Walking With Dinosaurs - Television Tropes & Idioms

Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) is a documentary series focusing on... well... dinosaurs, using state-of-the-art CGI to recreate Mesozoic life.

It has several continuations, specials, and spin-offs:

Walking with Beasts (2001), focusing on what came after the dinosaurs.
The Ballad of Big Al, focusing on a specific Allosaurus.
Chased by Dinosaurs (2002), two specials focusing on Argentinosaurus and Therizinosaurus. This was the first in the Walking with... series to feature a visible presenter (in this case, Nigel Marven).
Sea Monsters (2003), focusing on dangerous prehistoric marine wildlife. 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.
Prehistoric Park (2006), the first actual Spin Off, featuring Nigel Marven populating a safari park with prehistoric animals.

Walking with Dinosaurs and it's continuations provide examples of:

All There In The Manual (more than a few species names)
Always A Bigger Fish Happens on several occasions
Anachronism Stew (Mostly averted, with exception of Eustreptospondylus which was shown living in the Late Jurassic period)
Big Creepy Crawlies (Featured in Walking with Monsters. Needless to say, most of them are examples of Truth In Television (but see Science Marches On below), and they are still smaller than many fictional examples of big arthropods.)
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 Ankylosaurus from the TV series with their fight in the book.)
Camera Abuse (like Tyrannosaurus spraying drool all over the camera)
Crapsack World (Obviously, but especially the late Permian in Monsters and, to a lesser degree, Death of a Dynasty.
Crowning Music Of Awesome (Several, such as the opening theme, the heartbreaking "Giant of the Skies," the epic "Flight of the Ornithocheirus," the Diplodocus march, the Cruel Sea suite...just get the soundtrack, close your eyes, and let Benjamin Bartlett's music take you back to the Age of Dinosaurs.)
Downer Ending (Kind of a given, since almost every animal covered in each series obviously goes extinct eventually.)
Everything's Better With Dinosaurs
- Ultimate example: 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.
Everything's Even Worse With Sharks (Mostly subverted: sharks can't hold a candle to Liopleurodon, Basilosaurus or Hyneria. Played straight with Carcharodon megalodon/Carcharocles megalodon in Sea monsters.)
- Technically, that's subverted too- the Pliocene is only the third most dangerous sea.
  - Though for some reason, they only mention in passing/show a fleeting glimpse of the shark that DID live in the #1 dangerous sea (Cretoxyrhina, the Ginsu Shark)
- This can be seen as an example of The Worf Effect. Sharks are the first predators to show up in Whale Killer (Beasts) and the Devonian parts of Sea Monsters and Walking with Monsters. Almost inmediately, they are either scared or eaten alive by the episode's Big Bad. Eat it, Jaws.
Everything's Squishier With Cephalopods (Big endocerids appear in Sea Monsters: A Walking with Dinosaurs Trilogy and Walking with Monsters. The original series' episode Cruel Sea featured ammonites.)
Feathered Fiend (the Iberomesornis in Giant of the Skies fit the Zerg Rush type of this.)
- Walking with Beasts has flightless Gastornis and Phorusrhacos.
Follow The Leader After Walking With Dinosaurs, there came a whole onslaught of documentaries with CGI dinosaurs. When Dinosaurs Roamed America, Dinosaur Planet, and Jurassic Fight Club, to name a few.
Full Boar Action (Entelodonts from Walking with Beasts - even though strictly speaking they aren't pigs)
Giant Flyer (Ornithocheirus and Quetzalcoatlus from the first series, Pteranodon from continuations.)
Hiroshima As A Unit Of Measure (the meteor at the end of the Cretaceous)
Killer Rabbit (Turns out that a sloth - granted, a sloth of the size of an elephant, but still, a slow and rather cute looking sloth - can kill a Smilodon when it's pissed off.)
- Chased by Dinosaurs has a herbivorous theropod Therizinosaurus that, frankly, looks like a giant goose... But, as T. rex's relative Tarbosaurus learns the hard way, this "giant goose" has really big claws and knows how to use them.
Mama Bear (The female Tyrannosaurus from Death of a Dynasty and the female brontothere from Walking with Beasts episode Whale Killer.)
Mega Neko (Smilodon and Dinofelis from Beasts)
Misplaced Wildlife (Plateosaurus in Arizona and Utahraptor in Europe, to name two cases)
- For Walking with Beasts, the biggest offender is early estuary Indian whale Ambulocetus somehow dweling in a German freshwater lake.
Narrator (Kenneth Branagh, he was dubbed over for some releases, (e.g. the US))
No Holds Barred Beatdown (The fight between female Tyrannosaurus and Ankylosaurus ends up this way in the book that accompanied TV series.)
Rocks Fall Everyone Dies
Rule Of Cool (Liopleurodon was not that big. Most likely, neither was Ornithocheirus.)
- Hand Waved/Justified in the case of Liopleurodon; it was mentioned that it was an unusually large specimen, not to mention extremely old, over one-hundred years in age.
Science Marches On (sorry, Ornitholestes, you didn't actually have that horn-thing on your nose)
- All these dromaeosaurids almost certainly had feathers...
- The Giant Spider from Walking with Monsters was based on Megarachne, which ultimately turned out to be eurypterid rather than spider.
Shoot The Shaggy Dog (Giant of the Skies)
Small Taxonomy Pools (Averted - the series did feature several creatures that weren't well-known among the general public before.)
Speculative Documentary
Stock Dinosaurs (possibly the Trope Maker in regards to Coelophysis)
- Your Mileage May Vary: ~~Brontosaurus~~ Apatosaurus doesn't appear until Big Al and it's only a one second background appearance; Cruel Sea, though showing Early Jurassic islands in Europe, omits completely Archaeopteryx and Compsognathus; the pterosaur episode is devoted to little known Ornithocheirus while Pteranodon is completely absent from the original series; and Death of a Dynasty, while totally devoted to Tyrannosaurus Rex, lacks Parasaurolophus and features a single, dead Triceratops (its living scenes are given instead to its close but bigger relative Torosaurus; plus, there is not the usual Rex vs. Horny fight, which is described as a "silly idea" in the making-of).
Stock Ness Monster (Liopleurodon, to a degree)
Tear Jerker (The death of Ornithocheirus in Giant of the Skies and the eventual extinction of the dinosaurs. But Giant of the Skies especially.)
- Walking With Beasts has also a sad scene when a young Indricotherium is violently driven off by its own mother as she got a new calf. The scene when the Gastornis chick is eaten alive by ants is an odd mixture of this and Nightmare Fuel.
  - Another example from Beasts is the opening with the australopitecines "mourning" their elder female in Next of Kin, probably because how human they look.
Tyrannosaurus Rex (well duh)
Visual Effects Of Awesome: Its visual effects are among the most impressive in any TV series ever, period.