Paleoworld
Paleoworld is a highly extensive TV Documentary series on Prehistoric Life that ran on The Learning Channel from 1994 to 1997. To quote The Other Wiki:
"Season 1 (1994) featured a smooth style to it and was narrated by Ben Gazzara. This series had lots of musical scenes, which resulted in what some consider to be an extremely calm and relaxing show. It also uses a lot more Paleoart than later series. Season 2 (1995) and Season 3 (1996) lost the musical element (as well as changing narrators), which resulted in a more conventional style nature documentary. Even so, seasons 2 and 3 were still perceived as maintaining the quality standard. For season 4 (1997), the series changed narrators again, and viewers felt the show suffered a drop in quality, shifting from musical and calm, to full-on and repetitive. Consequently, season 4 was canceled mid-season. The show never returned for a fifth season. However, TLC released a new series about dinosaurs the following year (1998) as a spin off to the Paleoworld series. It was called "When Dinosaurs Ruled" ("Jurassica" in some countries)."
See also its Science Marches On page.
Series-wide tropes:
- Everything's Better with Dinosaurs
- Science Marches On: Has its own page.
- Shown Their Work: Most of the airtime was devoted to paleo-folk explaining things in detail.
- Stock Footage: Mostly in the later seasons and its Spin-Off, this was taken to ridiculous heights. Instead of creating animation for each featured animal, they would often show the same few stock clips repeating. Every sauropod, every large theropod and every small bipedal dinosaur looked the same, disregarding what unique features they might have had or in the small dinosaurs' case, even whether they were meat or plant eaters. Other times, they just showed the camera wading through vegetation or looking up at trees. Another common theme was showing stiff and wooden animatronic dino-robots.
- Talking Heads
Tropes used for each episode:
Episode 2: Flight of the Pterosaurs
Episode 3: Back to the Seas
- Sea Monster: Basilosaurus.
Episode 4: Carnosaurs
- Tyrannosaurus Rex: Half the episode's about him.
Episode 6: Sea Monsters
- Megalodon: The last bit of this episode is about him.
- Sea Monster: Quite a number.
Episode 8: Attack of the Killer Kangaroos
- Australian Wildlife: Just a million years back.
- Land Down Under
Episode 11: The Legendary T-Rex
- Tyrannosaurus Rex: Guess what.
Episode 13: The Mysteries of Extinction
Episode 19: Mystery of Dinosaur Cove
- Land Down Under: Where Dinosaur Cove is.
Episode 22: Are Rhinos Dinos?
- Somewhere a Palaeontologist Is Crying: The show used its puppet of Triceratops and passed it off a rhino. This is the equivalent of an ostrich being labeled a human.
Episode 23: Killer Birds
- Feathered Fiend: This one's full of them.
Episode 24: The Land That Time Forgot
- Kill'Em All: The Permian extinction almost does this.
Episode 28: Dawn of the Cats
- Mega Neko: Quite a number.
Episode 29: Boneheads
- Use Your Head: The pachycephalosaurs do this.
Episode 38: Dwarf Dinos
- Little People: The small dinosaurs.
Episode 40: Prehistoric Sharks
- Everything's Even Worse with Sharks
- Megalodon
- Sea Monster: The sharks all qualify.
Episode 41: Loch Ness Secrets
Episode 46: Killer Raptors
- Feathered Fiend: Just without the feathers.
Episode 47: Clash of the Titans
Episode 48: Dinosaur Doomsday
Episode 49: Valley of the Uglies
- Feathered Fiend: Diatryma (that's what the show calls it.)
- Full Boar Action: Dinohyus (now Daeodon).