Walking with Dinosaurs/YMMV

• Crowning Music of Awesome:
  • 1) Walking With Dinosaurs: There are several, such as the opening theme, the heartbreaking Giant of the Skies, the epic Flight of the Ornithocheirus, the Diplodocus march, the Raptor chase, the Cruel Sea suite... just get the soundtrack, close your eyes, and let Benjamin Bartlett's music take you back to the Age of Dinosaurs.
  • 2) Ballad Of Big Al: The Allosaurus hunt on the salt flats is probably the best musical piece in the whole Walking With series. The funny young Allosaurus theme is also worth of mention.
  • 3) Walking With Beasts has many masterpieces as well: the attack of Basilosaurus to the Moeritherium, the entelodont battle, the Indricotherium theme, the Smilodon clash, the very evocative mammoth march, the majestic Australopithecus wandering in the plains after being chased from their old territory, and all the musics accompanying New Dawn. And the opening theme of course, which rivals Big Al as the title of "the best".
  • 4) Walking With Monsters: The opening theme, the Anomalocaris fight, the Cephalaspis migration, the Jaws-reminding Hyneria attack, the whole Early Permian Period, the relentless Dimetrodon and gorgonopsid attack, the sad Permian Extinction, and the march/river-crossing of Lystrosaurus. And don't forget the Evolution theme: it almost makes Monsters seeming a videogame with all the stages and respective enemies.
  • 5) The music in Sea Monsters is overall great, but the music playing during the mosasaur attack really makes it a Crowning Moment of Awesome, and is equally great to the above Ballad of Big Al example.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: the giant sea reptile Liopleurodon. This show did to him what Jurassic Park did to Velociraptor: make it stock (as well as exaggerate its size).
  • The huge dinosaur Giganotosaurus with its memorable predation upon the gigantic sauropod Argentinosaurus may be counted as another example. It's interesting both Giganotosaurus and Spinosaurus (the latter became stock after Jurassic Park 3) achieved their popularity in the same year (2001).
• Freud Was Right: Because of its shape, the Late Permian lake has been nicknamed Penis Lake.
• It Was His Sled: Spoiler alert--The K-Pg extinction happens!
• Most Annoying Sound: You will get really tired of hearing the American narrator say "wildlife adventurer Nigel Marvin" after every damned commercial break in Prehistoric Park.
  • I nominate "Anatotitan"'s "roar" (it does sound like they're saying the word "roar"). That sound drives me nuts.
• Narm: In Walking With Monsters. For all its hunting prowess and deadliness, the famous crested mammal-ancestor Dimetrodon looks pretty damn goofy when it's running.
  • Justified in the fact that every land vertebrate at that time period ran more or less like that, and the 10-feet one was likely to outrun everything else. And its following evolutionary stage (the gorgonopsid) loses its "clumsiness" altogether.
  • The final fate of the tyrannosaurid family at the end of "Death of a Dynasty" rather comically clashes with the grimness of the scene. To elaborate: The mother died from her leg wound, with the surviving infants clustering around her body. Then the meteor shockwave hits. The babies get suck up by the wind and zoom away, followed by the mother's corpse being lazily dragged after them.
• Special Effect Failure: Even these shows weren't immune to this: the most common goofs are CG clipping errors (like when the mammoth's trunk "merges" with its tusk), wires from the animatronic models or parts of the people controlling them being visible, and shadow/reflection effects being messed up. Some are obvious, others you only catch if you watch the clips frame-by-frame.
  • Walking with Monsters suffers from some particularly bad-looking CGI composition. A lot of times, animals either clip into the scenery, their shadows rarely correspond to the irregularities or the color of the ground, and in some shots, they are cropped a little bit too far from the screen's edge (like this poor fish), so you can even see parts of the background "through" them.^[1]
• They Just Didn't Care: The NetFlix episode summaries screw up a lot. By which claiming that "Giant of the Skies" centered on Archaeopteryx, promising "mammoth ichthyosaurs" (if by "mammoth" one means "dolphin-sized") and "marine crocodiles" for "Cruel Sea", and claiming that "Death of a Dynasty" was an examination of an unanswered query about the extinction of the dinosaurs, rather than it being a plain depiction of a giant meteorite killing them all after a considerable decline from volcanic activity.
  • Nigel surviving in the Carboniferous without filters is another example, since Carboniferous had much more oxygen in the atmosphere than every other prehistoric time, and too much oxygen is as lethal to human physiology as a low level of it.
  • Chased By Dinosaurs has the famous flying reptile Pteranodon living in the the earliest part of the Late Cretaceous (it really lived roughly in the middle) and in South America instead of North America. It was literally in the wrong place at the wrong time.
  • The Complete Guide cites Carnosauria as "an ill-defined collection of theropods, whose evolutionary relationships are much contested by scientists." This hasn't been the case since The Nineties at latest. Carnosauria is actually pretty well-defined and has been since earlier this century.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Its visual effects are among the most impressive in any TV series ever, period.
  • Special mention must go to Sea Monsters. It features pre-historic creatures underwater and interacting with Nigel.
  • The arena spectacular for the sheer spectacle of seeing life-sized dinosaurs live in front of you.
• What Do You Mean It's Not for Kids?: The series arguably was destined to a general public including both adults and children: however, for some people who watched it during childhood, several parts of the Walking With series are nothing but a long, endless sequence of Nightmare Fuel-related stuff. Arguably, talking about prehistory in a more reassuring way "will never be allowed" in TV. And the book "A Natural History" doesn't exactly better the situation, either.

1. ↑ Though this last one may depend on whether or not you watch it on DVD. At least one version of the Walking with Dinosaurs DVD also has some strange goings on at the edges of the screen.