Walking with Dinosaurs

The BBC should hang their heads in shame. CGI from the 50's, overly dramatic story telling, cuts to dumbed down palaeontologist commentary, horrible 'human like' dinosaur reactions, and ultimately a really boring series of shows. Honestly, if you don't love what you do - go home. Leave the making of these beloved shows to people who care and can negotiate a budget. No hope for your kids falling in love with dinosaurs after this mess.

Format should have been like the original. Long show of purely dinosaurs with good story telling and interesting interactions. Then, like Planet Earth sometimes does, do a 'behind the scenes' style show. Like what inspired the story.

If my legacy was to be depicted like this I'd have tried so much harder to survive the impact of the meteor just to make sure mammals didn't rise up to work in the BBC feature making department.

As a child of the 2000s I grew up watching the BBC and Impossible Pictures' "Walking with" series of natural history documentaries, chief among them Walking with Dinosaurs. So you can imagine my excitement when it was announced that Walking with Dinosaurs would be returning to our screens once more 25 years later. However, there's just one problem with this reboot and that is that this just isn't Walking with Dinosaurs.

While the original show focused entirely on the dinosaurs created with both (ground-breaking for the time) CGI and practical puppets/animatronics in real world locations, this show instead features short scenes of fully CGI dinosaurs intercut with very obviously staged and rather dull scenes of palaeontologists uncovering their remains in the present. Gone is the iconic voice of Kenneth Branagh, instead replaced as narrator by Bertie Carvel whose voice lacks the same gravitas that Branagh brought to the original. Also missing is Benjamin Bartlett's powerful score which elevated many of the original show's most memorable scenes, as well as the involvement of original creators Tim Haines and Jasper James.

It is unfortunate that the BBC decided to attach the Walking with Dinosaurs name to this rather different and honestly subpar dinosaur documentary instead of focusing their efforts on producing a true successor to the original show, bringing back the original creative team that made it so special.

Compared to the original this is something that belongs on Disney+ The dinosaurs are far to cartoony and look really CGI. In places it looks almost to computer-gamey and unrealistic.

How can something with 25 years computer and animation development look worse than the original?

The stories are happy-clappy woe is me with dinosaur behaviour you have no way of substantiating scientifically.

Stick to the science and stop trying to "tell a good story".

The narration is very poor and it is hard to get into.

Then there is the painful dialogue between researchers is cringeworthy to listen to - why make up obvious fake dialogue for people in the field.

Overall this is a major let-down - the original was (and still is) far superior.

I've never written a review on here because I never felt bothered enough to do so. But this is such a let down. I'm in my 20s, grown up on the original series and this is such a piece of garbage it shouldn't be allowed to be called the same thing. CGI is cheap, the bloke narrating makes it even more boring and there's more people in it than the dinosaurs. Very disappointed.

I would prefer to watch a show about dinosaurs that has dinosaurs in. I would like those dinosaurs to look like the programme has been made in 2025 not 1995. And I would like to see no people in a dinosaur documentary. Whoever directed this, you suck.

So the Walking with Dinosaurs reboot came out and many of the complaints are indeed true. Rather than a straight documentary narrative, each episode is intersected with modern day excavations to explain the narrative better. In essence it's like Planet Dinosaur and to a lesser extent Sea Monsters, but it definitely lacks the heart of the latter.

Accuracy is all over the place. Some things fly, other don't (like the many dense canopy settings, when Mesozoic forests were more open). The dinosaurs mostly look fine, but the animation isn't fully polished so they look often quite unnatural. The worst offender has to be the Edmontosaurus from episode 1, which look really unreal with their bright blue bodies contrasting against daylight.

Unlike Prehistoric Planet, there aren't many times dinosaurs act besides stereotypical ways like hunting, fleeing and fighting. There are a few instances of them acting more cuddly and playing, but it mostly happens with young dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs are the focus on the series, with little on other prehistoric reptiles and mammals. I guess that's to be expected, but the original run gave us episodes focusing primarily on marine reptiles and pterosaurs, so that's a downgrade.

But hey, at least it's better than WWD 2013!