My recent encounter with 28 Years Later had informed me that while you should avoid looking back where possible, old franchises can avoid the disappointment of a nostalgia-fuelled return for the sake of returning. But the fate I dreaded for that particular outing was not avoided by another of my beloved early experiences with moving image.
Striding back on to screens with an ill-judged sense of self-importance this summer, Walking with Dinosaurs 2025 waded waist-deep into the tar before it knew what was happening – and over the course of six excruciating episodes, it never looked like escaping its slow sink back into irrelevance.
When it first aired in the autumn of 1999, the eight-year-old me was captivated by Walking with Dinosaurs. Even then, it was very much a show you needed to accept warts-and-all – its budget visuals paling in comparison to the majesty of Jurassic Park (made years earlier). But it had something that its modern reincarnation sadly abandoned, and missed throughout its second life.
The original idea for Walking with Dinosaurs was devised following the huge popularity of Jurassic Park. It even utilised some of the methods its blockbusting predecessor deployed in delivering a less-is-more approach to CGI (though it was demonstrably more important for the smaller production budget, where relying on close-up animatronics and puppets simply kept notably low-res computer imagery out of the frame). But science television producer Tim Haines recognised that these techniques could be deployed to engage people with educational content, just as effectively as they could with a Hollywood movie.
Developing the idea with other BBC science producers, Haines hatched a plan to make a dinosaur series with the look and feel of a natural history programme: one of the broadcaster’s undisputed fortes. And so each episode in the six part series released in 1999 focused on a particular epoch in the age of the dinosaurs – which spanned millions of year, and boasted a fantastic diversity of evolutionary quirks and offshoots. Like many episodes of Natural World programming, episode featured a core animal, and its story around a fateful journey, or event in its life cycle. But also like that programming, this gave the team the opportunity to weave a wider world around the ‘main character’.
Imagine, being a kid who lived and breathed dinosaur trivia, suddenly being given a magical window, through which to observe their living, breathing ecosystem. It might not have been Hollywood, but it was box office – and box office for a noble cause.
Extinction of the author
Unfortunately, a culture of apologetically undermining innovation has been enshrined at the BBC by successive governments. Critics who have long since faded from relevance argued that the show was either a money-grab (Guardian critic Nancy Banks-Smith worried that the success of the series would lead to the BBC exploiting its appeal to younger viewers and launching merchandise), or playing fast and lose with the facts.
Some palaeontologists criticised the show’s speculative storylines and the boldness of some of its claims. This included noting that some aspects presented as definitive were very much speculative, and open to challenge in the future. And parents (including my own) were not indisposed to quipping “Well how do they know ANY of this happened to this specific diplodocus anyway?”
In spectacularly overvaluing these criticisms, however, the show’s 2025 revival has delivered one of the most tedious events in modern natural history viewing – one much less likely to enthuse youngsters considering a life as palaeontologists, or even just taking an interest in the natural world as it is or was. Because the vast majority of Walking with Dinosaurs 2025 consists of watching scientists pick through dust and mud.
There is some value in including that this time round. These people are the reason we get to talk about any of these fabulous creatures at all – and if you want to know more about the job, there is merit in showing a slice of the life of a palaeontologist. But there is only so much interest you can take in a beardy-man, paunch down in the dirt, ruling out various scenarios involving the sleeping giant they are unearthing.
The show is now obsessed with showing how it knows anything about the particular dinosaur it centres its format around – when that doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not enough to warrant this much focus on the team as they drive through barren land, launch drones off cliffs, or sit around the campfire exchanging dinosaur trivia.
Show us something. Show us literally anything but this…
Unfortunately, though, the ‘anything’ that manifests is solely focused on the exchanges we just had, or the other fossils found at the same dig-site. So, while one or two dinosaurs might crop up in the central story, we see practically nothing of that wider ecological context – and are deprived of the most important message the show could probably imbue in 2025. Life might find a way in a sense, but only because of its diversity. In the era of another great extinction, one which we might still have a say in preventing, showing how life has always depended on a precise balance of different shapes, sizes and diets could be revolutionary.
It would also be a damned sight more interesting. There are precious few surprises for anyone who hasn’t been decomposing in a tar pit of their own since 1999. From the very first moments of that original run, we were confronted by new phenomenon: particularly, the cynodonts who evolved alongside the earliest dinosaurs, who would eventually give rise to the mammals and us. But without this interest in a wider world, we get none of that in 2025. In fact, some episodes feature as few as two species, in one very specific alcove of a huge and wild world.
Even this might have been saved by a bit more of a cut-throat approach to the realities of wildlife, though. Whenever that most intriguing of events occurs – the hunt – the event is now punctuated by a visual cop-out. We cut away just as kill is made or the gore presumably would start to flow – occasionally with the viscera covered by conveniently placed shrubs, or another live dinosaur, in a way reminiscent of an Austin Powers knob-gag.
There is also a bare-faced propensity to re-used the same CGI sequence, but mirrored or reversed. So in the very small amounts of time we spend with the dinosaurs, we find ourselves either checking out of the action, or picking at its more-advanced but less-ambitious flaws. One instance notably looks unfortunately like an utahraptor getting its cheeks clapped. And it plays again, and again, and again. And without the withering narration of Kenneth Branagh (who often seemed cattily obsessed with the tiny brain size of most dinosaurs), there is little in the way of humour to help check our cynicism here, either.
It’s sad to see a once mighty titan go out this way. But ultimately it proves the value of imagination, of art and humanity in science. Because long discussions about ruling out what couldn’t have happened will only go so far in understanding, or getting people to care, about the natural world – then and now.
In 1999, Haines admitted in an accompanying book that speculating about dinosaur behaviour in of itself is unscientific, since the theories cannot be tested. But in the end, he still maintained that using both science and reasoned speculation “seems well worth trying to find out more about how [the dinosaurs] may have lived”. By doing that, the show gave us a new way to care and engage with the subject, and to translate it beyond dry academic dialogue. The 2025 outing shows how important that was.
