YMMV / The Ballad of Big Al

• Awesome Music: "Battle of the Salt Plains" is one of the best pieces of music in the entire series, conveying the exciting hunt of a Diplodicus herd by hungry Allosaurs.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The special accidentally name-drops another dinosaur film 15 years early:
  Narrator: In the middle of Al's Jurassic World is a vast salt lake.
• Memetic Mutation: The expression of Big Al's animatronic after he breaks his toe has been used to express annoyance in some circles, captioned with "Allosaurus had never seen such bullshit before◊".
• Science Marches On: Al is portrayed as male, but later studies indicate Big Al could have been female.
• Signature Scene: The attack on the Diplodocus in the salt lake, as well as the scene preceding it with the mud trap.
• Special Effects Failure: During the attack on the salt flat, one background Diplodocus briefly glitches out (can be seen here, at about 2:40).
• Tear Jerker: Big Al's death, naturally. With the wound on his toe making him unable to hunt in the middle of the dry season, he eventually succumbs to hunger and illnesses and ends up dying quietly in a riverbed in his teenager years without reaching his full potential, telling the paleontologists millions of years after his passing how harsh was the life of a Jurassic predator through his extremely well-preserved fossilized skeleton. The somber music playing in the background makes the scene even sadder.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Given that unlike "Time of Titans", this special focuses on Allosaurus, this would have been a great opportunity to bring in the other two large Morrison theropods (Torvosaurus and Ceratosaurus) as rival predators, but instead, we only see Al face off against his own kind.

---