YMMV / When Dinosaurs Ruled

• Awesome Music: Philip Pope's score is surprisingly good. Some of Dave Hummel's music from Paleoworld also makes a comeback.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Velociraptors are restored as utterly horrific looking featherless creatures that look like zombies, and one sequence has them ambush one of the talking heads, cutting to black just as they leap in for the kill.
• Special Effect Failure: While suffering some standard '90s issues, such as shrinkwrapping and lack of feathers on the coelurosaurs, the illustrations used in this show are fairly decent, but whenever they use actual CGI to restore some dinosaurs, the lack of budget is on full display. The models are crudely designed and barely resembled the intended animals, the movements are jerky and limited and the rendering is hilariously poor, even by '90s tv standards.
  • The migrating Muttaburrasaurus and duckbill herds are just the same exact walk cycle copied and pasted about three dozen times, often walking in sync.
  • The flying pterosaurs barely even count as animation, as they don’t even flap their wings most of the time, and instead just stiffly glide across the screen like a kite.
  • The Spinosaurus barely resembles the animal it’s meant to be (even for the time), with a head that looks more like some sort of hand puppet rather than any theropod dinosaur, and sprawled legs that awkwardly jut out of its body, to say nothing of its clunky movement.
• Stock Footage Failure: The few minutes of animation they have of the T. rex family, along with close-ups of an animatronic head, gets reused constantly in each episode. The adult T. rex gets used for any other large theropod, no matter how different they were from T. rex, while the animation of the juvenile gets reused for any other small dinosaur, including ornithischians.