although I personally think the titles "Dinosaur Revolution" and "Planet Dinosaur" would actually have fit better if they had been switched, as DR had an even wider geographical coverage, while PD had more emphasis on the science.

And then of course we have the elephant in the room, Prehistoric Planet itself. On some level I get their choice of title, as they wanted to allude to the other BBC nature docs they modelled their style after (see list above). But on the other hand, it can’t be denied that it is a staggeringly unoriginal choice, to such a high degree that it is honestly becoming a problem that not just are there so many nature documentaries that are all called something-something-"planet" (we’re getting the next one in less than a month), making them hard to tell apart, but also there are undeniably already two lesser known documentaries (even though they are just walking with- recuts) that are called "Prehistoric Planet" too. While Prehistoric Planet does have the style of those other nature documentaries, and I do get why they want to call it "Planet" and that it would deserve to use this title more than those other paleo documentaries, this is just so staggeringly overused by now that it becomes a problem.

Also, I think it would have been totally possible to give Prehistoric Planet, being entirely set at 66 Ma, a title that is more specific. "Last days of the dinosaurs" (see above) may not be ideal, as PP made a point of not showing us the extinction event or even concerning itself too much with it, but it would still be a lot more recognizable than using "Prehistoric Planet" for a third time. But surely with all the effort that went into the production, they could have thought of some sort of catchy title more unique than "Prehistoric Planet", perhaps referencing the time it is set in somehow.
Heck, they could have simply called it "66 Million Years Ago" (conveniently shortened as "66mya") and it would have been more memorable. Or kept the "Planet"-style, but at least added the time period to the title somehow. "Planet Earth, 66 Million Years Ago" (which they start the narration with, anyway) or "Cretaceous Planet Earth" or something like this. Or they could have used something relatively generic, like "Apex of a Dynasty" or "End of an Era". I don’t think any of these are particularly amazing titles, but at least they’d all be more unique than "Prehistoric Planet".

Uniquely memorable titles is something I think the original Walking with…-series is still unsurpassed in. Granted, they had this "Walking with"-idea once, and then just stuck with it, but it worked really well. A sort of common brand name that ties these series together, but still easily adaptable to fit the different things they portray, fitting the evolution-based narrative (in the sense of not just figuratively "walking with the animals" in each time period shown, but also figuratively "walking through time" following their evolution), noticeably different from other documentary names, easily abbreviated etc. Probably hard to match again now that so many names have been used.

[dinosauria101]

I think I actually have an idea for a Maastrichtian North America palaeodocumentary covering ground with T. rex that hasn't been covered by palaeodocumentaries yet, which presumably other members would want to hear about.

Perhaps Greg Paul's proposal (and its resultant counter-proposals) about the multiple species of T. rex might be a good topic for a palaeodocumentary. For all we know, such a thing is in production and it's unannounced.

Such a documentary would be to T. rex species what Prehistoric Predators was to animals like Hyaenodon and Smilodon. Admittedly not particularly entertaining to me compared to like WWM, but I'd watch it to see novel material from Maastrichtian North America on TV.

Edit: Scratch that. As I learned on Discord from theropod, this would make for a very dishonest documentary.

[Exalt]

You reminded me to post something I've thought about: Part of me wants there to be one that has the protagonist of one segment be an antagonist in another segment, to sort of get the audience thinking about how they judge the creatures in question, perhaps.

[creature386]

Sept 10, 2023 23:09:34 GMT 5 theropod said:

Recently, I made this complaint about first world problems on the other thread:

SNIP

You know, I'm a little divided on this subject.

On the one hand, you are absolutely right. The lack of variety is irksome and I think nobody here disagrees with you that there's only so many times you can show T. rex and the asteroid before you wish for their extinction.

On the other hand, there are factors at play here.

The first is simple market forces.

If you made a similar statistic for the highest-grossing movies in the 2010s, you'd probably find half of them to be superhero movies and the rest of them to be Disney properties (e.g. Star Wars), even though people have been complaining about them for a long time ("superhero fatigue" gives me over 6 million google results). Why was this case, even though the demand for something different was there?

Well, as Darren Naish pointed out in your Twitter thread (it was his post that motivated mine, btw), the production of most entertainment (I personally count documentaries among it) is controlled by people above the pay grade of producers. And these people are not artists. These people are shareholders. Shareholders have a very different mindset from artists. Whereas artists love originality and hate clichés, shareholders are the opposite. For them "originality" is a business risk. Literature, I think, demonstrates this even better than movies. Romance is the most financially lucrative genre in trad and self-publishing alike and it's also easily the most formulaic one (one of the most popular entries in the genre is a glorified piece of fanfiction!).

Now, I'm aware, there's also another side to this. Creating a product that's different from the rest is gives you a unique-selling point and shouldn't business-minded people love this? After all, to get back to my movie example, the superhero fatigue is part of the reason why Barbieheimer became such a smash hit.

That's perfectly true, but there's a second point to consider: The market for documentaries isn't super big.

Like, what do people like to watch on TV? What creates ratings? Off the top of my head, these are the top three things I can think of:

-Fiction
-Broadcasts of public events (e.g. sports, talent competitions, etc.)
-Reality TV (okay, maybe that not so much, but it's cheap to make, so there's lots of it)

Documentaries are not among them. And even among documentaries, I doubt dinosaur documtaries even make it in the top ten. Add the fact that they are expensive to make (for obvious reasons) and you've got a market that's inherently risky.

There's something else to be said about the target demographic of most of these documentaries: They are young.

Like, I think it's safe to say that a lot of us (particularly those of us born in the 90s or later) got into paleontology at a young age. A lot of those ten-year old boys that watch these documentaries will remain interested at a later age, too. But I think most will maybe watch one or two of these documentaries before moving on from dinosaurs to computers once they reach high school.

This is reflected in how a lot of these documentaries are written.

When Alien Worlds got released (speculative evolution documentaries share a lot of their target audience with dinosaur documentaries), many people on Twitter compared the strong focus on "basic science". I'd argue that this pedagogic aspect underlies a lot of paleo-docus.

Paleontology is an excellent entry into science for two reasons:

-Dinosaurs are cool.

-There's very little math involved. Computers and space are also cool, but they're harder to explain without high-end math.

Due to this "gateway drug" element, attention-catchers like T. rex and the asteroid are valuable. Plus, the rotating audience is less annoyed by clichés than some others might be.

Does that mean there's nothing we can do to promote diversity?

There is, but I fear the responsibility lies not among the documentaries themselves.

The T. rex isn't the King of the Dinosaurs because of WWD, or because of Planet Dinosaur, or because of Dinosaur Revolution. It's because of The Lost World and, to a lesser extent, Jurassic Park. Ditto for the asteroid. The fact that it killed the dinosaurs gets referenced a lot, including the fact that it did so 65 million years ago (it's even in movie titles).

I think popular media has a significantly greater influence on dinosaur documentaries than we like to admit:

Jul 25, 2021 15:22:08 GMT 5 creature386 said:

I have a hunch why this is the case. People make TV shows to make money. While less expensive documentaries might be exempt from this pressure and can get their expenses covered by government or public broadcast funding, documentaries with lots of CGI probably want to reach an audience. So, what do networks do? They give funds to what they think will give them the best ratings and that's normally what's similar to what's popular right now (the good old "Follow the Leader" trope). 1999-2011 was the time when the WWD hype was still fresh. WWD itself massively benefitted from first airing only six years after the original Jurassic Park movie which is probably why it got the budget it did. Because, honestly, what draws "normies" to dinosaur documentaries isn't the writing or the scientific accuracy (otherwise, we'd have more novels similar to Bakker's Red Raptor). JP brought dinosaurs back to live like nothing before it and WWD outdid it on that front. Then, the market responded by having documentary producers chase after the success of WWD, giving us many of the dinosaur CGI documentaries we grew up with. Now, though? Even a quick google search of "dinosaur documentary" puts most of what I find in the 1999-2011 range. Kinda sad, as watching and talking about them was always one of the most fun parts of this whole paleo-community thing.
I think we'd need a new technological breakthrough for a new WWD. Unfortunately, we already had an opportunity for that and WWD 3D botched it, so, the WWD brand is probably already too damaged to be repaired.
Maybe the success of the recent Jurassic World movies will inspire more new documentaries, but I doubt it. These days, every superhero movie puts the original JP to shame in the special effects department, so, JW didn't even try to recreate the magic of the original JP. It's less "Oh, the dinosaurs are back" and more "monster movies, but with dinosaurs".
...that was a pretty long rant. I should be saving that for my own retrospective review. 
Anyway, just some thoughts I had yesterday which may or may not be nonsense I'll take back in a few years. Who knows?

theworldofanimals.proboards.com/post/61344/thread

I was wrong about that last part. Your graph shows a spike in documentaries starting in the Late 2010's and contuining until today. It looks like the Jurassic World franchise did help to reinvigorate high-budget paleo-documentaries.

There's an upside to this. During the initial documentary boom, Velociraptor and Spinosaurus got a lot of screentime and I think being prominent antagonists in the original Jurassic Park trilogy helped. Maybe the pool of stock dinosaurs would change if any of the Jurassic World-knockoffs that are being produced at the moment took its monsters from a different time period than the usual. Considering how otherwise clichéd these works get (I swear, I'm gonna post a review of 65 on this forum, once I find the time), I think that would be much appreciated.

(Yes, I did have the time to write a small essay instead of doing things I should rather be doing. I'm a normal person, am I not?)

[theropod]

Oct 9, 2023 21:04:10 GMT 5 creature386 said:

On the other hand, there are factors at play here.

Sure, I’d never disagree that there are multiple factors that cause the situation to be as it is, and of course I’m not saying that those would all be easy or feasible to change, especially not quickly. But being fully aware of a problem is the first step towards solving, or at least mitigating it.

The first is simple market forces.

I’m a communist, I think market forces should be abolished

If you made a similar statistic for the highest-grossing movies in the 2010s, you'd probably find half of them to be superhero movies and the rest of them to be Disney properties (e.g. Star Wars), even though people have been complaining about them for a long time ("superhero fatigue" gives me over 6 million google results). Why was this case, even though the demand for something different was there?

I think the demand is not strong enough, and not in the right demographic. As long as movie studios have a financial incentive to make these kinds of movies, no matter how derivative and repetitive, and no matter how much a vocal minority of people who care more about artistic quality in films than about proven formulas that reliably bring in mones, they will get made (sorry for the convoluted sentence). But of course there are limitations. At some point, superhero fatigue will probably affect a majority, and at some point, I don’t know when, one of those films will flop at the box office, and from then on just making the next superhero movie featuring the same bunch of characters will not be a safe bet for turning a profit any more.

Well, as Darren Naish pointed out in your Twitter thread (it was his post that motivated mine, btw), the production of most entertainment (I personally count documentaries among it) is controlled by people above the pay grade of producers.

Sure, and those people of course want it to turn a profit. As long as that’s the case (a regrettable circumstance, but our current reality), of course they will want to make stuff that sells well. However the people above the pay grade of producers (etc.) will usually not be particularly well-aquainted with the actual content, or the creative decisions involved, so I think it also wouldn’t be correct for those lower-paygrade folks to just excuse themselves and act as though they had no influence whatsoever in, for example, convincing the higher ups of their own creative ideas, or, in the case of documentaries, of the importance of showing or highlighting certain content over other content.
I’m sure the CEO of Apple TV and the decision-makers at BBC did have final say in many regards, but it would have been the job of the people who actually produced the documentary to convince them of what kind of decisions are good and sensible (which, by and large, they did, I mean we also got accurate dinosaurs, that certainly wasn’t a primary concern of the higher-ups, or even something they had any qualification to comment on, either, so why would what localities get shown be?).

And these people are not artists. These people are shareholders. Shareholders have a very different mindset from artists. Whereas artists love originality and hate clichés, shareholders are the opposite.

That depends. The BBC is not a for-profit company, Apple TV or Netflix are though. But it is the job of the artists, or the scientists, or whoever has an interest in the quality of the resulting film, series or documentary, to persuade the shareholders or administrators who have final say in those decisions that their vision of the programme is what should be made.

For them "originality" is a business risk.

Yes, that is often the case. But luckily that doesn’t mean that no original content gets made any more (although throughout most of the film and television industry, it seems to be at a low right now), because those people also realize that total lack of originality is also a business risk, and that it is necessary to take risks from time to time in the interest of long term profits.

Literature, I think, demonstrates this even better than movies. Romance is the most financially lucrative genre in trad and self-publishing alike and it's also easily the most formulaic one (one of the most popular entries in the genre is a glorified piece of fanfiction!).

I’d argue that fanfiction is actually often more original than traditionally published literature, mostly precisely because it usually doesn’t have any profit motives. Granted, fanfiction is also often just plain silly and ridiculous, but that doesn’t really undercut its originality. And every so often, one of those original ideas that may seem right at home in fan fiction will actually manage to be commercially successful (and then usually what will happen is that it will immediately get ripped off and copied by others trying to emulate its success).

Now, I'm aware, there's also another side to this. Creating a product that's different from the rest is gives you a unique-selling point and shouldn't business-minded people love this? After all, to get back to my movie example, the superhero fatigue is part of the reason why Barbieheimer became such a smash hit.

The thing is, I don’t think the higher-ups at Apple or the BBC would really care for what exact taxa are included in a documentary. If someone told them, convincingly, that the documentary will be just as successful if it has a Giganotosaurus instead of a T. rex, showed them a picture of one and asked them if they could even tell the two apart if they just saw the footage in the trailer, then what reason would they have to doubt it? The only people smart enough to notice the difference wouldn’t care (but would instead think it a positive), and all the rest wouldn’t notice that it wasn’t a T. rex until its name actually got mentioned, by which point it likely wouldn’t be important to them either any more. So why then do we get something as specific as "Hell Creek formation" over and over and over again, when the majority of the viewership and the decision makers have no actual interest in the Hell Creek formation? Their concept of dinosaurs probably doesn’t go that much beyond "that big meat eating one". I just don’t buy that shareholders have such extremely strong feelings about this that they absolutely cannot be convinced to greenlight a documentary without T. rex.

That's perfectly true, but there's a second point to consider: The market for documentaries isn't super big.

That also goes both ways though. The market not being that huge makes it more important to produce something original, lest the relatively few, relatively specialized people interested in that kind of thing get bored with seeing the same thing over and over again.

Documentaries are not among them. And even among documentaries, I doubt dinosaur documtaries even make it in the top ten. Add the fact that they are expensive to make (for obvious reasons) and you've got a market that's inherently risky.

WWD was produced by the BBC, a public broadcaster. In fact the majority of high-profile paleo documentaries were largely or entirely made by public broadcasters. Even if they did turn a profit in these cases, the very reason we have public broadcasting (i.e. justification why you are required by law to pay those annoying 18.36 € every month) is to be independent of market forces and to be able to prioritize quality content over cheap and safe cash-grabs. Now granted, they don’t always do this very well, but I think considering how little of the money spent on public broadcasting actually goes into producing documentaries, we can justifiably expect the ones that do get made to not have to prioritize profit and ratings over the quality of the content.

Due to this "gateway drug" element, attention-catchers like T. rex and the asteroid are valuable. Plus, the rotating audience is less annoyed by clichés than some others might be.

I agree paleontology docs are a good entry into science education, but I’m not so sure I agree with the rotating audience. The thing is that there already are all those other documentaries to watch, and in the days of streaming services, it’s not as though kids were limited to watch only the documentaries that are currently premiering on traditional TV. So the market for seeing the same things repeatedly does become smaller over time, because at some points kids will have already seen all the previous documentaries that already did them. I suspect that might be one of the reasons why so few significant paleo documentaries came out in the decade before prehistoric planet; there simply already were so many documentaries out there for such a comparatively small market, and those people who could have made new ones didn’t have much in the way of new, inspired ideas, outside of very specialized ones highlighting specific discoveries at least. And the Prehistoric Planet came out, and the reason it succeeded at doing the whole "grand-scale, long-format, visually spectacular paleo documentary"-thing was that it did have enough to set it apart to make audiences want to watch it (namely: accuracy, the tried and tested BBC nature documentary format applied to dinosaurs, including Attenborough, and of course visuals far beyond anything we’ve seen in dino docs before).

Does that mean there's nothing we can do to promote diversity?

There is, but I fear the responsibility lies not among the documentaries themselves.

I do think it doesn’t lie with them alone, but I think they are in the best position to start, and it has to start somewhere. Even if I could convince 10 million dinosaur enthusiasts that a documentary without T. rex would be just as enjoyable to watch, what use would that be if nobody actually producing documentaries let themselves be convinced to capitalize on that?

The T. rex isn't the King of the Dinosaurs because of WWD, or because of Planet Dinosaur, or because of Dinosaur Revolution. It's because of The Lost World and, to a lesser extent, Jurassic Park. Ditto for the asteroid. The fact that it killed the dinosaurs gets referenced a lot, including the fact that it did so 65 million years ago (it's even in movie titles).

The asteroid, that wasn’t even known back at the time the Lost World was written or made into a movie, is well known because of The Lost World? Conan Doyle lived about a century before the impact hypothesis was even formulated, and T. rex wasn’t even in the book either, only in the movie. Obviously there was still a popular interest in dinosaurs back then, even without an asteroid or T. rex, enough to have that book made into a film, which then featured T. rex rather out of convenience.

I think we'd need a new technological breakthrough for a new WWD. Unfortunately, we already had an opportunity for that and WWD 3D botched it, so, the WWD brand is probably already too damaged to be repaired.

I think that was just a case of poor creative decisions and people not actually caring as much about 3D as film studios believed. But I don’t really care about the WWD brand, it doesn’t really matter what future documentaries are called (as much as I have been critiqueing the ridiculously uninspired naming convention, that’s of course the least important thing about any documentary). Prehistoric Planet already gave us "a new WWD" in a way, fueled by what I would say isn’t exactly a breakthrough, but rather the gradually accumulated advances in both paleontological science and special effects technology.

I was wrong about that last part. Your graph shows a spike in documentaries starting in the Late 2010's and contuining until today. It looks like the Jurassic World franchise did help to reinvigorate high-budget paleo-documentaries.

Well, actually that spike is mostly Prehistoric Planet, but yes, I think it did indeed reinvigorate paleodocumentaries (judging by the fact we are getting LOOP very soon), whether that has much to do with the JW franchise, or just with the fact that people are now finally hungry (after around a decade of very little such content) to see some more current paleontology documentaries utilizing not just the newest science, but also the newest special effects.

There's an upside to this. During the initial documentary, Velociraptor and Spinosaurus got a lot of screentime and I think being prominent antagonists in the original Jurassic Park trilogy helped.

Which initial documentary do you mean?

[creature386]

I don't have super much to say because the point with streaming is legitimately one I haven't considered and I'm too burned-out for another essay. So, I'll mainly make clarifications.

Oct 10, 2023 0:00:11 GMT 5 theropod said:

There's an upside to this. During the initial documentary, Velociraptor and Spinosaurus got a lot of screentime and I think being prominent antagonists in the original Jurassic Park trilogy helped.

Which initial documentary do you mean?

I meant to write "documentary boom", sorry.

Oct 10, 2023 0:00:11 GMT 5 theropod said:

The T. rex isn't the King of the Dinosaurs because of WWD, or because of Planet Dinosaur, or because of Dinosaur Revolution. It's because of The Lost World and, to a lesser extent, Jurassic Park. Ditto for the asteroid. The fact that it killed the dinosaurs gets referenced a lot, including the fact that it did so 65 million years ago (it's even in movie titles).

The asteroid, that wasn’t even known back at the time the Lost World was written or made into a movie, is well known because of The Lost World?

Another case of unclear communication. I meant to say that the asteroid owes at least as much of its popularity to popular media as T. rex does. I made it look like I talked about TLW specifically which wasn't the intent.

Oct 10, 2023 0:00:11 GMT 5 theropod said:

Due to this "gateway drug" element, attention-catchers like T. rex and the asteroid are valuable. Plus, the rotating audience is less annoyed by clichés than some others might be.

I agree paleontology docs are a good entry into science education, but I’m not so sure I agree with the rotating audience. The thing is that there already are all those other documentaries to watch, and in the days of streaming services, it’s not as though kids were limited to watch only the documentaries that are currently premiering on traditional TV. So the market for seeing the same things repeatedly does become smaller over time, because at some points kids will have already seen all the previous documentaries that already did them. I suspect that might be one of the reasons why so few significant paleo documentaries came out in the decade before prehistoric planet; there simply already were so many documentaries out there for such a comparatively small market, and those people who could have made new ones didn’t have much in the way of new, inspired ideas, outside of very specialized ones highlighting specific discoveries at least. And the Prehistoric Planet came out, and the reason it succeeded at doing the whole "grand-scale, long-format, visually spectacular paleo documentary"-thing was that it did have enough to set it apart to make audiences want to watch it (namely: accuracy, the tried and tested BBC nature documentary format applied to dinosaurs, including Attenborough, and of course visuals far beyond anything we’ve seen in dino docs before).

You definitely are right that the existence of streaming services changes things a lot.

In fact, I'd even argue that they invalidate most of my argumentation. lol

Streaming services have primarily done two things:

1. Make entry barriers lower, resulting in more content.
2. Replace broadcast times with algorithms as the primary factor that decides who watches what.

Both of these factors make entertainment that is targeted towards a specific rather than a broad audience more profitable than in the old days both because there's more competition (#1) and because said specific audience can find it more easily (#2). Paleo-nerds might not be many, but we are loyal, and since we can now choose what we watch, we can keep up with our favorite genre at any age.

I'm curious what else streaming could do to the whole paleo-documentary genre. We're already getting the first high-profile indie paleo-documentaries like Forgotten Bloodlines: Agate. If there's more of them, I wonder if any of them will ever get the same cult-following as the Trilogy of Life or PP (although matching the production values will probably be a greater challenge).