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YMMV / Planet Dinosaur

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  • Awesome Music:
  • Hilarious in Hindsight
    • Hearing the Narrator talk about we have only recently been able to accurately reconstruct Spinosaurus in the last few years can be humourous considering the discoveries in 2020 and 2014 have radically changed how we reconstruct this dinosaur.
  • Narm: Seeing The Far Side cartoon where the word "thagomizer" comes from before seeing the show does undercut the drama a bit for many.
  • Nightmare Fuel: There's something rather chilling about pterosaurs hunting baby sauropods, which is ramped up via a tense, horror-film style score whilst the Hatzegopteryx are on-screen. It is worse in Real Life, because it turned out Hatzegopteryx wasn't limited to babies and if fact specialized in big game (if it was alive today cows would be on the menu), because it had a much more beefy frame than was depicted.
    • Onchopristis, the sawfish-related fish that the Spinosaurus eats? It's 26 feet/7.9 metres long. Gives you a good sense of how big and terrifying Spinosaurus is...
  • Spiritual Successor: to Walking with Dinosaurs, being a 6 30-minute episode miniseries about Mesozoic life by the BBC, intended to update the public on new scientific discoveries made since WWD.
  • Tear Jerker:
    • The death of the Spinosaurus. Seeing such a magnificent giant reduced to laying in the desert heart tugs at the heart.
    • The ending of the Gigantoraptor's story.
    • The extinction. We knew it was going to happen, but the way it was done was brutal. Instead of showing the actual event, like most documentaries do, it depicts the aftermath, specifically, four months later on Hateg Island. The plants have died from lack of sunlight. Herbivores like Magyarosaurus have all starved to death. Hatzegopteryx, once a feared and mighty predator, is reduced to desperately scrounging for carrion. The Bradycneme is driven away by the massive pterosaurs everytime it tries to claim a carcass, and eventually only manages to get by on snatching up a tiny lizard. Through it all, the narrator somberly notes that none of these survivors will make it. Eventually their remaining food sources will run out and they will all die. And that's just on Hateg Island... at the same time, all of the above and more was happening on a global scale.
  • Visual Effects of Awesome: Yeah, yeah, this is taken for granted most of the time, but it still applies pretty spectacularly to this show
    • Special Effect Failure: But while the graphics are mostly a delight to look at, some of the backgrounds are too obviously CGI (even when the creators' intention of creating slightly fantasy-esque, moody backdrops is taken into account), and the jerky and stiff animation lends no credibility to the animals as massive, multi-ton beasts.
      • Interestingly, by far the most common complaint leveled against the program is that "the CGI sucks". Many people compare the effects unfavorably to those of WWD, despite that the latter show used real-life backdrops, so it's only natural that it would have also looked more realistic. Again, the faulty animation and some bizarre directing choices (there was no need to Undercrank all those scenes or keep the camera shaking) has a lot to do with this, but the CGI animal models are better than WWD in many ways though. See Tough Act to Follow above.

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