Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) is a BBCSpeculative Documentary series focusing on... well... dinosaurs, using state-of-the-art CGI to recreate Mesozoic life. It was narrated by Kenneth Branagh.
It received several equally succesful continuations, specials, and spin-offs:
The Ballad of Big Al (2000), which tries to recreate the possible life of a Real LifeAllosaurus, named Big Al.
Walking with Beasts (2001), focusing on mammal evolution which came after the dinosaurs in the Paleogene, Neogene, and Quaternary Periods.
Chased by Dinosaurs (2002), two specials focusing on two striking dinosaurs, the gigantic Argentinosaurus and the odd Therizinosaurus. This was the first in the Walking with... series to feature a visible presenter (in this case, Nigel Marven).
Prehistoric Planet (2002), a revised version of the Walking With Dinosaurs and Walking With Beasts documentaries, aimed at a younger audience and narrated by Ben Stiller.
Sea Monsters (2003), focusing on dangerous prehistoric marine wildlife, from "the seventh most dangerous sea ever" up to "the first" one. This also featured Nigel Marven.
Walking with Cavemen (2003), focusing on... guess. Also went for the "presenter" format (in this case, Robert Winston).
Walking with Monsters (2005), this time focusing on what came before the dinosaurs. Returned to the presenter-less format favoured by WWD and WWB.
The Complete Guide to Prehistoric Life (2006), a book that producer Tim Haines and consultant Paul Chambers wrote featuring creatures from throughout the series.
Walking With Dinosaurs: The Arena Spectacular (opened in 2007), a touring live arena show featuring life-sized animatronic dinosaurs and performers in costume.
Walking With Dinosaurs 3D (2013), a theatrical movie, but with a different team behind it. Unknown whether it will follow a documentary-style storytelling, ornot.
Carnivore Confusion: The "predation is just a fact of life" approach, as most predators are treated as any documentary animals should be treated, not as villains. There are a few exceptions though, mainly in the two spinoffs ending with "Monsters".
Downer Ending: A given, since every animal featured in the program goes extinct eventually.
Never Smile at a Crocodile: Postosuchus and Deinosuchus in Walking with Dinosaurs and Sarcosuchus in Chased by Dinosaurs. Phytosaurs and Proterosuchus are not a close crocodile relatives, but fill the same role in the accompanying book Walking with Dinosaurs: A Natural History and in the TV series Walking with Monsters, respectively.
Deinosuchus gets only a cameo appearance in Walking with Dinosaurs the TV series, but its badassery is emphasized in the accompanying book, where it's stated that it's even capable of killing a Tyrannosaurus getting too close to the water and later a group of them scares the female Tyrannosaurus away from freshly killed Anatotitan.
Noisy Nature: And HOW! All animals in the whole series make continuously sounds of every kind from roars to bellows, screechs, and so on (a major example of the strong Rule Of Cool that characterize this series). The most incredible example is perhaps the early "amphibian" Hynerpeton which makes belch-like sounds without a pause and apparently without any good reason.... despite being a very archaic vertebrate, and thus very unlikely to utter any loud cry.
Another example: giant arthropods like the scorpion Brontoscorpio and the millipede Arthropleuramaking creaking sounds when walking and even when they're moulting their exoskeleton. This kind of sound is heard also during the "Evolution takes over" moments in WWM (just like an horror movie...)
Roger Rabbit Effect: Some CGI animals share a scene or two with live-acted ones (including ancient humans), but this is used more greatly for comedic effect in all the various Making of specials.
Rule Of Cool: Several examples throughout the series, especially about speculative animal behaviour. Another example is the fact that only the most spectacular animals of each taxonomic group are usually portrayed in almost all the shows of the series, despite they were probably less common in their environments that their smaller relatives (like what happens among modern animals as well). However, we can see many small-sized prehistoric animals too. Still another example is that many animals are more or less oversized in the program: the two most striking examples are the swimming Liopleurodon and the flying Ornithocheirus.
Since the list of examples from this trope is really large, please go here to see them.
Science Marches On: Many new discoveries have been made after this series, which changed our perception about prehistoric wildlife. These discoveries regard animal behaviour, taxonomy, or other issues. See here for examples.
Stock Dinosaurs: Lots, but a few new additions and subversion as well. For every stock dinosaur used, there's one or more creatures that have never been heard of in mass media before—or, substitution for an appropriate relative. Again, see here for a exhaustive list of examples.
Walking with Dinosaurs provides examples of:
Adaptation Expansion: The accompanying book Walking with Dinosaurs: A Natural History contains a lot of additional information about geography of the world dinosaurs lived in, elaborates on some speculative concepts only briefly mentioned in the TV series, and introduces new ones. The book even introduced some creatures that weren't shown in the TV series.
All There in the Manual: More than a few species not named in the TV show appear in the aforementioned book.
The Coelophysis example is due to the classic (but now mostly discredited) interpretation of what appeared to be remains of young Coelophysis in the ribcage of some adults of the same species, it's not an invention of the show; while the Cynodont one is invented.
Apocalypse Wow: The meteor impact scene in "Death of a Dynasty" is pretty awesome, and much more realistically shown than most other portraits in other documentaries, with the correct sequence of events: first the light, then the earth tremor, then the dust cloud and wind-storms, finally the melted rocks from the sky.
Australian Wildlife: One Walking with Dinosaurs episode centers on Australian wildlife during the Late Cretaceous, the small plant-eating dinosaur Leaellynasaura, the larger plant-eating dinosaur Muttaburrasaurus, the large Temnospondyl Labyrinthodont Koolasuchus, the marsupial mammal Steropodon, an unnamed pterosaur and carnosaur (known only from fragmentary remains), and a weta (a large flightless insect, representatives of which are still alive today).
Big Damn Heroes: In Walking with Dinosaurs, the young Diplodocus is attacked by an Allosaurus and is saved when another Diplodocus knocks the Allosaurus down with its tail.
Bloodier and Gorier: Several scenes of mild or implied violence and death from the TV series were described in rather graphic detail in the accompanying book Walking with Dinosaurs: A Natural History. Compare, for example, the scene of fight between female Tyrannosaurus and the armoured herbivore Ankylosaurus from the TV series with their fight in the book.
Book Ends: The ending to the last episode of Walking With Monsters echoes the end of the first episode of Walking With Dinosaurs. It even has the same music.
Everything's Better With Dinosaurs: The developers originally wanted to do a show about prehistoric mammals. They only got money for one about dinosaurs. Once the dinosaurs series was finished (and a success) they could accomplish their original goal.
Giant Flyer: Several giant pterosaurs (the correct name instead of "pterodactyl"). From the first series, both Ornithocheirus (oversized) and Quetzalcoatlus (not oversized) had a wingspan of 45 feet.
Hiroshima As a Unit of Measure: The meteor at the end of the Cretaceous. It explodes with a power of 300.000.000 Hiroshima bombs.
Hemisphere Bias: The end of Dinosaurs, where Montana somehow transforms into the African savanna.
New Blood contained the deaths of all the cynodont young (One by being eaten by the Coelophysis, the rest eaten by their own parents in the uncut UK Broadcast/DVD), and cannibalism strikes the Coelophysis as well
"Time of the Titans" obviously with all the Diplodocus youngsters (called "sauropodlets" in the show). So many are alive at the beginning but as the episode goes on most of them die off. In the series only 2 or even 3 survive everything to join a herd, if you read the book only ONE survived
"Cruel Sea" just might be the only part of the series (Except for "Giant of the Skies", which didn't contain much young characters. That focused on old mortality if anything...) where this trope is put into use. As although there may have been implied deaths of the young Opthalmosaurus (a fish-like marine reptile belonging to the ichthyosaur group), the main one manages to avoid death by storms, sharks, and drowning.
Unless you count the very, very graphic instance of Death by Childbirth, which does have a dead little baby Ophthalmosaurus.
"Spirits of the Ice Forest" has young that are mostly implied to have died in the book, mentioning that although many of the Leaellynasaura clan mate and lay eggs usually the only young that will survive is the Dominant Pair's children. (Leaellynasaura was a tiny bipedal herbivorous dinosaur from Cretaceous Australia)
"Death of a Dynasty" has, (besides the Tyrannosaurus young killed by the meteor at the end anyway) the Triceratops-like Torosaurus young killed by dromaeosaurids (commonly known as "raptors") and an implied death of a picked on Tyrannosaurus. And if it counts: the small mammal Didelphodon eating the eggs.
In the original cut the female tyrannosaur gets in heat because a leak of volcanic gas kills her first litter of eggs before they hatch. Then two Didelphodon come and try to eat the almost-formed tyrannosaur embryos.
Land Down Under: Cretaceous Australia spends half the year frozen solid, with no sunlight whatsoever during that period.
Mama Bear: The female Tyrannosaurus. Deconstructed, as her valiant attempt to scare an Ankylosaurus away from her infants ends up killing her.
The female Tyrannosaurus also displays the trait in the live arena show, when she scares away a Torosaurus and an Ankylosaurus that are harrassing her baby.
Mood Whiplash: In the arena show, the mother Tyrannosaurus scares away the Torosaurus and Ankylosaurus harrassing her baby. The mother and her baby then share a cute little moment where she goes around roaring at the audience and he tries to mimic her, with underwhelming results. They nuzzle a bit, and then the comet hits.
Palette Swap: Similar looking animals (like Utahraptor and Dromaeosaurus, various ornithopods) were just these. Certain animals (like large theropods and ornithopods) only got new heads. You can tell, because many creatures have the exact same folds and blood vessels on their skin. Then, there is Plesiopleurodon, which is just Stock Footage of Liopleurodon from the previous episode, only tinted lighter.
Prehistoric Monster: Gorgeously averted, perhaps except only for Liopleurodon, which still behaves like a real animal, but is presented in a sinister light. The portrait of T. rex is of particular note: they appear more good mothers and playful youngsters than scary killers.
Real Is Brown: Averted, although most other artwork makes dinosaurs with boring, green/grey colours, here they are often brightly coloured with stripes, spots and patterns, like reptiles and birds are today.
Red Herring: Eustreptospondylus being shown during the opening narration of Cruel Sea, with Kenneth Branagh talking about "the most fearsome predator of the Jurassic" that "is watching his prey". Only a few moments later it becomes obvious that this narration wasn't about Eustreptospondylus, but instead about Liopleurodon
This is ruined in Italian dub: here the narrator says "Eustreptospondylus, the most fearsome predator of the Jurassic..." (sigh)
Apparently some paleontologists strongly criticized the scene from the first episode of Walking with Dinosaurs where Postosuchus was shown urinating in a way more similar to that of mammals than that of reptiles and birds, despite it was an ancient relative of both crocs and dinos - so strongly in fact, that one of the series' scientific consultants, Prof. Michael Benton, decided to address their criticism. The relevant bit: "Another category of WWD-haters, the fact checkers, began compiling lists of errors in the first week. These were gleefully circulated on the e-mail lists. For example, in the first programme, Postosuchus urinates copiously. There is no doubt that it does so in the programme, and this was a moment that my children relished. However, of course, birds and crocodiles, the closest living relatives of the dinosaurs, do not urinate; they shed their waste chemicals as more solid uric acid. Equally, though, we can’t prove that Postosuchus did not urinate like this: copious urination is the primitive state for tetrapods (seen in fishes, amphibians, turtles, and mammals), and it might have been retained by some basal archosaurs."
This combines the twin arts of whining and digging oneself deeper into a hole. His argument is similar to "well. we can't prove for certain that T. rex didn't breathe fire, so there's nothing wrong with having it do so in our documentary." Also note that excreting uric acid uses less water than excreting urea, which gives doing so a selective advantage in dry environments like deserts. Guess where New Blood is set? That's right, the biome least conducive to a urea-excreting reptile.
Scaly raptors weren't to the paleontologists' liking even back then.
Reusing models meant that some correct anatomical details that got carried over from one animal to the other suddenly turned erroneous. Case in point: the thumbs on hadrosaurs.
The book accompanying the series implies that birds are no more related to theropods than ceratopsians are to pachycephalosaurs.
Taxonomic Term Confusion: Branagh refers to the sauropods as "a great family of dinosaurs" in the original WWD. "Infraorder" would be more appropriate.
If the animal is another predator, another way is to have it prey on or scare away another stereotypically dangerous predator such as a theropod or shark. Most famously done with Liopleurodon; and then the several Everything's Even Worse with Sharks examples of course (see above).
Shown Their Work: The second part of the special, which deals with how we learned all this stuff about Al and Allosaurus in general.
Walking with Beasts provides examples of:
Ape Shall Never Kill Ape: Averted again, as an invading Smilodon kills another Smilodon's cubs, behaviour based on modern lions.
Big Damn Heroes: A Smilodon cub is chased by a pair of Phorushracos at the beginning of the Saber Tooth episode, but then Half-Tooth appears out of nowhere and scares the Terror Birds away just when they're about to eat the cub.
Hemisphere Bias: The last episode ends with a pull-out from the United Kingdom (due to the last scene being a pull-out from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.)
Prehistoric Monster: Averted again, though the entelodonts are portrayed as, and are also said to be, mean bullies, though not quite in a villainous manner.
Scavengers Are Mean: One example in Beasts: The pig-relatives entelodonts are portrayed as scary as possible, with enormously wide mouths, always-screeching behaviour, and described as "the Hogs from Hell" which do nothing else but bullying other animals; while true WWB predators like Smilodon tend to receive a more neutral portrait.
Sexy Discretion Shot: The scene of the mating Australopithecus even had to be censored with a huge blur for the American release (but strangely did't cut it entirely, like in Australia), because it looked exactly like the way humans do it.
Spared by the Adaptation: The second Smilodon brother is fatally wounded in the original episode, but in the corresponding chapter of the book, he just runs away.
The Worf Effect: In Land of Giants, a mob of entelodonts have this on a lone Hyaenodon, but a lone entelodont is then scared away by the indricothere calf. Meanwhile in the book, it's a pair of Hyaenodon that drive off a single entelodont.
In the episode Saber Tooth, a Megatherium shatters the dominance of the antagonistic Smilodon brothers by killing one of them, and later on Half-Tooth (The Hero) completes the effect by killing the remaining brother.
Also happens to the Dinofelis, as the Australopithecus realize that by attacking it as a group, they can scare it away.
What Could Have Been: Among the proposed episode ideas for WWB was one based around the Riversleigh fossil site from Australia. They chose to abandon it, as they already had enough stories planned.
Killer Rabbit: The herbivorous theropod Therizinosaurus, which honestly looks like a giant goose-but, as Tarbosaurus finds out, this giant goose has giant claws.
Palette Swap: Thankfully averted by the iguanodonts and the Tarbosaurus, as these received new animation models (or at least new details) instead of being straight reuses of almost identical models from the original series.
Anachronism Stew: T. rex appearing in a Cameo role 75 million years ago, whereas the oldest known rex dates from "only" about 68 million years ago. And it's clearly confirmed to be a real T. rex in the book, not one of its ancestors.*
Feathered Fiend: Subverted with Hesperornis, which look agressive but only serve to get eaten by other predators. Played straight in the book, which lists dromaeosaurs as Cretaceous land menaces.
Darker and Edgier: Has a scarier edge to the fight for survival than Dinosaurs and Beasts.
Death by Sex: The male Hynerpeton gets eaten by a Hyneria right after it mates. In an interesting subversion, this only happens because it failed to mate the previous night, so in a way, it's a case of "death by belated sex".
Eye Scream: A female Dimetrodon's eye is knocked out of her head while defending her nest.
Infant Immortality: Yet more aversions. A juvenile Edaphosaurus gets eaten by a Dimetrodon, a bunch of baby Dimetrodon get eaten by the adults, and a mesothelae spider butchers an entire nest of Petrolacosaurus, save for the few that got away.
Late Permian Period:Gorgonops, Diictodon, Rhinesuchus, Scutosaurus
Early Triassic Period:Lystrosaurus, Euparkeria, Proterosuchus, Euchambersia
Somewhere, a Palaeontologist is Crying: Walking With Monsters plays this trope straight more than any other presenter-less series. Evolution is described here as a war between predators and preys and many predators (giant arthropods and the giant fish Hyneria for example) are portrayed as a sort of Hollywoodian Big Bads that do nothing else but menacing the protagonist species (portrayed as a sort of Hollywoodian hero who fights enemies several times stronger). It's worth noting that big primitive arthropods like scorpions and spiders weren't an obstacle for vertebrate evolution: they instead did help our ancestors in an indirect way, preying upon the less adapted of them and thus selecting actively their best-adapted traits. One can say that they "guided" actively their evolution and perhaps even contributed to make primitive fish becoming amphibians and finally Amniotes (the group including "reptiles", birds and mammals). In a sense, they may better be considered our friends rather than our enemies. This argument is more widely discussed in Prehistoric Life.
Not to mention the mistakes about ancestor -> descendant relationship: the jawless, armoured Cephalaspis becoming a primitive amphibian missing two passages (jawed armoured fish and and non-armoured lobe-finned fish), and the early lizard-like Petrolacosaurus (portrayed as the "first reptile") wrongly becoming an Edaphosaurus (a Dimetrodon relative, thus a mammal ancestor). Another example is Euparkeria mentioned as the ancestor of all the dinosaurs (it was only a distant relative). And chasmatosaurswere not the ancestors of crocodiles and alligators, and perhaps they weren't even aquatic as shown in the program.
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