I saw this series in 1999 in London TV and was blown away. Like another user commented - This is what i would have liked to see when i first watched "Jurassic Park" - Life and death of Dinosaurs in their natural habitat as a documentary. The CG are very lifelike, and the diversity of dinosaurs and habitats shown makes it also very educational.
The series takes everything factually known about dinosaurs, adds a lot of good ideas on "what it could have been" to make up what then looks like a documentary series. What i missed was some small bar-graph constantly in one corner of the screen, moving between "fiction" and "fact" along with the narration and the pictures, because you often wonder how much is educated guessing, and how much is pure fantasy.
To some clues on facts & fiction, you have to see the 50 minute "Making Of", which is not only very educational about the CG process and collecting and including the paleontologists knowledge into the series, but which also is very funny (Dinosaurs smoking cigarettes and complaining about CG animators).
I highly recommend to watch this series before going into the upcoming Disney Dinosaur movie or watching any Jurassic Park (like) movie again. It will surely make you much more critical towards those movies. The Disney Trailers looked especially bad.
The series takes everything factually known about dinosaurs, adds a lot of good ideas on "what it could have been" to make up what then looks like a documentary series. What i missed was some small bar-graph constantly in one corner of the screen, moving between "fiction" and "fact" along with the narration and the pictures, because you often wonder how much is educated guessing, and how much is pure fantasy.
To some clues on facts & fiction, you have to see the 50 minute "Making Of", which is not only very educational about the CG process and collecting and including the paleontologists knowledge into the series, but which also is very funny (Dinosaurs smoking cigarettes and complaining about CG animators).
I highly recommend to watch this series before going into the upcoming Disney Dinosaur movie or watching any Jurassic Park (like) movie again. It will surely make you much more critical towards those movies. The Disney Trailers looked especially bad.