Six episodes, six hours, and a single goal: show the world what a dinosaur really looked like. Walking with Dinosaurs, the 1999 BBC series, tried to build the first natural history of the creatures that ruled the Earth for 165 million years. It was a gamble, and it paid off.
Trailer, via Tyson Eric George Hiemstra.
The Format
The show follows a simple plan. Each episode covers a period of the Mesozoic era, from the Triassic to the Cretaceous, and follows a group of dinosaurs as they hunt, fight, and raise young. There is no narrator telling you facts directly. Instead, the camera watches a pack of Velociraptors chase prey across a desert, or a herd of Diplodocus feeding in a swamp, and lets you draw your own conclusions.
Kenneth Branagh provides the voice-over for the British broadcast. Avery Brooks took over for the American version on the Discovery Channel. The difference barely mattered. What mattered was the picture itself.
The Picture
The show uses computer animation mixed with models and live-action shots. The effect is seamless. A dinosaur moves through a field of grass, and you cannot tell where the model ends and the real world begins. That trick was not new in 1999, but it had never been done this way before. The makers wanted to show dinosaurs as living creatures, not museum pieces. They succeeded.
The cost was huge. At £6.1 million, the series cost over £37,654 per minute to make, which made it the most costly documentary per minute ever produced at the time. The makers said the effects were too costly to make until a graphics company named Framestore found ways to bring the costs down. That work made the whole thing possible.
What Works
The best episodes are the ones that focus on behavior. A scene where a mother Tyrannosaurus protects her young from a predator packs more emotion than pages of text could describe. The show does not explain the science. It shows it.
The weakest episodes lean on the spectacle. A chase scene can be thrilling, but a chase scene about a creature you barely know is less so. The series also struggles with pacing. Six hours is a long time to watch one kind of animal, and some episodes feel padded.
The Numbers
| Episode | Title | Date |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | New Dawn | 1999-10-04 |
| 2 | Time of the Titans | 1999-10-11 |
| 3 | Cruel Sea | 1999-10-18 |
| 4 | Giant of the Skies | 1999-10-25 |
| 5 | Storm of Extinction | 1999-11-01 |
| 6 | Death of a Species | 1999-11-08 |
The Verdict
Walking with Dinosaurs is not perfect. It is not a textbook. It is a television show that happened to teach you something along the way. The ambition is the point. The makers wanted to show what no one had shown before, and they did.
The series holds up best when it stays grounded in observation. When it drifts into spectacle, it loses some of its force. Even so, the technical achievement remains remarkable. The animation is still impressive today, nearly two decades after it first aired.
The show also had a wide audience. With 15 million people watching the first episode, it became the most-watched science program in Britain at the time. That reach was a measure of how well the makers understood their audience.
The series was also a hit internationally. It ran on the Discovery Channel in North America in 2000, with Avery Brooks taking over the narration. The show traveled further than anyone expected.
Walking with Dinosaurs is a landmark of its kind. It changed how documentaries look, and it changed how people think about extinct creatures. It is not a perfect show, but it is a lasting one.
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