The Dinosaur Box
Primeval. Dinotopia. Terra Nova. Primal. Did you know how many dinosaur TV dramas there are? Or that some of them are actually good? Switch on The Dinosaur Box with hosts Thomas Gomersall and Darby Knight as we sink our teeth into every paleo drama you've ever watched, and some you probably haven't too. Featuring detailed and (we hope) humourous breakdowns of characters, themes, production histories and of course, creatures, this is the podcast for anyone who loves dinosaurs, storytelling or any combination of the two.
The Dinosaur Box
Dinotopia (The Miniseries): That time Hallmark made a paleo drama
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Really? That company for soppy holiday TV movies made a dinosaur show too? Based on a series of best-selling books, Dinotopia had the task of taking an IP renowned for its breathtaking artwork and unique fantasy worldbuilding (less so for its story) and adapting it into three 90-minute TV episodes, with all the constraints that entailed in 2002. What followed was a magnificently "meh" miniseries that gets some things right (like its villain), fails spectacularly at others (like its love interest), but manages to stay just on the right side of mediocre to be enjoyable. Join us we compare the book vs the miniseries, witness a future Prison Break star riding a pterosaur, wonder if we accidentally watched a Star Wars prequel movie, and ask the question, "How did this god-awful CGI win the Emmy for Best Visual Effects?"
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Hello and welcome to the Dinosaur Box, the podcast where we dig up and study dinosaur TV shows to see what makes them thrive or go extinct. I'm your host, Thomas Gomersal. And I'm co-host Darby Knight. And we are back to bring you our thoughts on all that is fossilized, televised, and dramatized. How are you feeling about this, Darby?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I'm feeling pretty good. Overall, I'm feeling pretty good. I mean, this is diving back into the depths of my memory in terms of all the dinosaur stuff that was floating around on TV back in the day, so should be interesting.
SPEAKER_01Do you feel more confident about doing this now that you've cut your podcasting teeth on the pilot episode?
SPEAKER_02Uh we'll we'll see. The second run in some ways can be more difficult than the first, but we'll see how it goes.
SPEAKER_01So are you ready for round two?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, bring it on.
SPEAKER_01Well then let's get into it. Let's talk about Dinotopia. Brackets the mini-series. It is based on the fictional world of Dinotopia, a utopia in which anthropomorphosized dinosaurs and humans coexist, created by American author James Gurney. The miniseries uses plot details from Gurney's first two Dinotopia books, Dinotopia and Dinotopia The World Beneath, although it takes place in a time further into the future. The main characters are Carl and David Scott, two American teenage brothers from a contemporary time frame, unlike the 19th century castaways in the books. The boy's father's plane crashes into the sea and they get stranded on Dinotopia, where they must adjust to a new society threatened with imminent destruction. The miniseries aired on ABC in May 2002 and was followed later that same year by a short-lived TV series that ran for just one season. So I kind of knew from quite early on that this was what we were going to do for our second episode, in part because I wanted to do something that was very different to primeval, but also because, much to my surprise, I discovered that you had actually not seen this mini-series before, Derby, which came as a real shock to me because this was very much a staple of my paleo fiction diet when I was a kid. So I kind of assumed the same would be true for you.
SPEAKER_02I think it was something that very much tried to edge its way onto my paleo plate when I was younger, as I've got a distinct memory of going to the local library and just seeing that massive Dinotopia VHS box set in the media section.
SPEAKER_01Oh, you mean those big clamshell ones?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it was huge, and god must have weighed like a kilo back in the day. But I pretty much begged my mum to let us borrow it and watch it at home, not realizing that it was basically a trilogy of movies, a set of like 90-minute episodes, and I just don't think I ever really made it to the end or had enough time to actually watch all of them. So I'd seen part way through, but definitely not the entirety. Upon re-watching it, there was things in there that I had memory of, things in there that I didn't have memory of. So it was sort of there, but also sort of not there at the same time.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, with that in mind, I was quite interested to do this to see how you were going to react to it, because I myself, for the longest time, really didn't know what to think of it, and so I figured it was very much gonna be a coin toss as to whether or not you enjoyed it. So having now actually watched it all, what is your one-sentence review?
SPEAKER_02I think it was enjoyable overall, though it certainly shows its age. The effects look rather dated by what we're used to nowadays, and it had a bit of a rocky beginning, but then it sort of got better as it went on and then had a bit of a lackluster ending. So a little bit of an up and down, but overall it was fairly decent and enjoyable for what it was.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I enjoyed it too. Although that said, I should make it clear, this is definitely not for everyone. Like, I know someone who loves the book and really does not care for the miniseries, hi Joe. Um, and there are things in here I can see people being turned off by, not least of which, like you said, the CGI. This was done by Framestore, which is the same effects company behind Walking with Dinosaurs and Primeval. And let's just say they were definitely not showing off the A material here.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it feels like they were A, not guided by as an adept hand as Tim Haynes, but also B, potentially more stretched and asked to do too much with what they had. And yeah, it does certainly look rough in a number of places.
SPEAKER_01Well, anyway, getting into the personals now, apart from the story of borrowing it from your local library, do you have any history at all with anything in the Dinotopia franchise, be it the books or any of the other adaptations?
SPEAKER_02I had one book when I was younger, which I just picked up from a charity shop. Again, when I was too young to really know what it was. I know it was only like 99p, it was sleeveless, and I don't recall whether Younger Me actually read it or was just completely absorbed in all the dinosaur artwork that was within it. And I've no idea where it ended up, probably in a bin or back at a charity shop, so I can't go back to it. But yeah, again, I just have these flashes of knowing I had this old style book in my hand, but also that it was full of nice dinosaur pictures.
SPEAKER_01Well, in fairness to Younger You, there's not really that much of a book to read per se. It is primarily about the drawings, as we will discuss later.
SPEAKER_02Unvindicated then.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So what's your history with the books? Because I think there's quite a number of them, isn't there?
SPEAKER_01Well, I actually did not know there was a book to begin with. The first time I heard about anything dynotopia related was when it first aired on local TV in Hong Kong when I was a kid. And I first heard about it from a woman at the church I attended at the time. She told me the title, and in particular, I remember her telling me about the scene where a man and a dinosaur play ping-pong together. Unfortunately, by this point, I'd already missed the first episode, but I recorded the second and third on VHS and enjoyed them both. In between those two episodes, I discovered that it was based on a book, which I struggled to get from my school library because suddenly everyone wanted to read it because of the miniseries, and there was only one copy. But eventually I did manage to borrow it and skim through it. Then years later, I bought it off eBay and read it properly as research for this episode. And I should just say, for the sake of transparency, that we have only read the first Dinotopia book. We have not read any of the others in the main series.
SPEAKER_02I had a gander on Wikipedia, and I think there's four main books in the series, and some like 20 smaller novels written by various writers other than James Gurney. But we are definitely not fully fledged Dinotopia aficionados with any kind of deep knowledge on the majority of those.
SPEAKER_01I did read some of the digest novels, and there is one that we will get to towards the end of this episode. But like you say, I've definitely not deep into the dynotopia law myself. So anyway, I later recorded all but one episode of the follow-up TV series on VHS when it aired, which then became my primary source of entertainment during the 2004 SARS epidemic while people in Hong Kong were quarantining and nobody was allowed to go to school. Sound familiar?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, history has like a 20-year cycle for most things, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_01Pandemic. What pandemic? Um so some years later, I bought the whole miniseries on DVD and I enjoyed it at the time, but over the years I started to become conflicted about its quality. Part of me thought it was really bad, and there are definitely some things that are pretty corny or haven't aged well, but another part of me considered it a guilty pleasure. I mean, I definitely found myself coming back to it a lot for something that I supposedly thought wasn't all that good. So when I watched it for the podcast, trying to judge it objectively, I wasn't sure if my feelings were going to be net negative or net positive. But I have to say, having watched it again, I have way fewer bad things to say about it than I thought I would. So it did pleasantly surprise me.
SPEAKER_02That's a double-edged sword. That's less to talk about, but I guess you had a better time preparing.
SPEAKER_01Okay, let's get into a bit of the background of this. So James Gurney, at the time he had the idea for what would become Dinotopia, was working as an artist for National Geographic, drawing a lot of recreations of ancient cities like Machu Picchu, traveling around with archaeologists to visit dig sites for inspiration. And he got the idea to create his own fictional Lost City. So he drew two standalone paintings, Waterfall City, which he imagined as basically Venice on Niagara Falls, and Dinosaur Parade, which was a painting of dinosaurs and humans in an ancient Roman-spired setting, which eventually became the cover of the original book. So he then did a whole series of similar dinosaur paintings and eventually decided to put them into the same world, drawing a map of an island which he then named Dinotopia. And then he was convinced by a pair of retired publisher friends to turn it into a proper book. So he came up with a story of sorts about a father and son, Arthur and Will Dennison, who get shipwrecked on Dinotopia and explore this new world. And then Will goes on to become a Skybax rider, who are this elite group of pterosaur pilots, which is about the closest the book comes to having a proper story, but we'll get to that. And then the first Dynotopia book was published in 1992. So, with regards to adaptation, this miniseries was not the first attempt to do that. Efforts were made by both Columbia Pictures and Disney to make a Dinotopia movie, but were ultimately scrapped due to cost. Although, as we've said, Walt Disney Television did co-produce the miniseries, which is why I don't quite understand why you can't find it on Disney Plus.
SPEAKER_02Probably for tax purposes, isn't it? I don't know the ins and outs completely, but I know other streaming platforms have removed a lot of niche content purely to maintain their taxes and whatnot. So they probably don't see it as viable for putting on for the general populace.
SPEAKER_01Side note, the would-be Dinotopia Disney movie actually had George Locust attached to it. And then when the project fell through and he later went on to make Star Wars the Phantom Menace, one of the many criticisms of that film was that the design of the capital city of Naboo was plagiarized from Waterfall City.
SPEAKER_02That's interesting.
SPEAKER_01Not the only Star Wars prequel comparison we'll be making about this miniseries, by the way. So eventually in the late 1990s, the then head of Hallmark Entertainment, Robert Halmey Sr., bought the screen rights to the book and went on to executive produce the miniseries with his son, Robert Halmey Jr. This was back before Hallmark decided it wanted to specialise in soppy rom coms and Christmas movies, by the way. Now he had previously made several successful event miniseries adaptations of books before, including ones of Gulliver's Travels and The Odyssey in the 1990s. In fact, the screenwriter of said Gulliver's Travels miniseries, Simon Moore, was later brought on to write the script for Dinotopia, and then ABC Entertainment greenlit the miniseries in 1999. And both Halmy and ABC were very confident about the success of Dinotopia, some might say overconfident. Halmy was willing to spend $80 million on it, in spite of his previous miniseries for Hallmark, The Tenth Kingdom, also written by Simon Moore, having not performed particularly well. Ultimately, Dinotopia cost $85 million to make. And to direct the miniseries, they hired Marco Brambiler, which was an unusual choice as he had spent most of his career prior to this creating video montages for art museum installations. According to IMDB, he'd only directed two feature films by this point and had never directed anything for television before. So it's odd that for this big expensive production with some not exactly low-profile actors in it, people like Terry Jones of Monty Python and David Thuhlis, that they'd hire such an inexperienced director.
SPEAKER_02It's certainly a decision that you can see the effects of throughout the mini-series. For example, you can see some scenes, they just feel like a narrative need to be stitched together, there's not like a natural flow to them. There's a lot of quite brightly lit scenes as well, I feel, which also doesn't help the CGI situation. It makes a lot of the negatives of the CGI pop out more. So yeah, perhaps a more adept hand could have done a better job with what they were trying to pull off here.
SPEAKER_01I don't know. Have you seen the lighting in Joel Schumacher's Phantom of the Opera? Um well, anyway, it certainly didn't taint ABC's faith in the project. In fact, they were so confident in its success that they commissioned and filmed Dinotopia the series before the miniseries had even aired. They also launched a big marketing campaign for it as well. There was a Macy's Thanksgiving parade float, there were toys in Hallmark stores, and parts of the Waterfall City set were even sent to Disneyland Paris. So without getting into spoiler territory just yet, Derby, do you think they were justified in their confidence?
SPEAKER_02No, I think they were overconfident. There was also a Game Boy Advance video game released around that time, and it takes a lot of gusto to think your IP is big enough to go and code an entire game for it. For Jurassic Park Pills games like that out, which you can understand, but for a brand new TV IP, definitely feels like they were overreaching, I think.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, at least Primeval waited till the second series was out of the way before they started putting out merchandise.
SPEAKER_02Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_01And another thing is this came out at a time when event miniseries as a thing were very much dying out. And I think Harmi was hoping that Dinotopia would revive the genre. Now, I don't know whether or not he succeeded in that. I haven't really done too much research, but I do know he was involved in one or two event mini-series aired by the Sy-Fi Channel in the late 2000s. So clearly the genre didn't completely go extinct, but whether or not Dinotopia had anything to do with that is pretty unclear. Okay, so let's start with a brief-ish summary of the plot of the mini-series. Darby, do you want to take a shot at this?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, we've mentioned the beginning already of the American brothers, Carl and David, who get stranded on Dinotopia.
SPEAKER_01And who are very clearly played by actors in their mid to late twenties, despite being friend as teenagers.
SPEAKER_02Oh yeah, that that old trope's definitely in here.
SPEAKER_01Also, FYI, David is played by Wentworth Miller of Future Prison Break Fame. And Carl is played by an actor who I have never heard of before or since this.
SPEAKER_02Anyway, the series starts off with Carl and David's father taking them on a plane ride to give Carl some flying experience. They fly into a storm, which causes the plane to crash. Their father goes down with the plane, but Carl and David manage to get out and swim to a nearby shoreline, which they don't recognise. They've never been there before. And as they go wandering through this new land looking for help or civilization, they stumble across an archaeologist called Cyrus Crab.
SPEAKER_01Played, much to my surprise, by David Thoolis. I was like, really? That's Professor Lopen from Harry Potter? He's completely unrecognizable in this role.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, there's a little bit of star power just hidden around the cracks of this, which I guess helps elevate it somewhat. Yeah, Cyrus takes David and Carl to a nearby settlement where they encounter their first dinosaur, and they also encounter a young woman called Marion, who has a uh how do I describe it? Who has a very deep-seated connection in dealing with the dinosaurs. So after spending the night at the town, they get on a Brachiosaurus bus heading towards the continent's capital of Waterfall City. On the way, they discover a ruined town which used to be powered by a sunstone, which is sort of Dinotopia's power source, and also a way for settlements to keep predators away.
SPEAKER_01Which is not a thing they do in the book, by the way. That is made up for the mini-series.
SPEAKER_02They find that there is a sunstone crisis spreading across Dinotopia, where the sunstones are failing, leading to settlements getting attacked by predatory dinosaurs and pterosaurs. After a brief run-in with a pack of T-Rex, David and Carl and Marion get saved by a squadron of Skybax riders who safely escort them the rest of the way toward Fall City. Once they've arrived, they meet the mare, who happens to be Marion's father, and learn the rather uncomfortable truth that there is no way off of Dinotopia. Everyone that gets stranded there is there for life. But they get given temporary accommodation with a English-speaking dinosaur called Zippo.
SPEAKER_00Very kind of put us up, Zippo. Oh no, not at all. I find you very interesting species.
SPEAKER_02And are tasked with integrating themselves into dynotopian society. David is a little bit more open to the prospect than Carl, who views himself as now trapped in some sort of hell he doesn't understand.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's another thing. I can never quite tell what species Zippo was. I always viewed him as some sort of ornithumimid, just because he's got that very ostrich-like body, but in the show they refer to him as a Stenosaurus, which I believe was their kind of bastardised way of saying Stenonychus, which is a kind of raptor.
SPEAKER_02I thought I read somewhere that he was a struthiomimus, but I've just done a quick search on the internet and the top result says he's meant to be a troodon. So who knows? As they begin to familiarise themselves with dynotopian society, David fully throws himself into the history, learning the language, whereas Carl sort of buddies up a little bit with Cyrus Crab in trying to find a way off of Dynotopia. And towards the end of what is meant to be their study period, the brothers clash again, which leads them falling over a waterfall and washing down river into an ancient temple, which is an entrance to a place called the World Beneath, which, according to Dinotopian history, is where the sunstones came from, and also a taboo place that no one is meant to enter. Marion and Zippo manage to find them at the ancient temple, after which they go to a place called Vidabo, where they meet Marion's mother, Rosemary. Here they undertake what's called habitat training, which is something that was briefly mentioned in the book, but wasn't really expanded on here. After a period, David gets assigned to go to Canyon City to train as a Skybax pilot, whereas Carl is assigned to go and work at one of the hatcheries helping to raise new saurian partners and eggs and baby dinosaurs.
SPEAKER_01So by the way, on that subject, in the miniseries, every human in Dinotopia is assigned a saurian partner, which is basically a dinosaur life partner. Marion likens it to a marriage, which is not anywhere near as reassuring as she thinks it is.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it just seems wrong in a number of ways, but it's not what it is. It's basically just a lifelong companion. And during the second episode, Carl and David get paired with their saurian partners. So for David, he pairs with an albinotteranodon called Free Fall after he fails to attract the Skybacks during his graduation ceremony. Carl, meanwhile, gets paired with a baby dinosaur who he really cares so little about, he doesn't even give her a name other than her assigned egg number of 26. 26 is what we know as a chasmosaur, but for some reason the show identifies it as a Casmiosaur of the Hadrosaur family, which it's not.
SPEAKER_01Which is how you can tell James Gurney had no part writing the script for this, because he would never have made such a stupid mistake. Chasmosaurs are a member of the Ceratopsian family, the same family as Triceratops. And I know James Gurney knows this because he had a Casmosaur character in the original book. I think his name was Fiddlehead.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And even before she's born, he tries to return the egg. He doesn't want it to be his responsibility. But egg hatches, yes, to deal with this little baby dinosaur. And even though he still really wants to leave, he wrestles with the thought of leaving Twenty Six behind, and it's only when she tries to follow him into the sea that he really sort of buckles and abandons his boat to go and rescue her.
SPEAKER_01So anyway, while all of this is going on, the sunstones are continuing to fail, and the government is doing basically what half the world's governments did during Covid and bury their heads in the sand. Carl, David, and Marion tried to solve this themselves by going back to the jungle temple to find an entrance to the world beneath to mine new sunstones, but instead accidentally awaken a swarm of pternodonts guarding it, which then proceed to fly out and attack every settlement between them and Waterfall City. So then Cyrus, who kind of hates Dinotopia and everything about it, but at the same time wants to save it too, it's not entirely clear whether that's his real motive or not, enlists David and Carl on an expedition to the world beneath via an undersea cave using a sunstone-powered submarine. They get to the world beneath and find out that their dad actually survived and has been living there this whole time, which doesn't really need to be in this story at all, but whatever. Cyrus abandons them but is eaten by a giant fish that guards the cave, so they instead find another way out via the jungle temple. Then David reunites with Freefall there and flies him back to Waterfall City in the middle of a Tyranodon attack that is honestly way better than the one. In Jurassic World, in my view. They deliver a sandstone that repels the swarm. Marion's father, Waldo, and his government admit that they made an oopsie daisy with this whole situation and reward David with a medal. And then Carl and their dad show up with a whole card of sandstones, despite having no obvious means of mining or transporting that many on their own. And yeah, that's the mini-series. In terms of the story, like this thing happens, then that thing happens, which then leads to this other thing happening. This is relatively solid, I would say, bar a couple of minor plot holes and moments where you're just like, oh, that seemed rushed, or why was that there? The story on the whole does make sense and you can follow it pretty easily. There's not really anything here that fatally damns the miniseries on that basis.
SPEAKER_02No, it just, in my opinion, did a very poor job of actually setting it up. I remember watching those first few scenes and how everything went from one thing to another and thinking, okay, this is a rather tenuous way of getting here, because we see the characters get on a plane, we don't know why they're flying. We don't know who Carl and David are really, character-wise, until they get to Waterfall City pretty much, and David decides, you know what, I actually quite like this and want to learn more. The plane crash itself felt a bit contrived. Why didn't they just turn away from the storm or their father take control of the plane again? And it just felt very much like we need to have characters and we need to get them there somehow. This'll do. It was a bit of a poor sell to me.
SPEAKER_01I don't know. It's not that far removed from how it happens in the book when often Will Dennison are shipwrecked. It's kind of a classic Bermuda Triangle story in that sense.
SPEAKER_02It is, but it just didn't seem to have any of that Bermuda Triangle weirdness, like dial anomalies or strange stuff going on, like we see in primeval. Sorry for the comparison with the compass and the magnetism and that kind of thing. If there was like a magnetic storm and they were pulled to it, maybe that would have been a more satisfying explanation rather than just deciding, eh, we'll just fly this micro light into the storm.
SPEAKER_01And what was your issue with the ending? Because you said earlier that you found it a little lackluster.
SPEAKER_02The ending, I think, flip-flopped from being good to not good, so it was very difficult to fall on either side of the line. One thing I definitely wasn't a fan of was their dad somehow being alive at the end. We saw how low the plane sunk, so he would have surely drowned, and I just questioned why would he swim towards an unknown rock formation instead of straight to the surface in terms of sheer primal survival instincts? I can see why they would want it, but the way it was written in, it just did not make any sense to me.
SPEAKER_01They do kind of wash their hands of explaining how he would have survived in the caves all that time. There's a moment when David asked him, What did you do about food? And he's like, I'll tell you later. I want to find out what you're not to first.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I heard that. And I was like, That's a we don't actually know, but we don't want to explain it.
SPEAKER_01I guess if I were to really nitpick the story, it would be about things that they either glossed over or that didn't really make sense in the narrative, like the habitat training they undergo in the second episode. I'd have loved to have seen more of what that entails, because the book doesn't ever really go into great detail about it either, so it would have been nice if the miniseries had expanded on it. And then there was another plot point which we didn't mention, which is Rosemary sending Marion to Canyon City with David to study the Pteranodons. That never really seemed to have much point to it. Like she doesn't learn anything about them that informs anything later on. It's never very clear why Rosemary even wanted her to study them in the first place. The only function it really seems to serve is to introduce the audience to Freefall. But in Universe, as far as the characters and conflict are concerned, it comes to virtually nothing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, there's a few strands and things in here that just don't really amount to anything. They introduced T-Rexes in the first episode and they never crop up again.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's funny. The T-Rexes are very much minor antagonists in the miniseries, whereas the Pternodons are the main antagonists. In the TV series, it's the other way around. The T-Rexes are in probably every other episode of that show, and the Pternodons, if I remember correctly, are only in three, and in two of those, they're mainly just a side threat.
SPEAKER_02Okay, maybe they were just getting the models done and saving them for the TV show.
SPEAKER_01Well, speaking of the Pteranodons, I want to talk about the big Pteranodon Swarm attack at the end of this mini-series. So the reason why I thought this was better than the one in Jurassic World is because I felt there was much more of a sense of build-up to it, in that you kept cutting back to the swarm, and more and more frequently as the episode went on to highlight them getting closer to Waterfall City. Whereas in Jurassic World, it's just literally the Indominus smashes through the Avery, the Pteranodons fly off and start attacking people immediately. And we've never seen them do anything like this before. It just felt really rushed watching it in the theatre. So I felt this one did a far better job of building a sense of tension and suspense to it.
SPEAKER_02The explanation that I'd heard for the Pteranodon attack in Jurassic World was kind of retconded in Fallen Kingdom anyway. So that made it more difficult to digest.
SPEAKER_01What was the explanation?
SPEAKER_02The explanation was that the Pteranodons in Jurassic World all got free and then headed straight for the nearest big body of water on the island, which happened to be the Mosasaur Lake by Main Street, and then started mobbing all the humans to drive them away from what they viewed as their new territory, albeit this wasn't really obvious or well executed in the film. But then Fallen Kingdom has the continuity error of the Mosasaur Lagoon is all of a sudden right by the coastline and opens into the sea, because they changed the map of Jurassic World between the two films. So that blows that entire idea completely out of the water.
SPEAKER_01So how do you feel the Pteranodon attack in Dinotopia compares to that one?
SPEAKER_02I don't know. By comparison, I don't really remember feeling it was as much of a threat as the show was trying to portray. I think that wasn't helped by the fact that the swarm they showed was so massive it was almost comical, because there was like hundred thousand pteranodons, and it was like, is there really that many on this continent? And we knew the Skybax riders had larger pterosaurs, because I think the leader, doesn't he ride like a Quetzalcoatlas or something?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the Skybax is a fictional species of Quetzalcoatlas, aka one of the largest pterosaurs ever discovered.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. So you'd think that that pterosaur being present in the skies, even in the wild, would keep the pteranodons at bay, but no, that wasn't the case.
SPEAKER_01Well, I blamed that down to Marion's useless father not amassing the skybax to defend the city.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that crossed my mind as well. I was like, the logical thing is just to bring the skybax in to patrol the perimeters, but he didn't even think of that.
SPEAKER_01Well, I feel like the fact there were so many pteranodons really added to the sense of chaos they were going for. Like you saw them swooping down on things, knocking people into canals, dropping barrels onto stalls and all that sort of stuff. So I felt that there was much more of a sense of danger in that respect. Whereas in Jurassic World, the camera was so shaky, you never got to focus on anything. You never really saw the effects that the pteranodons were actually having, except for the gratuitous death scene of the Irish nanny in the Motor Solagon.
SPEAKER_02It was probably a limitation of the budget for Dinatopia, but I feel like there would have been a greater sense of chaos if all of Waterfall City was invaded by carnivores, because the Pteranodons only really sort of caused chaos in the air if they'd had T-Rex come back into it and rampage on the streets, and then you'd have chaos both land and air, really lending to this real intense feeling of peril throughout the city, but they just went with the one.
SPEAKER_01You're starting to remind me a bit of all the people who have their own comments on how the finale of Primeval Series 5 should have played out.
SPEAKER_02Well, whoops.
SPEAKER_01I will admit that it is a slight issue that we never really see them kill anyone. The worst we get is when one of them swoops down on this little boy we've never seen before and flies off with him. But like I say, I still feel that there was an appropriate amount of chaos and intensity. I particularly like the scene where an ankylosaurus whacks this Pteranodon that's harassing him with his tail club. I thought that was pretty cool.
SPEAKER_02This I think just leans into more about missed opportunity because there could have been an almost Lord of the Rings style battle scene if they'd called in Sauron partner soldiers, and we would have had different species going up against Pteranodons and whatnot. But again, it's just the limitations of TV in the early 2000s.
SPEAKER_01Well, since we're already talking about creatures, what did you think of the effects?
SPEAKER_02I'll describe it as a time capsule of rubbery TV CGI. Definitely, I think, too ambitious for a TV budget on top of all the physical sets, the locations, and the actors. So it's very much a product of its time.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I thought the CGI was awful personally. Like as a kid, I didn't care about it because I was just like, ooh, dinosaurs, shiny keys. Um, but now I just think it looks terrible. Like, even if I hadn't been so heavily exposed to CGI and seen so many much, much better examples of it, I still don't think I would consider these good effects. There's one scene in the third episode where there's a shot of a stegosaurus walking down the street in Waterfall City, and I swear that thing hadn't even been rendered. It looked fake even by the low bar that had already been set.
SPEAKER_02Walking with dinosaurs was like three years before. Yes. And you could see, you could see the downgrade from that to this, and think, okay, has this gone a little bit backwards?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's so funny because I read articles from when the mini-series came out saying how these were groundbreaking effects, and I'm like, no, they weren't. And we knew they weren't, even at the time, because we had walking with dinosaurs just three years earlier, and those are still some of the best CGI effects in the business to this day.
SPEAKER_02Devil's Advocate, I have re-watched Walking with Dark Dinosaurs recently, and there are a couple of wonky CGI shots in there, but even those are still better than a fair number of CGI shots in Dinotopia. I mean, Primeval several years later had better effects still, so.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, bafflingly, this miniseries won an Emmy for outstanding visual effects, which I can only surmise is because there wasn't much competition for that award in 2002.
SPEAKER_02I guess it just had the floor to itself at that point in time. There was nothing else for it to really stand against.
SPEAKER_01I will say though, I thought the animatronics were done a lot better. These were created by the Jim Henson Creature Shop, which, despite the name, managed to make them look very unmuppety, more dark crystal-y, I would say.
SPEAKER_02But maybe that was just due to the past work experience of the creature shop, or it was to marry up with the CGI aesthetics and designs.
SPEAKER_01There was one scene I thought was particularly good. It's when they're at the jungle temple in the moat and there were all these Mosasaurs swimming around. There was one scene where the camera panned up from a CGI Mosasaur under the water, and then when it came above the surface, it merged perfectly with the animatronic one. I thought that was a really good trick of theirs.
SPEAKER_02Primeval did something similar, didn't they? But the inverse of going from an animatronic above the water to CGI below.
SPEAKER_01And 26 was a really good animatronic too.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think that was probably the most impressive one in the series. But again, it still looked a little bit carsoony to me.
SPEAKER_01Well, actually, here's a funny story. I saw a behind-the-scenes documentary where the narrator said that the animatronic for 26 was so lifelike that apparently kids on the set were quite unnerved by it. Even the actress who plays Rosemary said that she really fell into the illusion of the animatronic because it was so realistic.
SPEAKER_00But when she tried to get out of her egg, I got so excited that I don't think the take is usable actually.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, when you get a really good animatronic, that also really brings out the best in the actors that are interacting with it. And I think that really helped Carl's character arc in being a bit more empathetic and accepting of dinosaurs and life partners and all of that.
SPEAKER_01I think we should definitely talk about the world burning in this miniseries. The first and second episodes focus a lot on this, and personally, I think they're the most enjoyable episodes because of it. Like even before you've seen a single dinosaur, you know this is a different world. For instance, when Cyrus brings Carlin David to catch the Brachiosaurus bus, you see a sign written in the footprint alphabet of Dinotopia. Basically, all their letters are in the shape of dinosaur footprints.
SPEAKER_02I did like that, but it did pose the question to me of why is the footprint alphabet only composed of theropod footprints and not other sorts of dinosaur footprints like sauropods or any of the other species.
SPEAKER_01Well, they do explain this in the book, which is that the smaller theropods are much more nimble and lightweight, so they can sort of dance around a bit more in the sandboxes where they write these words. So that's why they choose them to be the scribes of Dinotopia, as it were.
SPEAKER_02Okay, that's interesting.
SPEAKER_01I love how they go into so much detail, particularly with the sets and the architecture. Like it might surprise some people to hear this, but Waterfall City, some of it was digital, but a lot of it was also a real set built on about five acres of Pinewood Studios in England.
SPEAKER_02You very rarely get massive built sets like that nowadays. A lot of it's just computer generated.
SPEAKER_01I do feel that's a shame because I feel like there is something to be said for having a real set there. And I do feel CGI is very much overused these days in constructing visual worlds.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, particularly on the Disney Plus shows, you can see where they've used the volume stage and just completely generated everything behind the actors.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, Disney CGI has a certain fakiness to it. You were saying earlier how Dinotopia was overlit in some parts. I think that's true of almost all Disney CGI. Like it's trying too hard to be colourful and it just comes across as fake as a result.
SPEAKER_02I was thinking of the Star Wars shows like The Acolyte and The Mandalorian. There's been complaints at the opposite end of the spectrum there that TVs also got too dark to try and hide the edges of the green screens. There's I don't know, it seems to be this gaping chasm of whether the TV show is too light or too dark, and it seems to have lost that sweet spot for a lot of people.
SPEAKER_01But game out of Dinotopia, you look at the architecture, and everything is massive in this world. The buildings and archways are huge, the roads are five times wider, everything is built to be dinosaur friendly.
SPEAKER_02I think that really helps sell the scale and integration of dinosaurs into society, because it wasn't just humans building for themselves, everything was built in partnership with the dinosaurs.
SPEAKER_01And another thing I appreciate is that there's a real mishmash of influences from many different stages of history. Because one of the things about the citizens of Dinotopia, the human ones, is that they're all descended from people who have washed up on the shores of this island over the centuries. So in Waterfall City, there was a column I saw in the first episode that had Egyptian hieroglyphics on it. There's ancient Roman statues in the library and little alleyways and corner shops a la Dickensian London.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it is very much just a patchwork of different periods and empires that have all sort of been stitched together with a fresh architecture.
SPEAKER_01I'd say they took a lot from Renaissance Italian architecture as well. I went to Florence recently and I saw a lot of piazzas and fountains and archways there that were very reminiscent of the ones in Waterfall City. Like some of those archways were so big, you probably could walk a brachiosaurus through them in real life. And in keeping with that, the costumes also have a very eclectic sense to them. I noticed a lot of the Dinotopians would wear clothes from one era, like medieval dresses, for instance, but then hats from another, like a Victorian top hat. And like I say, I feel like it highlights how these are descendants of castaways from all stages of history.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and they still had a sense of unification in how they were dressing fashion-wise. It wasn't like the costumes department had just pulled randomly from different costumes to make something. They're all given little hedges and flares to merge them into a thought-out piece of fashion to the world that they were living in.
SPEAKER_01I did have one very slight nitpick about the architecture. It's the scene in episode one where Carl and David are having to register inside the Senate chamber at Waterfall City. How did they get Ankylosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Casmosaurus in balcony seats in there? Like, how do you get a 50-ton dinosaur up onto a balcony seat?
SPEAKER_02They must have a really, really long ramp on the outside of the building.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, either that or maybe just like a system of pulleys and levers where you hoit the thing up and then just plonk it down on the balcony.
SPEAKER_02And now I have this mental image of an elevator powered by a brachiosaur walking back and forth to pull it up and down.
SPEAKER_01Well, I mean, they do have those treadmills that these stenosauruses use in the library to read scrolls because dinosaurs do their best thinking when their feet are moving.
SPEAKER_02Which is, I think, taken directly from the books.
SPEAKER_01So what about the trappings of the world? Like all the little details about how this society functions. What do you have to say about those?
SPEAKER_02It's very much meant to be a utopia, isn't it? But my big question is, is it really a utopia if you're trapped there and it's not a choice?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that is something I've noticed watching the miniseries. Carl and David are not really given much of a choice in terms of how they're supposed to live their lives in Dynotopia. Now, admittedly, you could argue that's because they physically don't have a choice, because you physically can't leave Dynotopia. But even so, nobody asks their opinions on the matter. People just tell them they're going to become dynotopians, right down to detailing the step-by-step process.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I slightly very much going to entertain the idea that some people have free will and won't want to stay. It's a you're here, you're staying, that's how it is.
SPEAKER_01Well, I think that one way you could argue they kind of get around that is when you look at how David really starts getting into Dynotopia and gradually decides that he wants to stay permanently. That is taken from this concept in the book that Dynotopia is such a fantastical and wondrous place that the longer you stay there, the less you want to leave. So it could be that maybe they sort of assume that everyone learns to love this place in the end. So we don't really have to take freedom of choice into account because they'll eventually make the choice of their own accord to stay and integrate.
SPEAKER_02Have they heard of Stockholm Syndrome?
SPEAKER_01Well, actually, in the TV series, there were a bunch of human antagonists called outsiders who have explicitly not integrated into dynotopian society and live very much on the outskirts, raiding, trading caravans, living this very hedonistic lifestyle. They're basically like medieval bandits, essentially.
SPEAKER_02Some people in the world do reject, so we just didn't see them in the miniseries.
SPEAKER_01We do technically in the miniseries, because Cyrus is very much a malcontent, and that's one of the reasons why Carl becomes drawn to him.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, very much an antagonist living in plain sight.
SPEAKER_01I thought it was very charming how interested the Dinotopians were in hearing updates about the outside world. Like they think the Second World War is still going on because the last arrivals they had showed up in the 1940s. Are you still at war with the Germans?
SPEAKER_00No, no, we won that one.
SPEAKER_02I found that interesting as well. And also how the mayor then tried to shut them down when they were giving these updates that just sounded too fantastical for people to resist. Like they mentioned men walking on the moon and people like double checked that they heard them right, and then as soon as they started bringing up mobile phones and the internet, the mayor's like, okay, that's enough.
SPEAKER_01The idea of Sauron partners is an interesting one. There's not that much detail about how these are formed, and again, choice is not really implied to play that big a part of it. For instance, when Carl gets 26, it's because he is literally just given a piece of paper with the number of her egg on it, and then they say to him, Okay, Carl, this one's yours. This is your partner for life.
SPEAKER_02I did find that odd because life is very rarely that straightforward. If you fancied a lifestyle or career change, what would you do with your sauri and partner if they A didn't want to, or B, it was detrimental to them?
SPEAKER_01It kind of reminds me a bit of the demons in the His Dark Material series. I don't know if you're familiar with those books, but basically, in this world, a part of your soul takes the form of an animal. Now, before you reach puberty, it can change shape depending on how you're feeling. But when you become an adult, it fixes shape. So some people have, for instance, a snow leopard walking by their side. And that is something I kind of wondered reading some of the stuff that happens in the books, like these high-flying adventures they go on and traveling through portals into different worlds. You think to yourself, would this really be practical if you had a large demon? A lot of this seems like stuff that is only limited to people with something that can sit on their shoulder.
SPEAKER_02No, like if you wanted to go from like a clerk to being a sailor and your partner's an ankylosaurus, it's not gonna float. You just have to leave it behind.
SPEAKER_01Well, they do have well, I do remember reading a Dinotopia Digest novel where they had a polar canthus on a boat. So evidently they do account for size differences when constructing shipping in Dinotopia. Um true. The other noteworthy thing about the Saurian partners is that it appears to be based on this thing from the book called Habitat Partners, which is an elite group of humans and dinosaurs whose job it is to study the various habitats of Dinotopia. But the book never says that it's a requirement for all Dinotopians to have saurian partners. So it's kind of a case of the miniseries taking something from the book and expanding it into its own thing.
SPEAKER_02But again, making it mandatory with no choice just doesn't really fit with being a utopia. Relationships are complicated. How do Saurian partners resolve grievances with their life partners? But we are led to believe that there is some element of destiny and that things will just fall into place as they should.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's very much Marion's life philosophy. She's been told she's expected to be a future matriarch to take over from her mother, and she just goes along with it. And doesn't question it at all. She literally says, how can you want anything other than your destiny?
SPEAKER_02Which does sound a little bit like brainwashing. Speaking of destiny, the Dinotopians live by a set of codes, don't they?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's very much a pacifist society. Their laws are things like others first, self last, weapons at enemies, even to their owners, which I think is good in theory, but in practice they kind of take it to a ridiculous extreme.
SPEAKER_02I love the wording of these codes. I did feel very zen and how they were all phrased. Like something that would come out of an actual pacifistic religion.
SPEAKER_01But later on in the miniseries, I think they become more like the laws of animalism from Animal Farm, in that some of the characters use the codes to justify their own corruption. Like, you know, do one thing at a time is one of the codes Waldo uses to justify not taking action on the Sunstone crisis.
SPEAKER_02It's just politicians for you, though, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01Speaking of which, something I thought was interesting watching the miniseries is I felt like it showed that there can be a downside to living in a utopia in that it makes the masses and especially the people in power complacent and unwilling to recognize problems when they arise.
SPEAKER_02I did see interesting parallels with the fossil fuel crisis that was gaining momentum this time in the early noughties. The same thing of politicians burying their heads in the sands to enjoy the cushy status quo. That was very much how the mayor of Waterfall City was reacting to the Sunstone crisis.
SPEAKER_01Or if you want to use an even more relevant for the time example, this miniseries came out less than a year after 9-11, which allegedly happened in part because George Bush ignored intelligence memos for warning about the attacks. Except here they didn't have any Pteranodons destroying the Sunstone Tower. Hashtag too soon.
SPEAKER_02That would have been a step too far, I think. Disney would have been all over that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but you're right. They very much like this idea that they live in this perfect world and they refuse to engage with anything that contradicts that view. There's a scene in the second episode where Zippo is trying to petition the Senate for a permission to explore the world beneath the sunstones, and the larger dinosaurs literally raw to drown out his voice. And likewise, anyone who speaks the truth about the sunstone crisis, like Cyrus or later David and Carl is accused of scaremongering.
SPEAKER_02They imprison Carl and David for trying to take proactive action, don't they? So it's almost like free thinking is punished if it goes against someone's interpretation of the codes.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, they're too bound by their traditions, like pacifism and not exploring the world but need to take necessary action. Like even in the third episode, when the head of the Skybax court informs Waldo that the situation is getting so grave that even they may not be able to contain it soon, he still refuses to do anything. He kicks the can down the road every chance he gets. He's just completely shut up in his ivory tower. I'm sure Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk would probably share an approving wink with him.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it just reminds me of those constant moving fossil fuel targets of, oh, we'll be net zero by 2025, 2030, 2040, 2050. It's like, yeah, you can't kick it down the road that long.
SPEAKER_01The interesting thing is, Rosemary would probably be a much better ruler of dynotopia if she had the taste for it. Like when David and Carl are arrested, she's called to testify at their trial, and she says, How can we call ourselves dynotopian if we only respect those who agree with us? So she clearly sees the bullshit in dynotopian politics for what it is. It's just that she'd much rather be an earth mother than a politician.
SPEAKER_02She very much has the more decisive mentality about her than Waldo has.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, like immediately after that scene where Waldo, for some reason, blames her for everything by saying none of this would happen if you hadn't sent Marion to Canyon City. She chucks it back at him, saying nothing at all would happen if it were left up to you, Waldo.
SPEAKER_02It kind of says a lot when the crisis gets so bad that people are opting to verbally attack each other instead of collaborating on action. Sort of a breakdown of the utopia somewhat.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, even when Waldo does eventually wake up to it with only about 12 hours to spare before the Pteranodons reach Waterfall City, he still doesn't do anything useful. He just organises a mass prayer of hope instead of, as I say, amassing the skybacks to defend Waterfall City. Like they're so unused to problems that they have no idea how to respond to a crisis. They don't even have the common sense to shelter in their homes during the Pteranodon attack. They're all just running around in a panic outside.
SPEAKER_02It's almost a hump that breeds incompetence scenario.
SPEAKER_01I mean, to be fair, he does suggest using this sunstone that Marion has been carrying around her neck for most of the miniseries as a replacement for the prime sunstone. But even by his own admission, it's only a short-term solution.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and if the crisis was that bad, you think they just keep any sunstone they had their hands on just in case? But I guess he just was so arrogant and ignorant that he thought, oh, I can just give it away as a gift to my daughter. It'll be fine. Everything works out in the end.
SPEAKER_01I want to just say as an aside before we move on, Jim Carter, who plays Wardo, is an amazing fucking actor. He's best known now for playing Caston the Butler on Downton Abbey, who is this very stun, stiff upper lip type character. And here, of course, he plays the bumbling corrupt official really well. But by all accounts, he is the loveliest guy in the world in real life. Someone in my extended family worked as a production designer on Downton Abbey, and she said he was the sweetest person on set and would always buy strawberries for all the Caston crew on Saturdays.
SPEAKER_02I guess strawberries are easier to get a hold of than Sunstones.
SPEAKER_01So what do you think about the characters?
SPEAKER_02I can see what they were going for. Once they got into the second episode, I think is really where it really came together in terms of the hatchery and skybax training. But in that very first episode, the character traits and personalities were told more by exposition than actual demonstration. I didn't actually think we saw any of what made them individual characters until they got toward Fall City and were faced with that first conundrum of we can't get out of here and then how they reacted to that.
SPEAKER_01I don't know. Like I I agree a lot of it is told through exposition at first, but I feel it's at least effective exposition. Like you do get a very good idea of who Carl and David are in the very first scene when they're getting on the plane with their dad. Like David is shy and bookish, while Carl's the more confident one has a better relationship with their dad.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I guess that was a little bit of personality, but I don't know, it just didn't really sell me on them. I didn't feel invested in them from the outset. It was just very much the book nerd and the delinquent I felt.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but I think on the whole they are both done solidly enough, especially David. David is the best character in the miniseries.
SPEAKER_02Definitely. Once he's assigned to the Skybax training, you can see what they're really going for. That's I think when you really, well for me at least, got tolerably invested in him. I was like, okay, yeah, he's gonna have to grow if he's gonna deal with this.
SPEAKER_01I think David has the more appreciable arc of the two of them. Because when they start out, he's the more timid and unconfident one. He talks a lot about how he was very distant from his dad and felt like Carl was the favourite child. Like in the first episode, he says to him, At least you two have something in common. He didn't have the time of day for me. And also he has a fear of height, which makes him very reluctant to take part in Skybax training. Although, admittedly, that's actually pretty justifiable given that the last time he went flying, he and his brother nearly drowned, and their dad ostensibly did.
SPEAKER_03This is like a chronic nightmare within a very, very bad dream.
SPEAKER_02David definitely had the harder journey, I feel, but it felt like he learned to open his world up and to go back to Jurassic Park 3. He went from being less of an astronomer to being more of an astronaut and actually got into the fray of things and began taking risks.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think being in Dinotopia is what really helps him to come into his own. He gets really into learning about the culture, the footprin alphabet, and then after they've only been there for like a week, he's already talking influence Saurian to a Parasarolophus. Ironically, he's much more in his element here than he was in the outside world. Whereas for Carl it's the other way around.
SPEAKER_02Carl, I think, was the polar opposite. While David felt like his world had opened up, Carl felt like his had been completely stripped away, which is where a lot of his animosity and negative feelings and frustrations came from.
SPEAKER_01Well, Carl is definitely the more flawed of the two. He's the brash, cocky, selfish brother to begin with. He has a lot of problems with authority and rules, which puts him very much at odds with Dinotopia. David tells Rosemary at one point that he's been kicked out of 11 schools. I mean, from the beginning, he's really pretty disrespectful of the place, doesn't want to understand anything about it. The only thing about it that he's really into is Marion, which is kind of problematic when it comes to her character, but we'll get to that in a second. He really does chafe all attempts at integration. He skips the school that he and David are enrolled in. When he's given 26, he makes it clear that he doesn't want her, and spends a good portion of the second episode trying to have as little to do with her as possible. And he also goes to very great lengths to try and leave Dinotopia, like stealing a book from the Waterful City Library to help him find a way out, which, by the way, nice way to repay Zippo for giving you a place to live.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, Carl is the hothead who has to learn to become more grounded, whereas David takes off, so to speak, with some self-belief and conviction once he's embedded himself and familiarised himself with Dinotopian society.
SPEAKER_01In fairness to Carl, he did watch his father supposedly drown, so he's probably in a phase of wanting someone to blame for it and lashes out at Dynotopia as a result. In fact, there is a moment when David implies that is in fact the case.
SPEAKER_02There's also that scene that triggers them to physically fight, where David almost blames Carl for their dad dying, where he just says to him, Well, you were flying the plane.
SPEAKER_01That said though, they do show that Carl has a good side. Like in the first episode where he introduces Ping Pong to Dinotopia, Zippo asks to play, and Carl's very patient with him in explaining the rules. He lets Zippo play, and it's a really charming scene. It's one of his very few wholesome moments in the first two episodes where he's unambiguously showing his better nature and isn't being a moody, selfish prick at all. It's a game.
SPEAKER_02A game? Oh, can I play?
SPEAKER_01Sure.
SPEAKER_02I don't know. I still got tinges of selfishness from that scene because immediately off the back of school where he was getting shown up and almost made fun of a little bit, I thought the whole ping-pong game was him setting up a competition against a newbie that he knew he would dominate. Sort of a little bit of ego maintenance is how it felt like.
SPEAKER_01I don't agree with that, because if you remember, Zippo says, Well, I actually don't care about the competition, I just like to play for fun, and Carl's not upset by that at all. Like he actually says, you know what, I'm having fun too.
SPEAKER_02I think that was just some naive innocence from Zippo that perhaps Carl wasn't expecting, or maybe taking a little bit of advantage of, of oh, I can make myself look good against this guy, but he won't really care. Two ways to cut it.
SPEAKER_01How do you think him becoming a parent to 26 improves him as a character?
SPEAKER_02Well, I think that was his first time learning to care for something other than himself that isn't for romantic purposes. He now has this little infant that is dependent on him for survival. Shirking the responsibilities of that would be devastating. So it really wised him up and matured him a lot.
SPEAKER_01I saw what they were going for with that, but I think the problem is that he does shirk his responsibilities as a parent to her for most of the time. Like he actively tries to avoid spending time with her. And I really wish they'd spent more time focusing on the tour than building a bond and seeing her start to break down his boundaries. Because in the final product, he's just like, fuck this for most of the episode. And then he has a change of heart at the end when he's trying to escape from Dinotopia in a leaky boat, and she tries to follow him out to sea and nearly drowns in the process, and that's when he decides he likes her.
SPEAKER_02I think that was that real-world wake-up call of this thing depends on me, that if I'm an irresponsible idiot, it's gonna end up killing itself. And that's when the weight of the guilt on his conscience really solidified.
SPEAKER_01Let's get back to David again, because I also really enjoyed his arc with becoming a Skybax rider.
SPEAKER_02I really like that as well, because once he got over his fear of heights and actually put his mind to it, he tried really hard. He gave it his all, despite being very reluctant and hesitant and convinced he was the wrong person for it. But the commander still didn't let him graduate.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's the thing. Nobody really tries to support David very much through getting over his fears. The commander kind of just brushes it off and says, fear is in the future, not the present, which reminds me way too much of Will Smith in After Earth for my liking. The only person who is actually kind of helpful to him is one of his fellow cadets, Romana, who incidentally we find as the daughter of Will Dennison from the book. And I feel like that's a character who could so easily have been an adversary to David, because Skybax training runs in her family, and she's been training her whole life to do this. So she could so easily have been written as a character who would try to sabotage him. But I like how instead they make her a genuinely nice character. Like she actually takes time out of her day to do extra training with him, and is a lot more sympathetic to him than the commander is.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I felt that as well. I felt she felt like the more organic love interest for him, the Marion, but they didn't go with that angle in the end.
SPEAKER_01It's also really good how you see David becoming so invested in being a Skybax rider. Like, even though he doesn't necessarily want to do it, he's like, okay, I'm gonna see this through to the end, I'm gonna succeed in this.
SPEAKER_02And then when he was told, You've done well, but not well enough, he didn't take that line down and actually stood up to the decision and tried to prove himself even more.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the Skybax graduation ceremony, he fails to attract a Skybax as a steed and he's told pack your shit and get out of Canyon City. But instead, he steals a saddle from the training room, goes up onto the platform and calls freefall to him. That I thought was such a satisfying scene, seeing them fly together. Because here's the thing, it's implied that no one has ever ridden a Pteranodon before because they're considered too wild. So when the commander says to him, You will never ride a Skybax, I was thinking, no, he'll ride something better.
SPEAKER_02That was probably the most satisfying part, seeing all that come to fruition.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, Eamund and House of the Dragon got nothing on this. It's especially fitting as well because Freefall, we find out from Marion's Pteranodon study, was similarly rejected by the other Pteranodons for his albinism. And the conjecture I've heard in the Dinotopia Online fandom is that that is the reason why he chose David, because he saw that he'd been rejected by the Skybacks just as he'd been rejected by the other Pteranodons. And then what makes it even better is how at the end it's David and Freefall who are the ones who fly to Waterfall City to deliver the sunstone that repels the Pteranodon swarm. So it's the two former outcasts becoming the heroes of the day.
SPEAKER_02We should probably talk about Marion now.
SPEAKER_01Oh god, yeah. I thought she was a really boring character. And a lot of it is the actress Katie Carr who plays her. I swear, through this whole thing, she has the exact same expression and the exact same tone of voice, just this blank stare the whole time, and she never raises or lowers her voice at all. The only time where she does is the scene in episode two where the two Tyranodons are attacking her, but that's the only time.
SPEAKER_02I think the delivery of the voice was meant to be very eloquently spoken, like she was an Edwardian or Victorian woman. So I think that might have had something to do with it.
SPEAKER_01Well, I get that, but it's just that she's so robotic the whole time. And the thing is, she's played by a different actress in the TV series who brings this really spunky Kira Knightley and Pirates of the Caribbean style energy to it. And if we ever watch it, I think you'll agree it's a much more interesting and dynamic performance.
SPEAKER_02Was the same director involved in the series, or did they get someone else?
SPEAKER_01I'm pretty sure they got a whole load of directors, as they very often do in a TV series.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_01I will be fair, I think they do kind of explain this. There's the scene where she says that she's been training to be a matriarch, and she does mention how it hasn't really prepared her for certain things. So I feel like that in a way could be used to explain why she's quite blank the whole time.
SPEAKER_02Fair enough. Well, there are certain things my training doesn't seem to have prepared me for.
SPEAKER_01I feel like it doesn't really make sense for her to become friends, much less romantically involved with Carl, as they kind of show her doing in the second episode. Because like they don't really have anything in common, and he's been nothing but disrespectful about her home and culture the whole time. David is much more in common with her, so I'm not entirely sure why she decides to shuck up with Carl.
SPEAKER_02I thought that given she was so used to everyone in Dinotopia, being so relaxed with their way of life, she was potentially drawn to his willingness to push some of the boundaries and rules, and over time it did help them escape some of the rules and curfews that may have dampened life a little bit and allowed her to do things she might have found relieving that she would never have thought of doing without him. So I could potentially see it from that angle.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I guess there is a certain rebellious appeal to him, but it still feels like a stretch given all of his objectively more odious traits. For instance, in the second episode, he steals a sunstone from a hatchery for Cyrus, which A, we later find out is because Cyrus was trying to find the right sunstone to power his submarine. But B is potentially also mass murder given that sunstone is powering the incubators for all those dinosaur eggs. And Marion does tell him off of that in the third episode, but you'd think this would be more of a deal breaker for their relationship. She literally says to him, I can't think of anything much worse you could do.
SPEAKER_02When I was re-watching it, I was wondering, they don't solidly conclude as to whether any of them are actually together in the end. They all just sort of become mutual friends all round.
SPEAKER_01Well, in the TV series, Carl and Marion actually do become a couple properly, and David is completely A-OK with it, despite the fact that there's the scene where he and Marion are in the skybax nest in the second episode, and he tells her, I think I'm falling in love with you. And she's just like, Oh, in love. Oh, and like that's it.
SPEAKER_02Ah, so it sounds like a lot of these plots they just didn't wrap up because they knew they were going to do a TV series. That might be why I had some issues with the ending being fairly abrupt and not really addressing everything.
SPEAKER_01Here's an idea of how much the romance between Carl and Marion doesn't work, in my opinion. Wentworth Miller, who plays David, is gay in real life, and I still felt he had better chemistry with Marion than Carl did.
SPEAKER_02And maybe down to acting abilities as well.
SPEAKER_01We're getting onto someone who I thought was far more fun to watch. Let's talk about Cyrus Crab.
SPEAKER_02Very well played by David Tulis.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, David Thuulus, you can tell, is having a lot of fun playing this character. He is milking every scene he's in, and I honestly love it so much. So Cyrus is essentially the human villain of the miniseries. He appropriately is the descendant of the villain from the original Dinotopia book, Lee Crab. Although I say villain in the very loosest sense of the word for that character, as he only really appears once in the first book, and then only to voice his discontent with Dynotopia. He's very similar to how Carl starts off in that he is similarly anti-dynotopian sentiments. He very liberally uses the word scaly, for instance, which is essentially a racial slur for dinosaurs. They should just call it the S-word for short.
SPEAKER_02He has no qualms about that word, it's very much a part of his vocabulary.
SPEAKER_01What have the scalys ever done for you, eh? I'll tell you. Nothing. Big fat nothing. Which is why it doesn't entirely make sense for him to be the one to try and save Dinotopia, although technically he does explain that it is basically just because he wants to save his own skin from the impending sandstone occalypse.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's the only explanation you really get is that he wants everything to stay up and running so that he has enough time to finalise his plans to get away. He had a slimy charm to him, and you can never really tell which team he was really batting for, or whether the scale of the problems overrode his personal views. I think when we spoke about it before, you described him as like the devil on Carl's shoulder.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, he's the one who persuades Carl to break the rules the most in Dinotopia in order to help him achieve his own end. He very much plays into his victim complex and acts as a faux ally to him in a world he doesn't truly feel a part of. It's kind of Darth Sidious and Anakin Skywalker-esque in that sense.
SPEAKER_02Probably not a deliberate action. This did come out the same year as Attack of the Clones, but it was purely as coincidental that the similarities are there.
SPEAKER_01Getting into something that might be considered a bad thing, I did get a very strong Star Wars prequel vibe watching this, didn't you?
SPEAKER_02I did, particularly from the design of Waterfall City and the Parasaurs as well. They were quite Gungan-esque, I think, in posture and facial design.
SPEAKER_01And very much in voice too. All the larger dinosaurs taught like boss nas.
SPEAKER_02Refreshments? I'll just leave them over here. Yeah, that's it. I was trying to think what their spoken language reminded me of, but I couldn't put my finger on it.
SPEAKER_01I also said in my notes that Zippo has the CGI of Jar Jar Binx crossed with the personality of C3P. Oh.
SPEAKER_02He definitely wasn't Jar Jar Binks level bad in terms of personality or execution. He was definitely more enjoyable than that.
SPEAKER_01Well, most characters are. And also the scenes in the submarine where they're being stalked by that giant fish, that could very easily have been part of the sea monster scene in The Phantom Menace.
SPEAKER_02I still struggle to see how they decided that was Dunkleosteus.
SPEAKER_01Did they? It looked to me like a giant ore fish more than anything else.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, according to Wikipedia and whatnot, that's what it's supposed to be. Kind of ironic now that they've decided that Duncleosteus was actually shorter in real life than they originally envisioned, whereas this went the other way and just made it this massive eel-like monster.
SPEAKER_01Well, like I said, it would have looked very at home in the oceans of Naboo.
SPEAKER_02Oh yeah. The only carrying resemblance it has is that sort of armor placing on the face, but other than that, in as I'll just be some Star Wars creature.
SPEAKER_01Well, the whole miniseries is very much from that awkward teething phase when 2000s films were still trying to be 90s films and hadn't yet developed their own identity. So as a result, it does have an overall aesthetic to it that is fairly reminiscent of 90s adventure films, like The Phantom Menace, and in some parts I would say the first mummy movie, too. You already mentioned Waterfall City looked a lot like the capital of Naboo, and Canyon City, I felt. Looks a lot like Geonosis from Attack of the Clones.
SPEAKER_02It did, but without the same production budget behind it. I remember re-watching those scenes and looking at the cast rocks that they were climbing over and thinking those are definitely made for TV rocks compared to what we're used to seeing in TV productions today, which are basically movie level effects.
SPEAKER_01Also, I felt like Karl and Marion were kind of a discount Anakin and Padme. And Anakin and Padme were a discount Anakin and Padme.
SPEAKER_02At least Carl didn't go on whinging about sand or anything at any point during the show. That would have been one coincidence too far.
SPEAKER_01And I think it's also worth mentioning that most paleo fiction is very firmly in the realm of science fiction. But Dinotopia has a lot more in common with fantasy. Because I mean you've got so many fantasy elements to it. You've got these magic stones, you've got talking animals, it's the Middle Ages-inspired setting. There's even a scene where David describes Waterfall City as being like something out of a fairy tale, which is another reason why I was quite keen to get your opinions on this, Derby, because generally you're not a big fan of this genre, are you?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, fantasy for me can be quite hit or miss. I think it depends on how well thought out all the components of the fantasy world are. I really like where fantasy treads a line between fiction and reality where there's a good balance of both rather than just throwing it wholeheartedly into magic system after magic system. If things are just added because of a coolness factor or whatever, and you're just expected to accept there and move on, I find that really off-putting because it introduces a lot of inconsistencies in some stories where one thing that's already been established could easily solve a problem, but no, they introduce something else. So I'm a bit of a weird one. I have a very specific fantasy taste. But I actually quite enjoyed the fantasy here overall, and the way that they established the law than the talking dinosaurs. They gave the dinosaurs their own language that felt inspired by humans rather than having them all know English, which I think would have been more jarring. I can understand 17 major human and Surian languages and imitate many natural sounds. The sunstones were a bit more of a stretch, I think, as it wasn't clear to me how they provided power, but I could see how they could be used to deter predators.
SPEAKER_01Well, actually, I don't know how you all feel about this, but the Dinotopia TV series leans even more heavily into the fantasy elements. Like you've got castles, you've got potions, you've got magic amulets. There's literally one episode where Carl kisses a magic toad.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that is the kind of stuff that I get a little bit worried about. Castles fine. Magic potions. No, and magic magic toads. Where does that come from?
SPEAKER_01Did I mention the toad makes you time travel when you kiss it?
SPEAKER_02No. No, no. That just that just feels like all the fancy spaghetti at the wall kind of plot device. Yeah, not for me.
SPEAKER_01Well, I mean, buckle up, it's coming one of these days. So now we come to the age-old question surrounding any adaptation. How well does this stack up to the source material? For his part, James Gurney, according to his substack, has only seen the miniseries once and has very mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, he was glad to see his world brought to the screen, but on the other, he felt detached from it at the same time, feeling like it was ultimately someone else's imaginary world he was watching. And it needs must be said that a lot of fans of the books are not fans of the miniseries. So, Darby, what are your thoughts on this?
SPEAKER_02I only had one of the books a long time ago as a child, and the thing that stuck with me most was the artwork, and that the books very much felt like an exercise in world building. And I think on that merit, the show did quite well on establishing the world and also translating the artwork to the screen. I think that is probably the strongest element of the show overall.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it is. And we'll come back to that in a second, but I think the biggest difference we need to establish between the book and the miniseries is the miniseries actually has a plot. It's not a direct adaptation of the book. It's set in modern times, whereas the book is set in the 1860s. So it sort of acts as a sequel stroke spin-off to the book, but references a lot of things from it. And I would argue it's made that way out of necessity, because the book doesn't really have a three-act structure that would lend itself to adaptation. The closest thing it does have to a narrative is Will Dennison training to become a Skybax rider, but I wouldn't say that's a very central aspect to it. It's basically just about him and his father getting shipwrecked on Dynotopia and then exploring this new world. The story, such as it is, is really just a means to move the characters from one incredible place to the other. And that was actually by design. James Gurney has said several times that he deliberately wrote Dinotopia to be unfilmable. It's written more like a travel log or a study of Dynotopia's culture, history, geography, etc. So adapting the book as it is would really not have made for a particularly engaging miniseries beyond the visual appeal of the world building.
SPEAKER_02It was very much written in the style of an old Victorian expedition diary or log. And as you say, it was more just about a record of discovery and experience. There was no real narrative hook or ticking clock for a miniseries to adapt. So they very much had to start from scratch in terms of adding those kind of elements.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it is that rare book that is almost entirely about the world building. And like you were saying, the strength of it comes more from that and from the artwork than the story itself. James Gurney is very much an artist first and an author second. But all that said, there are definitely a lot of elements from the book that are worked into the miniseries. The Skybax designs are very faithful to the ones in the book, as are the designs of Canyon City and Waterfall City.
SPEAKER_02The Skybax were definitely one of the concepts that I think really captures the imagination and draws readers into the book with its artwork. And overall, that was translated very well and given due attention. It had a lot of flesh and development in the miniseries, and I think that was one of the elements that really intertwined most organically with the character development.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and speaking of which, the characters and their relationship to the source material are kind of interesting as well, because you have those that are direct descendants of characters from the books, like Romana Dennison is the daughter of Will Dennison, Cyrus Crabbe is a descendant of Lee Crabbe. And then you've got ones that are almost kind of reincarnations of the book characters. Like David is essentially a modern-day Will Dennison in that he is A, the relative of the other protagonist, B interested in dynotopian society from the start and really throws himself into learning about it, and C becomes a Skybax rider after completing his studies. Difference being that Will wanted to be one from the start, whereas David kind of had it thrust upon him and then just learned to get into it.
SPEAKER_02It was definitely a change for the better, I thought, because it introduced a lot more conflict and drama that is needed for a narrative mini-series. You really see a big shift in his character from originally being a person that just wants to sit and study and understand to a person that's like, no, I want to get involved, I want to be proactive and get into the meat of things that are going on rather than sitting on the sidelines. It's a much more engaging character, I think, rather than someone who turns up, knows what they want, manages to do it, and comes out the other side without any sort of real obstacle in their path, and especially satisfying when that obstacle is originally themselves.
SPEAKER_01And there are other characters who are sort of a mishmash of ones from the book. Marin's mother, Rosemary, seems to be based somewhat on this character called Nora, who is the matriarch of Tree Town, which is where young Dinotopians go for their habitat training. And Zippo is sort of a mix of Bix the Protoceratops and Malek the Stenonicus from the book, in that he has the knowledge of Dinotopia of the former and the body of the latter.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's like they sort of took the character archetypes from the books and tried to shape them into fleshed-out characters for the show in some instances.
SPEAKER_01I will say though, I can see why fans of the book might take issue with the miniseries, just because the book had so much more detail to it, which is understandable since it didn't have to worry about budgetary constraints. And I feel like the miniseries does make a valiant attempt to incorporate a lot of those elements, but I feel like it doesn't feel as vibrant or as rich as a world. Like as an example, the book had a much, much greater diversity of creatures, not just dinosaurs, but also prehistoric mammals and even a few creatures from the time before the dinosaurs. There's one painting in the original book that has Alystrosaurus, which predates even the earliest ancestors of the dinosaurs. Whereas the miniseries, I think, only has about eight or so species, and even then it's really just the most famous ones, Brachiosaurus and Kylosaurus, etc. The most obscure dinosaur in it is a Casmosaurus, which is 26 species. But that's one of those ones where I feel like unless you're really into dinosaurs and you know your species very well, you will almost certainly mistake it for a triceratops.
SPEAKER_02I think it does take the best elements of the book and does its best to wrap it around a compelling narrative and visual effects feast. But yeah, as you say, due to budgets and other factors, not everything really lands with the stories and the visuals. But on the whole, it is faithful for the most part.
SPEAKER_01I know it's been a while since you've read the book, but did you feel like the colours in the miniseries were more muted than the ones in the original drawings?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and I think that was partly down to the colour grading. I've already said that a lot of the miniseries felt very bright to me. The book illustrations had a lot more contrast and shadow and a lot of different hues that you could really pick out. And I think a lot of that was lost just from the general brightness. So I think a better balance in the colour grading could have really helped a lot of the visuals pop a bit more, particularly with a lot more contrast and other rebalancing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, ironically, it's brighter, but it's less colourful.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, not the combination that you really want in the end.
SPEAKER_01But I mean, that said, I feel like for me personally, it didn't detract from my experience of watching the miniseries. But I can see how, if you're a massive fan of the artwork in the book, how it might do it for you. Because at the end of the day, it just doesn't look the same as much as it really tries to.
SPEAKER_02I think that really stacks the odds against it, because when you're adapting a book, say, like Harry Potter, when you literally just have the text and the book cover, the special effects and VFX team really can run wild with their imagination in shaping it. And I think the audience was a lot more accepting of what they saw on screen as an adaptation, rather than when you're given a physical picture of what you're supposed to be seeing on screen, and then you see something else, it can be a lot more jarring. So the double-edged sword, we have really nice artwork, but then that really lifts our expectations for what we're expecting a visual story to deliver.
SPEAKER_01Well, speaking of written stories, I do want to bring this up. The mini-series is not a direct adaptation of the main book. However, it is very similar in plot to a Dinotopia Digest novel from 1995 called Wind Chaser. So between 1995 and 2002, James Gurney worked on a series of short, self-contained novels written by other authors with his input, focusing on characters and locations in Dynotopia that were either glossed over in the main books or invented for the novels. And Windchaser was the first of these. So the premise of Windchaser is stop me if you've heard any of these, two teenage boys are shipwrecked on Dinotopia. One is a more bookish, sensitive type who immediately embraces it, while the other is a pickpocket who distrusts it. They go to Waterfall City and are tutored by a dinosaur, here in Edmontosaurus, not a stenosaurus or whatever Zippo species was, and then the sensitive one ends up training to become a Skybax rider and takes on a reclusive Lona Teresaur for his Saurian partner.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's pretty much a copy-paste job, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and this came out seven years before the miniseries, and I don't think it's ever been publicly acknowledged that there's any similarity between them by anyone who made it.
SPEAKER_02All it sounds like is missing is the Sunstone Crisis, or is that in there as well?
SPEAKER_01No, that's not there. That is original to the miniseries. No.
SPEAKER_02Fair enough. Could there's some originality there, otherwise, it's pretty much just a straight copy of that work.
SPEAKER_01Although I probably had the advantage that they're technically both part of the same IP, so probably no copyright battles over that.
SPEAKER_02Luckily.
SPEAKER_01So final thoughts on the miniseries?
SPEAKER_02I'd say for a nostalgic early 2000s throwback, it was worth watching. It was fairly easy and enjoyable going into it with an open mind. But it is very much an item of its time from before every TV show was expected to have Hollywood level visual effects and movie budgets. So I think if you go into it with that sort of expectation, you're gonna have at least a decent time.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think this is fine too. I don't think it's a great miniseries by any means, but it's perfectly inoffensive. There's nothing here that is painful to watch or even really cringy and awkward for the most part. I think the worst thing you can really say about it, apart from the CGI, is that it just couldn't capture all of the splendour of the book because of budget and being a completely different medium. And also, as I said, the book effectively being unadaptable by design. The only thing I would say is that I feel like it is a lot better at world building than it is at drama. Because I remember finding the first two episodes way more enjoyable. And then the third one I felt like this isn't really working in the same way, like it's not building the tension a lot.
SPEAKER_02I picked up on that as well. The episode very much just started off by telling you, oh, the T-Rex have done this, the Pteranodons have done that. It didn't really show you the scale of the peril and the threat they were trying to portray. And then the episode just sort of limped along, flip-flopped between the Pteranodon attack, and then Carl and David wandering through the world beneath at a comparatively leisurely pace. So it did drop the ball in the end, I think.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but I mean, like I say, on the whole, I did enjoy it. But I think whether or not you will is very dependent on you as a person and what you do and don't like. So, like Darby said, try and go into this with an open mind.
SPEAKER_02One thing I would add is I would like to see a second attempt at adapting this with all the advances we've seen in special effects over the years. I think just relying on the Jurassic World franchise as being the big dinosaur blockbuster series, there is scope for other things to come in and have a stab. And I think Dinotopia with its huge fantasy world, all of those great pictures that we've got from the books that could be much more faithfully translated with modern technology would be quite impressive to see. So I'd be down for another adaptation of this.
SPEAKER_01I wouldn't be too hopeful about an on-screen adaptation just because James Gurney, I think, is not keen for it himself, given the fact that he was tepid at best about the mini-series. What I think it could work well is as an open-world role-playing game. That would work really well with a world that doesn't actually have or need a story to it, and you could just spend a lot of time exploring all the incredible sites and the creatures in it. Very much in the spirit of the original book.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's a thought. The one thing that I do think of as a counterbalance to that is modern games very much in the hack and slash and shoot and kill things space, and that is very much against the sort of utopian atmosphere that Dinotopia tries to go for. I don't know how well the game would go down if you're just walking and platforming instead of battling or whatever with all the dinosaurs.
SPEAKER_01Well, we'll leave this as a discussion for all of our listeners to have in the comments. But for the time being, thank you for listening to this. Hope you enjoyed yourself, and we will see you on our next dig. Take care.
SPEAKER_02Yep, see you all soon. Bye.