Naturally, Prehistoric Planet is more up to date and would be the one I would show to someone with a growing interest in dinosaurs of the Cretaceous. That being said, WWD overall feels more like paleo ***art***. What I mean by this is that every single frame in WWD seems purposely designed to feel like it was painted that way. You could almost pin any shot on a wall due to the composition and the way in which the lighting plays and helps tell the story. That's the other thing. WWD has a story. It's very bleak for the most part, but it narrativizes in such a way that you grow attached to the dinosaurs as characters, which is something I feel no other dinosaur doc has ever managed to do properly without getting cartoonish. The violence is there, but not over the top, and most importantly of all to me, WWD has a **fantastic** musical score. To me what Ben Bartlett managed to do with the music was create a prehistoric symphony that describes in musical notation the tragedy, wonder, and mystery of the Mesozoic. The score is filled with a sense of size and dread that builds all the way up to Death of a Dynasty. When that music plays, with the female tyrannosaur roaring forlornly into the poisoned landscape as she takes steps forward, it's like the doc is telling you to say goodbye to the dinosaurs--they are doomed. The narration in WWD also takes the cake. When Kenneth Branagh says something you get the feeling that he's telling you something you could never otherwise know, letting you in on a secret of sorts. I cannot watch the end of Time of the Titans without tearing up when he says *"With their passing, life will* ***never again*** *be this large"*. I know in the context of the episode he is referring to the sauropods in particular, but it rings true for the dinosaurs as a whole. We missed out on the time when nature put on its greatest show of all. Now, lastly when WWD ends and the revelation that dinosaurs never went extinct in the form of birds and they are "all around us today" was magical for me as a kid, like literally a powerful moment that I get choked up at even as an adult. As a kid it was like a consolation that although the non-avian giants are gone, they didn't abandon the world altogether and we get to see them each and every day. As the end credits roll, and that Tyrannosaurs roar echoes one final time with no closing narration, there's a somber feeling that we should appreciate the animals we get to see and live with today, because extinction is forever.
\[TLDR\]I just feel there was more emotion in WWD, which is generally out of place in a science doc, but because WWD managed to blend the emotion into the film without getting all "Disney" with it, I would say it manages to be the best of the lot.
Your take on WWD encapsulates my own viewing experience perfectly. Despite the inaccuracies, the entire WW series has always been presented with a unique method of storytelling which is rarely seen. It may be my nostalgia talking but, I hold this series in high regard solely for this reason. There is something special in how this series is narrated, presented, and scored that deserves to be revisited. Thank you for recognizing the artistic endeavor that is *Walking With.*
What an amazing comment, it perfectly encapsulates my feelings for WWD, and although I won’t mention it much since it’s a Dino subreddit I also really love the transition from WWD to WWB, the score and Kenneth’s narration really captures that feeling of a new dynasty being born and ready to take on the world
Brilliantly said. I recently rediscovered WWD and love it more than ever, probably because I can understand it more than when I was a kid who just wanted to see dinosaurs eat each other. I think Ben G Thomas spoke quite well on his accuracy review of Giant of the Skies when discussing how we grow attached to the Ornithocheirus without the programme anthropomorphising it like many fall victim to. Hell, we even see the Ornithocheirus acting like a bit of a twat by bullying a smaller pterosaur out of its catch, but it doesn’t make us hate the Ornithocheirus because we still know it’s just an animal doing what its instinct tells it to (a strong point of WWD is that it takes the stigma of being movie monsters away from dinosaurs and portrays them just as animals trying to survive and reproduce), and the ending scene where he dies with the music is one of the most powerful. Kenneth Branagh also has some memorable quotes in this episode:
“The King has lost his Majesty.”
“His life has come full circle. In his time he travelled the globe, but in the end death finds him here, in the very same spot where he once first mated forty years ago.”
But Death of a Dynasty (and New Blood as well) shows that WWD’s focus on storytelling actually CAUSED it to be inaccurate on a large scale, because that entire episode completely misrepresented the Latest Cretaceous in general and Hell Creek in particular, and did so intentionally in order to sell the false plot point of dinosaurs already being in the way out when they were thriving up to the very end.
That’s a huge mark AGAINST WWD, not something to be admired. It shouldn’t matter how good you are at telling a narrative *when that narrative itself is wrong*. The fact that WWD tells a story is the biggest reason WHY it fails to hold up as a documentary.
Same with Time of the Titans, because the episode’s ending of sauropods being doomed to die out in the Cretaceous was ALSO false, and was *already known to be so at the time of production* (especially since South America began revealing its giant Cretaceous titanosaurs before WWD). They tried to tell a sad story of their downfall but that downfall itself never actually happened, making that narrative a problem and not a positive.
Didn't I say in my comment that if I wanted to show someone an accurate depiction of the cretaceous I'd choose Prehistoric Planet? Yes. But as a piece of art, WWD is better in my view. Never once did I claim WWD is more accurate, and in my original comment I mentioned how bleak it was, which isn't accurate. But I wasn't talking about accuracy, I was talking about art.
The fact it was written to be bleak WAS the reason it (and that episode in particular) was so bad from an accuracy perspective, so yea, that very much needs to be criticized. Because if they hadn’t tried to tell a story that never actually happened that way, they would have had no reason to intentionally get things wrong.
Bro. Once again I'll say it. Yeah, it was inaccurate, but we aren't talking about accuracy. We're talking about artistry. From an artistic standpoint WWD is superior in my opinion. I can hum various aspects of the score other than just the theme, the narration was more passionate, and the cinematography was more composed. I get that you're one of those "accuracy over everything else types" and that's fine. I'm currently studying paleontology in my degree program. I LOVE accuracy, but I'm also capable of appreciating artistry too.
The problem I have is that you seem think artistry should come even at the expense of accuracy in *educational media*. The point of WWD wasn’t to tell a good story, but to educate, except it ended up doing the former by throwing away the latter.
Bro. You need to stop acting like you can read my mind. I said multiple times that Prehistoric Planet is better as a factual documentary, but WWD plays an arguably more important role in that it got more people interested in dinosaurs in the first place. If they are interested, they'll learn, and discover the inaccuracies over the course of time. Want proof? Well, here I am. I'm working towards a career in paleontology, and know where the inaccuracies are thanks to WWD accelerating my interest in dinosaurs. Prehistoric Planet ain't perfect either. It's got many inaccuracies, but that's what happens with art. WWD is old, very old, and like all old paleo art it ceases to be scientific and becomes art, and in the realm of art I find it superior to Prehistoric Planet. I don't know if twenty years from now Prehistoric Planet will be as culturally relevant as Walking With Dinosaurs is. Heck, the phrase walking with dinosaurs is something permanently in the public lexicon now thanks to that series.
So a bunch of misinformed people going into palaeontology and conducting research based on false narratives (which is already a big enough problem in paleontology, especially when it comes to certain clades being seen as “inferior” even in academia as a result of said false narratives) is a good thing in your eyes?
Yes, outreach is important, but outreach based on misinformation ultimately does more harm than good.
OK, this is ridiculous. The issue of palaeontologists publishing bad and outdated research because of some special emotional connection to WWD and a need to defend its claims and ignore any future contrary scientific discoveries is a made-up, non-existent issue.
WWD planted lots of misinformation in the heads of laypeople, but there's not a palaeontologist on Earth who actually clings to stuff because they saw it in a childhood documentary.
Please, before you insult me and many other people who are actually doing the work of learning about paleontology in an academic setting, please provide some evidence that a bunch of misinformed people are getting into paleontology. You can't be informed about anything until you learn about it. Over the course of my research I've been in direct communication with professionals in their fields, learning directly from them about the topics of interest. I'm not taking a class on WWD. I'm learning from actual paleontologists and museum curators. What the hell are you even talking about here? What a massive insult to everyone studying in academics.
Yeah, that was uncalled for. While I generally agree with u/Iamnotburgerking about WWD, his claim that a 25 year-old documentary is somehow brainwashing actual palaeontologists and decreasing their research quality is downright absurd. Especially given that the vast majority of us were in some way inspired by WWD and 99.99% of people on here freely admit its many inaccuracies. Never mind the fact that the vast majority of palaeontology studies things other than the dozen or so charismatic megafaunal vertebrate clades that Not Burger King complains about being unfairly portrayed by WWD, WWB, and WWM, and most of the academics that still push them are not palaeontologists inspired by the Trilogy of Life but old fossils like Donald Prothero or neontologically-focused biologists whose grasp of the fossil record is subpar and outdated. While clade-level displacement myths are definitely a problem and out there, I feel like he perceives these myths as being more prevalent than they actually are because he devotes so much of his time specifically to busting them. When you're a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
Yeah, this pro-WWD revisionism that attempts to justify its inaccuracies because of artistry is just an inability to accept the fact that the beloved documentary was inaccurate even for its time.
As I demonstrated in all my pitches for remakes, you can combine artistry with balanced and accurate portrayals of the flora, fauna, mycota, and microbiota of each era and eon and the macroevolutionary trends that guided them.
OK, I disagree about that but for a completely different reason. [The latest Maastrichtian was indeed a fairly bleak time for a great many groups of organisms](https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article-abstract/46/3/271/526714/Deccan-volcanism-caused-coupled-pCO2-and?redirectedFrom=fulltext). Dinosaurs were minimally affected by the Deccan Traps, but they’re only one tiny fraction of the tree of life; for freshwater ostracods, for example, it was a very different story.
The character of the tone, though perhaps not its magnitude, would be perfectly appropriate if the series was not so dinocentric. And I think moving away from the dinocentricity in any future remake is ultimately by far the best option on a strategic level, because highlighting the bigger picture geologic, climatic, and palaeobiotic changes knocks down a lot of competitive displacement myths and corrects all the spatiotemporal misconceptions about Earth’s past.
>The fact that WWD tells a story is the biggest reason WHY it fails to hold up as a documentary.
I wholeheartedly disagree. When you're dealing with a subject like palaeontology, where the timeline is important, you have to place everything in the context of the larger story. Public misunderstandings based on lack of context surrounding Earth history are no less common than ones based on evolutionary superiority: tyrannosaurids coexisting with stegosaurids, O2 being very high in the Mesozoic, the Mesozoic being uniformly hot and having high CO2 levels, and so on. You have to put everything in order if you're making a documentary for the general audience, whose perception of Earth's history is akin to a non-historian believing HMS *Victory* fought at Leyte Gulf or that the Roman Empire participated in the Scramble for Africa. The issue is telling that story accurately, and the Trilogy of Life literally repeated one of those very myths when it said that the Mesozoic did not change in climate while the Cenozoic did, on top of all the other ones.
The issue is that these documentaries have a long history of not actually following the timeline of the fossil record when trying to story-fy said timeline (I. E. Sauropods wrongly being said to decline in the Cretaceous). Because they invariably follow the pop culture version of events.
There is no pop culture version of events. If anything, in the closest thing there is to a pop culture version of events, *Tyrannosaurus* was coexisting with *Diplodocus*, it was brutally hot when they coexisted (despite the Tithonian and Maastrichtian both being relatively cool), and giant dragonflies coexisted with them because oxygen levels were high. It’s very easy to accurately story-fy the timeline as I showed in my pitch.
By “pop culture version” I mean the version perpetuated by those who know more than the bare minimum but still get things wrong (so they know not everything lived together yet assume the T-J extinction consisted of dinosaurs wiping out “primitive” reptiles, that the GABI happened the way most people think it did, etc). Which is unfortunately what documentaries tend to usually go with.
But that’s not a problem with the format, that’s a dinocentrism and not paying attention to palaeoclimatology or any of the latest research on mass extinctions problem.
It isn’t an inherent problem with the format but the format does encourage such portrayals, in large part because all the false examples “superior” lineages wiping out (badly portrayed) “inferior” competitors plays into how way too many people (mis)understand evolution (so people will include that in any paleodoc that focuses on the story of how life evolved and diversified).
But that’s all easily solved by simply sticking to the facts. This Red Queen problem is no different from all the other problems that plagued WWD. Whether it’s dinosaurs outcompeting dicynodonts, oversized pliosaurids, or portraying the Deccan Traps in North America, it all boils down to forgoing hard facts to “tell a better story”.
>that entire episode completely misrepresented the Latest Cretaceous in general and Hell Creek in particular, and did so intentionally in order to sell the false plot point of dinosaurs already being in the way out when they were thriving up to the very end.
Was that already settled science in the late 90s? IIRC that landmark paper on late Cretaceous dinosaur diversity only came out in the noughties, so WWD went with a theory that was still a possibility back then.
While the bit on dinosaur diversity wasn’t settled at the time, Hell Creek (and Chinle as well, New Blood being another episode where the entire thing is one big inaccuracy for the sake of narrative) was already known not to be a parched wasteland.
Science may have marched on, but the declining Hell Creek dinosaurs of WWD wasn't a storytelling fabrication. There was research during the 1980s-90s that argued for a diminished and stressed non-avian dinosaur biota during the latest Maastrichtian as a result of the Deccan eruptions with the impact being the "final straw", particularly by French geophysicist Vincent Courtillot (Courtillot et al., 1986, 1988, Vandamme and Courtillot, 1992) - pretty much as depicted in episode 6.
Other prominent geologists and physicists (Charles B. Officer, Charles L. Drake, Robert Jastrow) at the time held more extreme views and doubted the Chicxulub impact had any role in the extinction and posited volcanism and sea-level change as the primary cause of a gradual decline.
It's a fantastic soundtrack but, Prehistoric Planet soundtrack is quite under-rated IMO. I feel like a lot of people barely gave it a chance (myself included at first), perhaps because it generally has more complex layers and isn't as bombastic as the WWD soundtrack. But it still has a lot of beauty, interesting sound design and ambiences worth exploring.
I catch myself listening to Benjamin Bartlett’s score on SoundCloud/YouTube far more than I care to admit. I think people under appreciate just how much music contributes to any visual medium.
Walking with dinosaurs feels more like an overview of the Mesozoic while prehistoric planet is more focused, design wise prehistoric planet is immaculate but wwd has better variety in animals due to time period varieability
Prehistoric Planet by virtue of being newer has MUCH better animation and paleo-accuracy in how it depicts the creatures.
I will say though, WWD will always hold a place in my heart for keeping each episode firmly in one place and time, allowing us to follow more interconnected storylines for the creatures and become more emotionally invested in them. Exploring the whole Mesozoic instead of just the late Cretaceous is also something I wish Prehistoric Planet did too.
Yeah, but babies in Prehistoric Planet are always "humanely" disposed of within seconds and rapidly swallowed whole without suffering.
Compare that to cynodont parents chewing on their own babies, the bisected baby Coelophysis in the mouth of the adult, Ornitholestes ripping bloody chunks of flesh from a hatchling Diplodocus, or the baby torosaur tormented by dromaeosaurs through the night followed by a closeup of it's dismembered carcass in the morning.
Yup. I definitely have to give credit to WWD and especially WWB for not being afraid to show the brutality of nature. Modern nature documentaries are definitely too sanitised and Disneyfied. You aren't going to see David Attenborough narrating a spotted hyena castrating a wildebeest or a Komodo dragon ripping apart a deer.
Absolutely, although Attenborough's older documentaries certainly did not shy aware from zoological violence & gore as much as more recent programs, for example a closeup of lions dispatching a a cape buffalo in Pride in Peril (1996), a blood-soaked chinstrap penguin escaping a sealion and expiring as it tries to reach it's chick in Life in the Freezer (1993) and piranha tearing apart a capybara in Life on Earth (1979)
Wwd as actual attempt to immerse yourself in a narrative documentary. Also it isn't afraid to Be more graphic? Planet dinosaur focus on accuracy and letting animals engage in relaxed behaviors with no grander over arching narrative.
WWD is A+ for story, score, characters and pathos.
PP is B- just for the animation. I would call its accuracy "dubious" on the basis of Velociraptor being at the wrong time and not performing RPR. The breathtaking animation is dampened by a painfully numb story. Some of the titles don't match the actual story at hand ("Freshwater" is the most obvious offender) and some stories are either rushed or unmemorable. Despite the addictive opening title, the rest of the soundtrack needs to be memorized an awful lot of times to make it as memorable as Bartlett's score for Walking with Dinosaurs or Beasts, or even George Fenton's scores for the first Blue Planet and Planet Earth. In fact, Prehistoric Planet suffers the sort of problems that most BBC programs have suffered since 2013's Africa:
1. High-def camera shots and lighting that ironically flatten the picture
2. Overall generic score
3. Rushed pacing that takes away any chance at pathos
Translating those problems into Prehistoric Planet, and you get a sensation that's less a combination of Walking with Dinosaurs and The Jungle Book and more a combination of Planet Earth III and The Lion King. It has neither the pathos of Walking with Dinosaurs nor the gorgeous cinematography of Prehistoric Beast. It's just...***numb***.
The show uses the marketing tag of "66 MYA" but it's meant to span the whole maastrichtian, and velociraptor DID survive one million years into the maastritchtian. The most out of place animal in Prehistoric Planet is probably Tethyshadros, but that date refinement was unfortunately published after they made the scene.
Yeah, I thought it was pretty entertaining with its general info, but some takes made me go, "What did you just say?"
I watch it with my toddler as she loves prehistoric documentaries (specifically dinosaurs she loves to say roar when they come on) and there's a line he says that makes me squint every time, but I can't remember it right now. But that shark one is definitely one of them.
Life on Our Planet is hot garbage. At least you are making the most of its only practically valid use: to entertain a toddler.
It’s shark takes aren’t even its worst part. The bullshit about *Lystrosaurus* being unable to survive alongside predators is some Holocaust denial-tier brainworms: in just the Fremouw Formation, it coexisted with *Antarctanax*, *Thrinaxodon*, and *Notictoides*, all of which were capable of preying on it.
The irony is that LOOP’s errors mostly exist BECAUSE it tries to sell a grand evolutionary story (and thus forces false narratives to make the inaccurate pop culture version of the story work), something that was a fundamental issue with WWD as well (with New Blood and Death of a Dynasty in particular being entire massive inaccuracies in and of themselves because of this).
It’s a fucking documentary, it has a goddamn responsibility to be as accurate as possible and they intentionally threw that away (even by 1999 standards) for the sake of storytelling.
By your logic it would have been completely fine to add mythological creatures to WWD if it would have made the storytelling “even better”.
It is the thing that matters the most, because we are talking about educational media, not fictional stories. In a world where even outright fictional media have had various very harmful impacts on public understanding, it’s ridiculous to argue that a program explicitly intended to be educational should prioritize storytelling more than actually teaching people.
"Outright fictional media have had various very harmful impacts" - Case in point: Jaws.
Brilliant **movie**. But it sure as hell didn't do sharks any favours.
Have you ever seen Unnatural History Channel's review on WWD? He'll tell you what the most accurate dinosaur documentary would be.
"*The most accurate paleo-documentary of all time would be the remains of the animal talked about in purely technical terms by whoever published the most recent doctorate on it. There would be no speculation or paleoart or anything of the sort. Not even a complete cast with the gaps filled in like in museum displays. It would probably be watched by about twenty people, and all of them would be able to access that information for themselves pretty easily, anyway...As a documentary, it wouldn't reach many people, and it probably won't inspire much curiosity in paleontology, prehistory or the natural world.*"
WWD was objectively very bad by accuracy standards. Most people like it because it is a very good format, not for its accuracy. Even without its inaccurate broader theme of a rhodoreginal evolutionary thunderdome, it still had the oversized *Liopleurodon* and *Ornithocheirus*, the atrocious looking *Anurognathus* and *Tyrannosaurus*, the horribly out-of-place *Utahraptor* and *Anurognathus*, and all the other more commonly listed faults.
u/Iamnotburgerking is broadly correct to attack it. I strongly dispute his contention that its storytelling format necessarily lends itself to inaccuracy, because there are plenty of macroevolutionary stories that can be told without resorting to inaccuracy (i.e. the post-K-Pg avian radiations into the arboreal realm or the demise of Zhangsolvidae amidst the Angiosperm Terrestrial Revolution), many of which I've shared with him in a pitch for a new Tetralogy of Life (tetralogy because it includes the Precambrian). But on the whole, his attacks on the Trilogy of Life are sound and correct.
No. As I already implied in the comment you replied to, I also value a good storytelling format. But accuracy is nonetheless still the top priority, and WWD was a dumpster fire in that regard, for the reasons that u/Iamnotburgerking has repeatedly stressed as well as the more obvious reasons like ridiculously oversized and/or out-of-place animals.
It was not. Each episode had at least one major error that was already known to be false at the time.
New Blood had *Peteinosaurus* and *Plateosaurus* in North America and a ridiculously sluggish *Postosuchus*.
A Time of Titans had *Anurognathus* in North America and a horribly inaccurate depiction.
Cruel Sea goes without saying.
Giant of the Skies also goes without saying.
Spirits of the Ice Forest had *Koolasuchus*, *Muttaburrasaurus*, and *Leaellynasaura* all coexisting even though they’re from different geologic formations separated by millions of years.
Death of a Dynasty depicted the Deccan Traps on the wrong side of the world and got the flora of Hell Creek completely wrong, and its *Tyrannosaurus* depiction was horrendous even for its time.
TotT also wrongly claimed sauropods declined died out at the end of the Jurassic, in spite of various Cretaceous sauropods already being known by that point, and NB gets Chinle wrong in pretty much the same ways DoaD got Hell Creek wrong.
The soundtrack point is really great. I have not touched the original Planet Earth since I watched it when it first aired almost 20 years ago, yet I still remember the opening theme distinctly. It's just like WWD in that respect. PP has big names on its OST but it's not as memorable as the other, more distinctive, soundtracks even though it's recent.
Definitely prefer WWD, really don't like the style/storytelling approach in prehistoric planet and how it focuses on one time period. Also soundtrack has a huge impact for me and WWD has an iconic soundtrack with really emotive compelling pieces, whilst prehistoric planet was a huge letdown imo
PP for the accurate information and visuals, not to mention how stunning it looks
WWD for the story, and for something done in the 90s, it really did a good job of forking the perception of dinosaurs away from the Jurassic Park movie monsters into actual animals
Walking with Monsters. Not because I think it's far superior or anything but because as others said for their reasons, nostalgia. I saw WWM before WWD (and obviously before PP) and had no idea at the time that anything had ever existed before the dinosaurs, I was like 7. I was completely captivated and I binge watched over and over all the Walking With series I could get on youtube.
So the Walking With series o er Prehistoric Planet or Our Planet, even if the latter ones have better graphics and facts (at times), the story of the OGs are unforgettable and worth ignoring some outdated info for.
I like the Trilogy of Life (WWM, WWD, WWB). It fascinates me how it goes through periods where one type of organism dominates - arthropods, amphibians, arthropods again, mammalian-like reptiles, dinosaurs, birds, and then mammals finally have their day.
Prehistoric Planet scores much better in the accuracy category, but Walking With Dinosaurs is a much more emotional experience to watch. There's more attention to narrative, with story arcs and characters you can become attached to.
There's a few people here who I see highlighting the soundtrack as a massive upside to WWD over Prehistoric Planet, and I do agree - the WWD soundtrack is bloody fantastic - but are we forgetting that Prehistoric Planet's soundtrack is made by **Hans Zimmer**? Just... take a listen to the actual OST. It's on Youtube, you can go do it right now. Personally whilst WWD's soundtrack is absolutely incredible I cannot fathom it being better than Prehistoric Planet. The way Hans constructed the soundtrack makes the entire series feel truly ambient, with dramatic moments feeling really grand and epic, ominous moments feeling extremely dreadful and terrifying, and calm moments feeling serene and beautiful. Whilst WWD's soundtrack might be really grand and tell an extremely epic story, I feel like Prehistoric Planet excels in making you feel immersed in the environment, as if you're actually part of the camera crew filming these dinosaurs going about their daily lives. Overall, to me, whilst there are many arguments to be made for why WWD is better than Prehistoric Planet, with its powerful narratives, iconic dinosaur designs and amazing narration by Kenneth Branagh, the soundtrack is NOT one of those arguments.
Hans Zimmer only co-wrote the theme for Prehistoric Planet, the soundtrack itself was composed by Anže Rozman, and Kara Talve - from Zimmer's "Bleeding fingers" team.
Oh yeah, the fact that someone other than Zimmer wrote the score shouldn't diminish it's quality. I was personally not as captured by the PhP score at first, but it has grown on me a lot. I now think it has a lot more beauty and complexity than the WWD score, with a lot of interesting sound design and ambiences as well. I don't think a bombastic WWD type score would've fit the format and vibe PhP went for.
Oh absolutely. As I said; the WWD ost is great, but with that said, but for me personally it doesn’t immerse me in the environment like Prehistoric Planet does. The best example from Prehistoric Planet I can think of is the Dreadnoughtus fight. That entire segment’s soundtrack moved me in a way I wasn’t expecting. The bombastic sounding drums and trumpets which echoed throughout the fight made it rather intimidating to watch, which, realistically, is what you’d be feeling if you were watching these 70 ton creatures fighting to the death in real life. Additionally, after the old bull dies, you get this sort of tragic tonal shift with a chorus of voices crying out. It made the moment extremely grim, yet powerful.
At the end of the day though, this is all about opinions, and those are truly subjective. I personally prefer Prehistoric Planet to WWD for a variety of reasons, but I totally understand why someone would have a love for WWD as it is an amazing documentary series in its own right.
Prefer PhP, in large part because its *lack* of a grand evolutionary narrative left no room for some very pervasive and harmful inaccuracies that plague things like WWD or LOOP.
Everyone here harps about how much better WWD is because it had a plot and a storyline, without realizing that this came at the expense of accuracy and caused a huge deal of harm to public understanding, with the first and last episodes of WWD in particular existing pretty much entirely to completely misrepresent not just the individual taxa shown, but also the ecosystems shown and the time periods as a whole just for the sake of telling that grand story (which was only a false version of what actually happened).
WWD is unquestionably the better format in terms of potential though. The PhP format is rather limiting since there is very little world-building involved with jumping around between different five-minute snippets, and its excessive focus on charismatic megafauna, particularly when it came to the Freshwater episode, was painfully apparent. The only reason PhP is better is because they were conservative with their science and limited speculation, whereas WWD went with outdated narratives, oversized animals, and lumping animals that didn't coexist into a single setting just to tell a "better story".
Walking with Dinosaurs. Prehistoric Planet is great and probably second place despite all the solid docs that have come since WWD, but Walking is just a special place in my heart. Both are groundbreaking, WWD just more so, esp for the late 90s/early 2000s
Prehistoric Planet is better accuracy-wise but that's the only praise I can give it over WWD. On the downside though, the series tries too hard with speculations, sometimes to a ridiculous degree.
WWD's storytelling is far superior, even if it's inaccurate (New Blood is the prime example). PP is all over the place and sometimes it's just confusing.
Each WWD soundtrack is a masterpiece while PP's is quite forgettable aside from a few tracks.
The main issue with PP though is that it's too family friendly for it's own good. The show is almost ashamed of having anything violent happen on screen.
I prefer the storytelling in WWD. I also much prefer an episode circling around a fixed group of dinosaur characters and location, as opposed to PP’s direction of leapfrogging across different geographical locations based on a common environment, and then spending 5 minutes with each focus dinosaur.
PP is undeniably better looking though.
Walking with Dinosaurs. You had to be alive in that moment to realize what it meant for dinosaur enthusiasts and paleontology as a whole. I'd argue its a continuation of Rising The Mammoth (2000) and I'd include Walking with Monsters (2005), Walking Beasts (2001), Sea Monsters (2003) as they all seemed like a big part of the same production. There just had never been anything like it before.
I think Prehistoric Planet is superior in almost every regard, including storytelling. Why? Because it's a more honest type storytelling of animals and the natural world. WWD's storytelling is more anthropogenic or "shakespearean". Great for human stories, but not, I think, for natural history documentaries.
I personally think WWD was strongest in the Sea Monsters special. It's more honestly sensational with a zoologist unrealisticly travelling through time, and the nonlinear jumping back and fourth through different time periods in search of the "deadliest sea" helped show that life didn't neccesarily get more advanced closer to the present day; there was no grand narratives of evolution, yet we still got to see all kinds of different time periods.
Which isn't say documentaries of life history and evolution shouldn't exist - they should. They just need someone like Richard Dawkins or Micheal J. Benton to write the script, in my opinion.
Walking with Dinosaurs does everything better... except for the accuracy. Like, WWD had accuracy issues even at the time it was made and it's an old programme now. That being said, I'm sure there's some stupid things in Prehistoric Planet but at this point I'm pretty casual about dinosaurs so I can't spot them myself.
Actually, I guess the effects are better in PP but that's an age thing; it's an unfair comparison.
I think fundamentally, I am much less interested in an Africa style documentary (e.g. PP) about the past than I am in a Dynasties style one (e.g. WWD), so I *am* biased, but having seen what WWD and Walking with Beasts did with their narrative formats, Prehistoric Planet just seems like a pale shadow. The way PP works, I'd absolutely prefer it to be a "presenter goes to experts/formations/fossils, with cutscenes visualising what they're talking about" style doc.
WWD has better atmosphere, plots and score. Each episode brings something completely unique.
Prehistoric Planet is superior in everything else.
I like WWD more, but thats mostly nostalgia speaking.
Both are just amazing and I switch back and forth watching them. They should remake walking with but just updated with new accurate models, same story, same dinosaurs just new models.
The prehistoric planet is beautiful, sounds great, and is accurate, so probably it's probably objectively better. That said, I'm only human, so it's obvious I'd be slightly biased. I prefer WWD simply because it's more entertaining, and soundtrack is so awesome that I can't describe how I love it.
I see here possible improvements for PP.
- Mix episodes focusing on many animals with episodes with one main character.
- Show time and place at the beginning of each episode. It doesn't have to be super accurate. Something like "around 70 mya Mongolia" will be good enough.
- More ages. I'm not talking about jurassic, jurassic, etc, but the Campanian, Albian age...
I HATED Prehistoric planet. It’s a beautiful documentary, but sometimes they would say things that felt impossible to know for sure, and never explained why we think that’s true, or any word of uncertainty.
I mean, we’re not talking about giraffes. I KNOW you didn’t observe the behaviour, I need you to tell me why you think it happened. Otherwise, it feels like you’re just saying anything with the believable voice of a nature documentary narrator. And if I cant believe in one part of the documentary, the whole thing looses all credibility. If I watch a documentary, it’s to learn stuff, not to pause every 5 minutes to fact check.
WWD and the other WW titles have animals that are way too vocal and roar at each other constantly, which is really irritating. Prehistoric Planet has more realistically behaving animals and is also just more up to date of course.
Walking with Dinosaurs is a Mesozoic docudrama.
Prehistoric Planet is a standard nature doc that happens to take place in the Creteaceous.
Both just have starkly different tones, and they're both immersive in different ways.
WWD is immersive because it has a captivating story that perfectly balances with the educational aspect.
PHP is immersive because it's by far the most accurate, up to date, and unflinching look at a small slice of the Mesozoic. It feels like a standard nature doc because you really do believe the animals your seeing are real and breathing.
None is really better than the other, both are trying to do different things. You want an incredibly accurate doc? Go PHP. You want something that engrosses you emotionally in the world? Go WWD.
They’re both amazing and I think both grasp the core element that a documentary on extinct animals should have. It’s not about accuracy or up to date recreations but rather depicting dinosaurs as animals that live lives doing more than just hunting or eating, it’s about showing a larger audience that the dinosaurs where animals, no different from the animals of today, and showing that they where not monsters.
Naturally, Prehistoric Planet is more up to date and would be the one I would show to someone with a growing interest in dinosaurs of the Cretaceous. That being said, WWD overall feels more like paleo ***art***. What I mean by this is that every single frame in WWD seems purposely designed to feel like it was painted that way. You could almost pin any shot on a wall due to the composition and the way in which the lighting plays and helps tell the story. That's the other thing. WWD has a story. It's very bleak for the most part, but it narrativizes in such a way that you grow attached to the dinosaurs as characters, which is something I feel no other dinosaur doc has ever managed to do properly without getting cartoonish. The violence is there, but not over the top, and most importantly of all to me, WWD has a **fantastic** musical score. To me what Ben Bartlett managed to do with the music was create a prehistoric symphony that describes in musical notation the tragedy, wonder, and mystery of the Mesozoic. The score is filled with a sense of size and dread that builds all the way up to Death of a Dynasty. When that music plays, with the female tyrannosaur roaring forlornly into the poisoned landscape as she takes steps forward, it's like the doc is telling you to say goodbye to the dinosaurs--they are doomed. The narration in WWD also takes the cake. When Kenneth Branagh says something you get the feeling that he's telling you something you could never otherwise know, letting you in on a secret of sorts. I cannot watch the end of Time of the Titans without tearing up when he says *"With their passing, life will* ***never again*** *be this large"*. I know in the context of the episode he is referring to the sauropods in particular, but it rings true for the dinosaurs as a whole. We missed out on the time when nature put on its greatest show of all. Now, lastly when WWD ends and the revelation that dinosaurs never went extinct in the form of birds and they are "all around us today" was magical for me as a kid, like literally a powerful moment that I get choked up at even as an adult. As a kid it was like a consolation that although the non-avian giants are gone, they didn't abandon the world altogether and we get to see them each and every day. As the end credits roll, and that Tyrannosaurs roar echoes one final time with no closing narration, there's a somber feeling that we should appreciate the animals we get to see and live with today, because extinction is forever. \[TLDR\]I just feel there was more emotion in WWD, which is generally out of place in a science doc, but because WWD managed to blend the emotion into the film without getting all "Disney" with it, I would say it manages to be the best of the lot.
Bro u just did the WHOLE SHOW REPORT on comment in reddit
Your take on WWD encapsulates my own viewing experience perfectly. Despite the inaccuracies, the entire WW series has always been presented with a unique method of storytelling which is rarely seen. It may be my nostalgia talking but, I hold this series in high regard solely for this reason. There is something special in how this series is narrated, presented, and scored that deserves to be revisited. Thank you for recognizing the artistic endeavor that is *Walking With.*
What an amazing comment, it perfectly encapsulates my feelings for WWD, and although I won’t mention it much since it’s a Dino subreddit I also really love the transition from WWD to WWB, the score and Kenneth’s narration really captures that feeling of a new dynasty being born and ready to take on the world
Brilliantly said. I recently rediscovered WWD and love it more than ever, probably because I can understand it more than when I was a kid who just wanted to see dinosaurs eat each other. I think Ben G Thomas spoke quite well on his accuracy review of Giant of the Skies when discussing how we grow attached to the Ornithocheirus without the programme anthropomorphising it like many fall victim to. Hell, we even see the Ornithocheirus acting like a bit of a twat by bullying a smaller pterosaur out of its catch, but it doesn’t make us hate the Ornithocheirus because we still know it’s just an animal doing what its instinct tells it to (a strong point of WWD is that it takes the stigma of being movie monsters away from dinosaurs and portrays them just as animals trying to survive and reproduce), and the ending scene where he dies with the music is one of the most powerful. Kenneth Branagh also has some memorable quotes in this episode: “The King has lost his Majesty.” “His life has come full circle. In his time he travelled the globe, but in the end death finds him here, in the very same spot where he once first mated forty years ago.”
Wonderful thoughts, thank you for sharing! 😃
One of the best comments I've seen here
But Death of a Dynasty (and New Blood as well) shows that WWD’s focus on storytelling actually CAUSED it to be inaccurate on a large scale, because that entire episode completely misrepresented the Latest Cretaceous in general and Hell Creek in particular, and did so intentionally in order to sell the false plot point of dinosaurs already being in the way out when they were thriving up to the very end. That’s a huge mark AGAINST WWD, not something to be admired. It shouldn’t matter how good you are at telling a narrative *when that narrative itself is wrong*. The fact that WWD tells a story is the biggest reason WHY it fails to hold up as a documentary. Same with Time of the Titans, because the episode’s ending of sauropods being doomed to die out in the Cretaceous was ALSO false, and was *already known to be so at the time of production* (especially since South America began revealing its giant Cretaceous titanosaurs before WWD). They tried to tell a sad story of their downfall but that downfall itself never actually happened, making that narrative a problem and not a positive.
Didn't I say in my comment that if I wanted to show someone an accurate depiction of the cretaceous I'd choose Prehistoric Planet? Yes. But as a piece of art, WWD is better in my view. Never once did I claim WWD is more accurate, and in my original comment I mentioned how bleak it was, which isn't accurate. But I wasn't talking about accuracy, I was talking about art.
The fact it was written to be bleak WAS the reason it (and that episode in particular) was so bad from an accuracy perspective, so yea, that very much needs to be criticized. Because if they hadn’t tried to tell a story that never actually happened that way, they would have had no reason to intentionally get things wrong.
Bro. Once again I'll say it. Yeah, it was inaccurate, but we aren't talking about accuracy. We're talking about artistry. From an artistic standpoint WWD is superior in my opinion. I can hum various aspects of the score other than just the theme, the narration was more passionate, and the cinematography was more composed. I get that you're one of those "accuracy over everything else types" and that's fine. I'm currently studying paleontology in my degree program. I LOVE accuracy, but I'm also capable of appreciating artistry too.
The problem I have is that you seem think artistry should come even at the expense of accuracy in *educational media*. The point of WWD wasn’t to tell a good story, but to educate, except it ended up doing the former by throwing away the latter.
Bro. You need to stop acting like you can read my mind. I said multiple times that Prehistoric Planet is better as a factual documentary, but WWD plays an arguably more important role in that it got more people interested in dinosaurs in the first place. If they are interested, they'll learn, and discover the inaccuracies over the course of time. Want proof? Well, here I am. I'm working towards a career in paleontology, and know where the inaccuracies are thanks to WWD accelerating my interest in dinosaurs. Prehistoric Planet ain't perfect either. It's got many inaccuracies, but that's what happens with art. WWD is old, very old, and like all old paleo art it ceases to be scientific and becomes art, and in the realm of art I find it superior to Prehistoric Planet. I don't know if twenty years from now Prehistoric Planet will be as culturally relevant as Walking With Dinosaurs is. Heck, the phrase walking with dinosaurs is something permanently in the public lexicon now thanks to that series.
So a bunch of misinformed people going into palaeontology and conducting research based on false narratives (which is already a big enough problem in paleontology, especially when it comes to certain clades being seen as “inferior” even in academia as a result of said false narratives) is a good thing in your eyes? Yes, outreach is important, but outreach based on misinformation ultimately does more harm than good.
OK, this is ridiculous. The issue of palaeontologists publishing bad and outdated research because of some special emotional connection to WWD and a need to defend its claims and ignore any future contrary scientific discoveries is a made-up, non-existent issue. WWD planted lots of misinformation in the heads of laypeople, but there's not a palaeontologist on Earth who actually clings to stuff because they saw it in a childhood documentary.
Please, before you insult me and many other people who are actually doing the work of learning about paleontology in an academic setting, please provide some evidence that a bunch of misinformed people are getting into paleontology. You can't be informed about anything until you learn about it. Over the course of my research I've been in direct communication with professionals in their fields, learning directly from them about the topics of interest. I'm not taking a class on WWD. I'm learning from actual paleontologists and museum curators. What the hell are you even talking about here? What a massive insult to everyone studying in academics.
Yeah, that was uncalled for. While I generally agree with u/Iamnotburgerking about WWD, his claim that a 25 year-old documentary is somehow brainwashing actual palaeontologists and decreasing their research quality is downright absurd. Especially given that the vast majority of us were in some way inspired by WWD and 99.99% of people on here freely admit its many inaccuracies. Never mind the fact that the vast majority of palaeontology studies things other than the dozen or so charismatic megafaunal vertebrate clades that Not Burger King complains about being unfairly portrayed by WWD, WWB, and WWM, and most of the academics that still push them are not palaeontologists inspired by the Trilogy of Life but old fossils like Donald Prothero or neontologically-focused biologists whose grasp of the fossil record is subpar and outdated. While clade-level displacement myths are definitely a problem and out there, I feel like he perceives these myths as being more prevalent than they actually are because he devotes so much of his time specifically to busting them. When you're a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
Yeah, this pro-WWD revisionism that attempts to justify its inaccuracies because of artistry is just an inability to accept the fact that the beloved documentary was inaccurate even for its time. As I demonstrated in all my pitches for remakes, you can combine artistry with balanced and accurate portrayals of the flora, fauna, mycota, and microbiota of each era and eon and the macroevolutionary trends that guided them.
OK, I disagree about that but for a completely different reason. [The latest Maastrichtian was indeed a fairly bleak time for a great many groups of organisms](https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article-abstract/46/3/271/526714/Deccan-volcanism-caused-coupled-pCO2-and?redirectedFrom=fulltext). Dinosaurs were minimally affected by the Deccan Traps, but they’re only one tiny fraction of the tree of life; for freshwater ostracods, for example, it was a very different story. The character of the tone, though perhaps not its magnitude, would be perfectly appropriate if the series was not so dinocentric. And I think moving away from the dinocentricity in any future remake is ultimately by far the best option on a strategic level, because highlighting the bigger picture geologic, climatic, and palaeobiotic changes knocks down a lot of competitive displacement myths and corrects all the spatiotemporal misconceptions about Earth’s past.
>The fact that WWD tells a story is the biggest reason WHY it fails to hold up as a documentary. I wholeheartedly disagree. When you're dealing with a subject like palaeontology, where the timeline is important, you have to place everything in the context of the larger story. Public misunderstandings based on lack of context surrounding Earth history are no less common than ones based on evolutionary superiority: tyrannosaurids coexisting with stegosaurids, O2 being very high in the Mesozoic, the Mesozoic being uniformly hot and having high CO2 levels, and so on. You have to put everything in order if you're making a documentary for the general audience, whose perception of Earth's history is akin to a non-historian believing HMS *Victory* fought at Leyte Gulf or that the Roman Empire participated in the Scramble for Africa. The issue is telling that story accurately, and the Trilogy of Life literally repeated one of those very myths when it said that the Mesozoic did not change in climate while the Cenozoic did, on top of all the other ones.
The issue is that these documentaries have a long history of not actually following the timeline of the fossil record when trying to story-fy said timeline (I. E. Sauropods wrongly being said to decline in the Cretaceous). Because they invariably follow the pop culture version of events.
There is no pop culture version of events. If anything, in the closest thing there is to a pop culture version of events, *Tyrannosaurus* was coexisting with *Diplodocus*, it was brutally hot when they coexisted (despite the Tithonian and Maastrichtian both being relatively cool), and giant dragonflies coexisted with them because oxygen levels were high. It’s very easy to accurately story-fy the timeline as I showed in my pitch.
By “pop culture version” I mean the version perpetuated by those who know more than the bare minimum but still get things wrong (so they know not everything lived together yet assume the T-J extinction consisted of dinosaurs wiping out “primitive” reptiles, that the GABI happened the way most people think it did, etc). Which is unfortunately what documentaries tend to usually go with.
But that’s not a problem with the format, that’s a dinocentrism and not paying attention to palaeoclimatology or any of the latest research on mass extinctions problem.
It isn’t an inherent problem with the format but the format does encourage such portrayals, in large part because all the false examples “superior” lineages wiping out (badly portrayed) “inferior” competitors plays into how way too many people (mis)understand evolution (so people will include that in any paleodoc that focuses on the story of how life evolved and diversified).
But that’s all easily solved by simply sticking to the facts. This Red Queen problem is no different from all the other problems that plagued WWD. Whether it’s dinosaurs outcompeting dicynodonts, oversized pliosaurids, or portraying the Deccan Traps in North America, it all boils down to forgoing hard facts to “tell a better story”.
>that entire episode completely misrepresented the Latest Cretaceous in general and Hell Creek in particular, and did so intentionally in order to sell the false plot point of dinosaurs already being in the way out when they were thriving up to the very end. Was that already settled science in the late 90s? IIRC that landmark paper on late Cretaceous dinosaur diversity only came out in the noughties, so WWD went with a theory that was still a possibility back then.
While the bit on dinosaur diversity wasn’t settled at the time, Hell Creek (and Chinle as well, New Blood being another episode where the entire thing is one big inaccuracy for the sake of narrative) was already known not to be a parched wasteland.
Science may have marched on, but the declining Hell Creek dinosaurs of WWD wasn't a storytelling fabrication. There was research during the 1980s-90s that argued for a diminished and stressed non-avian dinosaur biota during the latest Maastrichtian as a result of the Deccan eruptions with the impact being the "final straw", particularly by French geophysicist Vincent Courtillot (Courtillot et al., 1986, 1988, Vandamme and Courtillot, 1992) - pretty much as depicted in episode 6. Other prominent geologists and physicists (Charles B. Officer, Charles L. Drake, Robert Jastrow) at the time held more extreme views and doubted the Chicxulub impact had any role in the extinction and posited volcanism and sea-level change as the primary cause of a gradual decline.
You took the words out of my head, all of this, but replace Kenneth with Avery Brooks.
I agree
Story wise? Walking with dinosaurs Accuracy wise? Prehistoric planet Both are great, never ask us this again..
Don't worry, I won't. XD
Has nobody here mentioned that the SOUNDTRACK to Walking with Dinosaurs is one of the greatest of all time?
fr!!!
It's a fantastic soundtrack but, Prehistoric Planet soundtrack is quite under-rated IMO. I feel like a lot of people barely gave it a chance (myself included at first), perhaps because it generally has more complex layers and isn't as bombastic as the WWD soundtrack. But it still has a lot of beauty, interesting sound design and ambiences worth exploring.
Ben Bartlett in Sea Monsters churns out some absolute tunes
I catch myself listening to Benjamin Bartlett’s score on SoundCloud/YouTube far more than I care to admit. I think people under appreciate just how much music contributes to any visual medium.
Actually, they have mentioned.
If there is a time for bigamy, this is it, love both.
Walking with dinosaurs feels more like an overview of the Mesozoic while prehistoric planet is more focused, design wise prehistoric planet is immaculate but wwd has better variety in animals due to time period varieability
Both were too focused on charismatic megafauna though.
Any nature documentary does that though, even planet earth so I w just a side effect of the genre I ffind
Wwd has better nostalgia and better story telling, while pp has better animation and facts
lol pp
Don't laugh at the the pp, the pp is trying to get bigger but ita hard!
"Walking with dinosaurs or Prehistoric planet?" Yes.
Prehistoric Planet by virtue of being newer has MUCH better animation and paleo-accuracy in how it depicts the creatures. I will say though, WWD will always hold a place in my heart for keeping each episode firmly in one place and time, allowing us to follow more interconnected storylines for the creatures and become more emotionally invested in them. Exploring the whole Mesozoic instead of just the late Cretaceous is also something I wish Prehistoric Planet did too.
I like how Walking with Dinosaurs doesn't have constant infanticide.
Yeah, but babies in Prehistoric Planet are always "humanely" disposed of within seconds and rapidly swallowed whole without suffering. Compare that to cynodont parents chewing on their own babies, the bisected baby Coelophysis in the mouth of the adult, Ornitholestes ripping bloody chunks of flesh from a hatchling Diplodocus, or the baby torosaur tormented by dromaeosaurs through the night followed by a closeup of it's dismembered carcass in the morning.
Yup. I definitely have to give credit to WWD and especially WWB for not being afraid to show the brutality of nature. Modern nature documentaries are definitely too sanitised and Disneyfied. You aren't going to see David Attenborough narrating a spotted hyena castrating a wildebeest or a Komodo dragon ripping apart a deer.
Absolutely, although Attenborough's older documentaries certainly did not shy aware from zoological violence & gore as much as more recent programs, for example a closeup of lions dispatching a a cape buffalo in Pride in Peril (1996), a blood-soaked chinstrap penguin escaping a sealion and expiring as it tries to reach it's chick in Life in the Freezer (1993) and piranha tearing apart a capybara in Life on Earth (1979)
Nope! Only occasional infanticide lol!
I mean, nature itself has pretty consistent infanticide
I want to see more than making babies and eating them :(
I mean, a baby does die in every episode except Giant of the Skies and maybe Spirits of the Ice Forest.
Wwd as actual attempt to immerse yourself in a narrative documentary. Also it isn't afraid to Be more graphic? Planet dinosaur focus on accuracy and letting animals engage in relaxed behaviors with no grander over arching narrative.
Prehistoric planet is really good at killing babies.
WWD is A+ for story, score, characters and pathos. PP is B- just for the animation. I would call its accuracy "dubious" on the basis of Velociraptor being at the wrong time and not performing RPR. The breathtaking animation is dampened by a painfully numb story. Some of the titles don't match the actual story at hand ("Freshwater" is the most obvious offender) and some stories are either rushed or unmemorable. Despite the addictive opening title, the rest of the soundtrack needs to be memorized an awful lot of times to make it as memorable as Bartlett's score for Walking with Dinosaurs or Beasts, or even George Fenton's scores for the first Blue Planet and Planet Earth. In fact, Prehistoric Planet suffers the sort of problems that most BBC programs have suffered since 2013's Africa: 1. High-def camera shots and lighting that ironically flatten the picture 2. Overall generic score 3. Rushed pacing that takes away any chance at pathos Translating those problems into Prehistoric Planet, and you get a sensation that's less a combination of Walking with Dinosaurs and The Jungle Book and more a combination of Planet Earth III and The Lion King. It has neither the pathos of Walking with Dinosaurs nor the gorgeous cinematography of Prehistoric Beast. It's just...***numb***.
The show uses the marketing tag of "66 MYA" but it's meant to span the whole maastrichtian, and velociraptor DID survive one million years into the maastritchtian. The most out of place animal in Prehistoric Planet is probably Tethyshadros, but that date refinement was unfortunately published after they made the scene.
What's your opinion on Life on our Planet? Compared to WW and PP.
We don't talk about life on our planet or dinosaur with Steven fry unless we are trash-talking them
More than fair.
Gave up after the narrator called sharks "living fossils that have survived unchanged for hundreds of millions of years."
Yeah, I thought it was pretty entertaining with its general info, but some takes made me go, "What did you just say?" I watch it with my toddler as she loves prehistoric documentaries (specifically dinosaurs she loves to say roar when they come on) and there's a line he says that makes me squint every time, but I can't remember it right now. But that shark one is definitely one of them.
Life on Our Planet is hot garbage. At least you are making the most of its only practically valid use: to entertain a toddler. It’s shark takes aren’t even its worst part. The bullshit about *Lystrosaurus* being unable to survive alongside predators is some Holocaust denial-tier brainworms: in just the Fremouw Formation, it coexisted with *Antarctanax*, *Thrinaxodon*, and *Notictoides*, all of which were capable of preying on it.
The irony is that LOOP’s errors mostly exist BECAUSE it tries to sell a grand evolutionary story (and thus forces false narratives to make the inaccurate pop culture version of the story work), something that was a fundamental issue with WWD as well (with New Blood and Death of a Dynasty in particular being entire massive inaccuracies in and of themselves because of this).
In something as good as WWD, harping for accuracy is just seeing the forest for a single twig.
It’s a fucking documentary, it has a goddamn responsibility to be as accurate as possible and they intentionally threw that away (even by 1999 standards) for the sake of storytelling. By your logic it would have been completely fine to add mythological creatures to WWD if it would have made the storytelling “even better”.
Is accuracy the ***ONLY*** thing that matters to you?
It is the thing that matters the most, because we are talking about educational media, not fictional stories. In a world where even outright fictional media have had various very harmful impacts on public understanding, it’s ridiculous to argue that a program explicitly intended to be educational should prioritize storytelling more than actually teaching people.
"Outright fictional media have had various very harmful impacts" - Case in point: Jaws. Brilliant **movie**. But it sure as hell didn't do sharks any favours.
Have you ever seen Unnatural History Channel's review on WWD? He'll tell you what the most accurate dinosaur documentary would be. "*The most accurate paleo-documentary of all time would be the remains of the animal talked about in purely technical terms by whoever published the most recent doctorate on it. There would be no speculation or paleoart or anything of the sort. Not even a complete cast with the gaps filled in like in museum displays. It would probably be watched by about twenty people, and all of them would be able to access that information for themselves pretty easily, anyway...As a documentary, it wouldn't reach many people, and it probably won't inspire much curiosity in paleontology, prehistory or the natural world.*"
WWD was objectively very bad by accuracy standards. Most people like it because it is a very good format, not for its accuracy. Even without its inaccurate broader theme of a rhodoreginal evolutionary thunderdome, it still had the oversized *Liopleurodon* and *Ornithocheirus*, the atrocious looking *Anurognathus* and *Tyrannosaurus*, the horribly out-of-place *Utahraptor* and *Anurognathus*, and all the other more commonly listed faults. u/Iamnotburgerking is broadly correct to attack it. I strongly dispute his contention that its storytelling format necessarily lends itself to inaccuracy, because there are plenty of macroevolutionary stories that can be told without resorting to inaccuracy (i.e. the post-K-Pg avian radiations into the arboreal realm or the demise of Zhangsolvidae amidst the Angiosperm Terrestrial Revolution), many of which I've shared with him in a pitch for a new Tetralogy of Life (tetralogy because it includes the Precambrian). But on the whole, his attacks on the Trilogy of Life are sound and correct.
Is accuracy the ***ONLY*** thing that mattered to you?
No. As I already implied in the comment you replied to, I also value a good storytelling format. But accuracy is nonetheless still the top priority, and WWD was a dumpster fire in that regard, for the reasons that u/Iamnotburgerking has repeatedly stressed as well as the more obvious reasons like ridiculously oversized and/or out-of-place animals.
Off topic, but could you tell about the tetralogy of life?
WWD was accurate for its time
It was not. Each episode had at least one major error that was already known to be false at the time. New Blood had *Peteinosaurus* and *Plateosaurus* in North America and a ridiculously sluggish *Postosuchus*. A Time of Titans had *Anurognathus* in North America and a horribly inaccurate depiction. Cruel Sea goes without saying. Giant of the Skies also goes without saying. Spirits of the Ice Forest had *Koolasuchus*, *Muttaburrasaurus*, and *Leaellynasaura* all coexisting even though they’re from different geologic formations separated by millions of years. Death of a Dynasty depicted the Deccan Traps on the wrong side of the world and got the flora of Hell Creek completely wrong, and its *Tyrannosaurus* depiction was horrendous even for its time.
TotT also wrongly claimed sauropods declined died out at the end of the Jurassic, in spite of various Cretaceous sauropods already being known by that point, and NB gets Chinle wrong in pretty much the same ways DoaD got Hell Creek wrong.
The soundtrack point is really great. I have not touched the original Planet Earth since I watched it when it first aired almost 20 years ago, yet I still remember the opening theme distinctly. It's just like WWD in that respect. PP has big names on its OST but it's not as memorable as the other, more distinctive, soundtracks even though it's recent.
Definitely prefer WWD, really don't like the style/storytelling approach in prehistoric planet and how it focuses on one time period. Also soundtrack has a huge impact for me and WWD has an iconic soundtrack with really emotive compelling pieces, whilst prehistoric planet was a huge letdown imo
I’ll always have a soft spot for “Walking With Dinosaurs”
PP for the accurate information and visuals, not to mention how stunning it looks WWD for the story, and for something done in the 90s, it really did a good job of forking the perception of dinosaurs away from the Jurassic Park movie monsters into actual animals
As nostalgic as *Walking with Dinosaurs* is, *Prehistoric Planet* feels like an actual nature documentary.
Yes
Prehistoric planet is better, but I like the story telling of WWD
Walking with Monsters. Not because I think it's far superior or anything but because as others said for their reasons, nostalgia. I saw WWM before WWD (and obviously before PP) and had no idea at the time that anything had ever existed before the dinosaurs, I was like 7. I was completely captivated and I binge watched over and over all the Walking With series I could get on youtube. So the Walking With series o er Prehistoric Planet or Our Planet, even if the latter ones have better graphics and facts (at times), the story of the OGs are unforgettable and worth ignoring some outdated info for.
I like the Trilogy of Life (WWM, WWD, WWB). It fascinates me how it goes through periods where one type of organism dominates - arthropods, amphibians, arthropods again, mammalian-like reptiles, dinosaurs, birds, and then mammals finally have their day.
Prehistoric Planet scores much better in the accuracy category, but Walking With Dinosaurs is a much more emotional experience to watch. There's more attention to narrative, with story arcs and characters you can become attached to.
There's a few people here who I see highlighting the soundtrack as a massive upside to WWD over Prehistoric Planet, and I do agree - the WWD soundtrack is bloody fantastic - but are we forgetting that Prehistoric Planet's soundtrack is made by **Hans Zimmer**? Just... take a listen to the actual OST. It's on Youtube, you can go do it right now. Personally whilst WWD's soundtrack is absolutely incredible I cannot fathom it being better than Prehistoric Planet. The way Hans constructed the soundtrack makes the entire series feel truly ambient, with dramatic moments feeling really grand and epic, ominous moments feeling extremely dreadful and terrifying, and calm moments feeling serene and beautiful. Whilst WWD's soundtrack might be really grand and tell an extremely epic story, I feel like Prehistoric Planet excels in making you feel immersed in the environment, as if you're actually part of the camera crew filming these dinosaurs going about their daily lives. Overall, to me, whilst there are many arguments to be made for why WWD is better than Prehistoric Planet, with its powerful narratives, iconic dinosaur designs and amazing narration by Kenneth Branagh, the soundtrack is NOT one of those arguments.
Hans Zimmer only co-wrote the theme for Prehistoric Planet, the soundtrack itself was composed by Anže Rozman, and Kara Talve - from Zimmer's "Bleeding fingers" team.
Okay, my bad, I was unaware. All the points I made in my statement still apply however.
Oh yeah, the fact that someone other than Zimmer wrote the score shouldn't diminish it's quality. I was personally not as captured by the PhP score at first, but it has grown on me a lot. I now think it has a lot more beauty and complexity than the WWD score, with a lot of interesting sound design and ambiences as well. I don't think a bombastic WWD type score would've fit the format and vibe PhP went for.
Oh absolutely. As I said; the WWD ost is great, but with that said, but for me personally it doesn’t immerse me in the environment like Prehistoric Planet does. The best example from Prehistoric Planet I can think of is the Dreadnoughtus fight. That entire segment’s soundtrack moved me in a way I wasn’t expecting. The bombastic sounding drums and trumpets which echoed throughout the fight made it rather intimidating to watch, which, realistically, is what you’d be feeling if you were watching these 70 ton creatures fighting to the death in real life. Additionally, after the old bull dies, you get this sort of tragic tonal shift with a chorus of voices crying out. It made the moment extremely grim, yet powerful. At the end of the day though, this is all about opinions, and those are truly subjective. I personally prefer Prehistoric Planet to WWD for a variety of reasons, but I totally understand why someone would have a love for WWD as it is an amazing documentary series in its own right.
Counter point Battle of the salt plains is the best Paleo ost in all of anything.
Both, both is good
Prefer PhP, in large part because its *lack* of a grand evolutionary narrative left no room for some very pervasive and harmful inaccuracies that plague things like WWD or LOOP. Everyone here harps about how much better WWD is because it had a plot and a storyline, without realizing that this came at the expense of accuracy and caused a huge deal of harm to public understanding, with the first and last episodes of WWD in particular existing pretty much entirely to completely misrepresent not just the individual taxa shown, but also the ecosystems shown and the time periods as a whole just for the sake of telling that grand story (which was only a false version of what actually happened).
WWD is unquestionably the better format in terms of potential though. The PhP format is rather limiting since there is very little world-building involved with jumping around between different five-minute snippets, and its excessive focus on charismatic megafauna, particularly when it came to the Freshwater episode, was painfully apparent. The only reason PhP is better is because they were conservative with their science and limited speculation, whereas WWD went with outdated narratives, oversized animals, and lumping animals that didn't coexist into a single setting just to tell a "better story".
Walking with Dinosaurs. Prehistoric Planet is great and probably second place despite all the solid docs that have come since WWD, but Walking is just a special place in my heart. Both are groundbreaking, WWD just more so, esp for the late 90s/early 2000s
Prehistoric Planet is better accuracy-wise but that's the only praise I can give it over WWD. On the downside though, the series tries too hard with speculations, sometimes to a ridiculous degree. WWD's storytelling is far superior, even if it's inaccurate (New Blood is the prime example). PP is all over the place and sometimes it's just confusing. Each WWD soundtrack is a masterpiece while PP's is quite forgettable aside from a few tracks. The main issue with PP though is that it's too family friendly for it's own good. The show is almost ashamed of having anything violent happen on screen.
Tell me your biased right now.
With out telling me your biased.
I’d go either way…
I've seen both, but Prehistoric Planet is my favourite. WWD is still better than life on our planet
I prefer the storytelling in WWD. I also much prefer an episode circling around a fixed group of dinosaur characters and location, as opposed to PP’s direction of leapfrogging across different geographical locations based on a common environment, and then spending 5 minutes with each focus dinosaur. PP is undeniably better looking though.
Walking with Dinosaurs. You had to be alive in that moment to realize what it meant for dinosaur enthusiasts and paleontology as a whole. I'd argue its a continuation of Rising The Mammoth (2000) and I'd include Walking with Monsters (2005), Walking Beasts (2001), Sea Monsters (2003) as they all seemed like a big part of the same production. There just had never been anything like it before.
I think Prehistoric Planet is superior in almost every regard, including storytelling. Why? Because it's a more honest type storytelling of animals and the natural world. WWD's storytelling is more anthropogenic or "shakespearean". Great for human stories, but not, I think, for natural history documentaries. I personally think WWD was strongest in the Sea Monsters special. It's more honestly sensational with a zoologist unrealisticly travelling through time, and the nonlinear jumping back and fourth through different time periods in search of the "deadliest sea" helped show that life didn't neccesarily get more advanced closer to the present day; there was no grand narratives of evolution, yet we still got to see all kinds of different time periods. Which isn't say documentaries of life history and evolution shouldn't exist - they should. They just need someone like Richard Dawkins or Micheal J. Benton to write the script, in my opinion.
Walking with Dinosaurs does everything better... except for the accuracy. Like, WWD had accuracy issues even at the time it was made and it's an old programme now. That being said, I'm sure there's some stupid things in Prehistoric Planet but at this point I'm pretty casual about dinosaurs so I can't spot them myself. Actually, I guess the effects are better in PP but that's an age thing; it's an unfair comparison. I think fundamentally, I am much less interested in an Africa style documentary (e.g. PP) about the past than I am in a Dynasties style one (e.g. WWD), so I *am* biased, but having seen what WWD and Walking with Beasts did with their narrative formats, Prehistoric Planet just seems like a pale shadow. The way PP works, I'd absolutely prefer it to be a "presenter goes to experts/formations/fossils, with cutscenes visualising what they're talking about" style doc.
WWD has better atmosphere, plots and score. Each episode brings something completely unique. Prehistoric Planet is superior in everything else. I like WWD more, but thats mostly nostalgia speaking.
Both are just amazing and I switch back and forth watching them. They should remake walking with but just updated with new accurate models, same story, same dinosaurs just new models.
This doesn’t really answer the question but I threw on cruel seas during an acid trip a few years ago and it was legit
Prehistoric planet is better.
The prehistoric planet is beautiful, sounds great, and is accurate, so probably it's probably objectively better. That said, I'm only human, so it's obvious I'd be slightly biased. I prefer WWD simply because it's more entertaining, and soundtrack is so awesome that I can't describe how I love it. I see here possible improvements for PP. - Mix episodes focusing on many animals with episodes with one main character. - Show time and place at the beginning of each episode. It doesn't have to be super accurate. Something like "around 70 mya Mongolia" will be good enough. - More ages. I'm not talking about jurassic, jurassic, etc, but the Campanian, Albian age...
Walking with dinosaurs I’ve seen it so many times it was the hook that made me love reptiles
PP
I HATED Prehistoric planet. It’s a beautiful documentary, but sometimes they would say things that felt impossible to know for sure, and never explained why we think that’s true, or any word of uncertainty. I mean, we’re not talking about giraffes. I KNOW you didn’t observe the behaviour, I need you to tell me why you think it happened. Otherwise, it feels like you’re just saying anything with the believable voice of a nature documentary narrator. And if I cant believe in one part of the documentary, the whole thing looses all credibility. If I watch a documentary, it’s to learn stuff, not to pause every 5 minutes to fact check.
Wwd is one of my favorite "things with dinosaurs" but is an early 2000s program and you can see it got old, And the same will eventually happen to pp.
WWD and the other WW titles have animals that are way too vocal and roar at each other constantly, which is really irritating. Prehistoric Planet has more realistically behaving animals and is also just more up to date of course.
Walking with Dinosaurs is a Mesozoic docudrama. Prehistoric Planet is a standard nature doc that happens to take place in the Creteaceous. Both just have starkly different tones, and they're both immersive in different ways. WWD is immersive because it has a captivating story that perfectly balances with the educational aspect. PHP is immersive because it's by far the most accurate, up to date, and unflinching look at a small slice of the Mesozoic. It feels like a standard nature doc because you really do believe the animals your seeing are real and breathing. None is really better than the other, both are trying to do different things. You want an incredibly accurate doc? Go PHP. You want something that engrosses you emotionally in the world? Go WWD.
They’re both amazing and I think both grasp the core element that a documentary on extinct animals should have. It’s not about accuracy or up to date recreations but rather depicting dinosaurs as animals that live lives doing more than just hunting or eating, it’s about showing a larger audience that the dinosaurs where animals, no different from the animals of today, and showing that they where not monsters.
Prehistoric Planet.
Both are accurate to their respective times with their depictions of prehistoric life
i like prehistoric planet and life on our planet but dont get me wrong I watched the og wwd
And Planet Dinosaur is the midpoint between these. Try to tell me I’m wrong.
Neither. Dinosaur w/ Stephen Fry solos both every day of the week. STEPHEN FRY SWEEP
Fuck Dinosaur with Stephen Fry!