Best/Worst Documentaries

[Ravonium]

Jurassic Fight Club.


Uuugh. It makes me want to vomit just seeing the title.

You can just tell it's bad based on the fact it's on the History Channel.

[WarrenJB]

There are a lot of posts over the five year history of this thread I'd like to reply to, but I'll limit myself to this one:

Documentaries have really gotten lazy these days. Rather than film or create fresh new footage, they keep recycling archive footage of older documentaries. A good example is the BBC documentary Deadly 60- One episode was about birds and dinosaurs and they kept recycling old footage from Walking with Dinosaurs.

A bit unfair to Deadly 60! A kid's show featuring Steve Backshall travelling the world, jumping on animals in the way Steve Irwin used to, to add them to his list of 'sixty deadly animals'. Despite and because of that, I think it's one of the best wildlife series of recent years, kid's show or not. Especially the comparison to Steve Irwin - I'm exaggerating the 'jumping on' bit, but Backshall's an equally enthusiastic and charismatic character with a genuine love for the natural world. And despite the premise of the show, it's featured animals are presented as rounded, complex, wonder-instilling creatures in a rounded, complex ecosystem, not just as bloodthirsty murderbeasts. Some aren't all that threatening or 'icky' to us humans, and there's always a generous look at other animals seen along the way.
All of which is to say, I can forgive the series and it's makers if they didn't or couldn't shell out for the CGI for one episode!

Back to the topic, I'd go with the ol' classic: WWD. I'd say it had similar impact to Jurassic Park - an amazing look at the then-modern view of dinosaurs. It had it's problems, noticeable even back then (the only good thing about the Tyrannosaur design was that it didn't just copy the Crash McCreery look) but there's few docs that've come along since, that come close to knocking it off it's throne. I swear there are times I look at certain pieces of palaeoart and the fanfare soundtrack from that starts playing in my head. (Well, toss-up between that and the JP theme)

I'd like to say I enjoyed Planet Dinosaur, but I can't remember most of it! Let's say I enjoyed parts of it, particularly the Allosaurus episode. Not least because it introduced Saurophaganax (or if you prefer, 'Saurophaganax') to the general public. I likes me some overbuilt iffy Allosaurs. And Desplato... d'ah I mean Daspletosaurus.
I vaguely remember the sauropods, after some comments here, and what I remember makes me think I must've blocked it out.

I also vaguely remember watching and enjoying The Dinosaurs and Dinosaurs! - it's been a while - and most of what I remember are the animations; both stop-motion and hand-drawn.

I don't think anyone's mentioned The Truth About Killer Dinosaurs - a two-part BBC thing looking at Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor that I quite enjoyed. The CGI maybe wasn't the best, but better than some: e.g. the Velociraptor had a touch of the lizard-faced monster about it, but at least it was fully feathered. The show had mechanical tests, which I gather aren't popular round here! Though the Velociraptor claw test in particular was in line with the general thrust of the programme - that these were relatively 'mundane' animals, even specialised in ways not immediately apparent, rather than indiscriminate slaughterers of all in their paths.

What I didn't like... well, after mentioning charismatic TV hosts, I have to say Nigel Marven isn't. Not to me. He just irritates me, whether presenting extant animals or imaginary computery versions of extinct ones. He's got a voice and personality like the dry dust you get at the bottom of a bag of porridge oats. The bits where he interacts with or is threatened by said computery creatures come across as unrealistic - 'interacts with' and 'threatened by' don't correlate as much as they should, IMO, for one thing; I'd like to see him run up and hug hippos the way he did Therizinosaurs - and more than a bit jokey and self-indulgent.

Then there was one relatively recent programme - I forget it's name (notice a pattern?) but it was about a list of the top ten biggest animals, in certain categories, including a few dinosaurs. IIRCC the blue whale came in at number two. Number one was Dreadnoughtus...

There are some dino documentaries I haven't seen, mostly because they're on a sliding scale of 'american shows not aired over here' (Dinosaur Revolution, When Dinosaurs Ruled America) to 'wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole'. (Jurassic Fight Club et al.)