Prehistoric Planet
Apple + TV
Series Directed by Andrew R. Jones & Adam Valdez
Series Writing Credits Amber Cherry Eames, Paul Stewart, Dom Walter, Matthew Wright
Series Cast
David Attenborough
Series Produced by Jon Favreau, Mike Gunton
Given how long David Attenborough has has been involved with broadcast documentaries, one might suspect that when he narrates about dinosaurs, he might just be speaking from memory. Now aged 97, he has been doing documentaries for the BBC since 1952. He is unique in that he could claim job superiority over Vin Scully of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
While he doesn’t go out in the field much for on-site narration any more (most nonagenarians would find slashing through dense jungle or climbing to the peak of Kilimanjaro a bit daunting) he still lends his matchless voice and utterly unique presentation style to a variety of the greatest and most prestigious nature documentaries ever made.
In his venture for the startup American network, Apple Plus, he didn’t have to leave his living room. He doesn’t appear in any of the locales shown in the 10-part two season series for the simple reason that all the scenes are green-screen recreations of what the world may have looked like some 230 to 65 million years ago. They didn’t even have color television back then, can you believe?
Prehistoric Planet takes a look at dinosaurs. If you’re thinking of the rubber monsters that frequented Tokyo and frequently ATE Tokyo, disabuse yourself. This series takes CGI to this absolute zenith, and the result, one of some 40 or so different species of dinosaurs feeding, breeding, dying and migrating, is breathtakingly realistic. By about the third ep, you start getting used to seeing what looks like a typically high-end Attenborough/BBC collaboration that involves living bloody dinosaurs!
The standards of the production of this series are amazing. While they sometimes miss a spot (40-ton behemoths generally leave footprints in wet sand) the depictions of dinosaurs walking, running, swimming, flying, burrowing and all of is incredibly convincing. If you didn’t know better, you might think it’s real.
The producers swear they adhered very closely to the state-of-the-art knowledge about dinosaurs. Where the fossil record showed feathers, the creatures had feathers. Scraps of evidence about nesting behavior and feeding were fastidiously followed. And the show managed to avoid obvious howlers, such as creatures that went extinct some 150 million years ago grazing alongside other species that didn’t evolve until 50 million years later, or hot swamp creatures nesting while watching for predators from the Antarctic archipelago.
For all of that, a lot of it remains conjectural. In most cases, researches don’t know if a given species had feathers or not, and in only a handful of cases can even guess at coloration. In terms of behavior, I suspect that they considered the ecological niche a given species occupied, and assigned to it mannerisms seen in modern-day correlates. Mating behavior was often based on the sometimes intricate displays seen in birds, or herd dominance such as is seen in ruminants. Some of it probably slopped over into the purely fictional.
It crossed my mind to wonder if Attenborough felt the need to explain just how tenuous the foundation for the scenes he was narrating really were. After all, he “refused to do the narration on Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) because he was unwilling to support a fictitious wildlife documentary at the time. Attenborough has since changed his view leading to his work here.” [IMdb quote]
And there is this: even at 97, Attenborough is no idiot, and fools don’t watch his shows. He trusted his audience to understand the difference between real and make-believe.
And even to this day, while we’ve learned much about dinosaurs, that knowledge is dwarfed by what we don’t know. We know of about 1,200 species; there were probably many times that number more.
So a bit of artistic license is suitable, and it is used to great effect to create an utterly memorable series.