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
Why did Prehistoric Park go Extinct?
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We like Prehistoric Park, but there are reasons why it was cancelled after one series (and no, it wasn't because of Primeval). Join Tom and guest host, Alex Croney, as we both celebrate a beloved 2000s mockumentary series with seemingly everything going for it — a charismatic host, a premise ripe with potential, and of course, dinosaurs — and try to answer why it came to an unceremonious end that still leaves fans clamouring for its revival long after that has ceased to be realistic. Warning: Rose tinted glasses may be removed here.
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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 filling in for my usual co-host, Dobby Knight, is a very good friend of mine, and possibly one of the only people in the world who is as obsessed with dinosaurs fiction or any combination of the two as I am. He is also, on an unrelated note, a very accomplished and passionate scuba diving instructor with experience diving in Hong Kong, the Maldives, Bali, and probably at least five other places in the world. Please welcome to the Dinosaur Box Alex Crony. Hi there. Thank you for having me, Thomas. Thank you for being on here, Alex. I'm so excited to have you on. I mean, like I said, I think you're one of the only people I've ever met who has the same level of enthusiasm for paleontology and speculative evolution as I do.
SPEAKER_02Yes, I'm so excited to be on here. Um in private, we have so many conversations, Thomas and me, about dinosaurs and paleontology. It's nice to be on the podcast and be able to share it with everybody else. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Uh, do you want to talk a little bit about how we discovered the shared interest and also how you ended up on this podcast?
SPEAKER_02Um, well, as Thomas mentioned, I'm a scuba diving instructor. So Thomas actually was the customer of mine. That's how we met. And um, we started talking about nature and uh marine biology and so on, and we somehow went into paleontology, and then from there on out we found out that we both love dinosaurs so much. And he told me about his podcast, and um, we share a lot of uh love, love for the paleo media. And after he told me about his podcast, I knew I had to join.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I remember I'm I'm trying to remember the exact circumstance under which we discovered. I think it was when we were at that Vietnamese restaurant having lunch, and we um you mentioned your distaste for the Indominus Rex in Jurassic World, and I that's when I mentioned uh Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous, which is an episode I'm definitely planning to make moving forward. And um, then I think we started just talking back and forth. I told you about the future Predator and Primeval, and then we had so many conversations over various lunch breaks where we talked about things like uh what was it, La Brea? And uh did we ever talk about Primal?
SPEAKER_02I went when Yes, yes, we did talk about Primal quite a bit because it came out when we um I watched it when I started to get to know you as well. Yeah, one of my favorite uh series, animating series, by the way.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, but you also got your interest in uh paleometer through documentaries, as most people do, didn't you, Alex?
SPEAKER_02Yes, so basically, as a small kid, I got introduced into dinosaurs, I think as many people did as well, with the Walking With series. So Walking With Dinosaurs, Walking With Bees from BBC. As a kid, I kind of grew up watching those. And after that, I started watching, if you guys know, Sea Monsters and the Giant Claw. So these kind of spin-off series, and that's when I learned about Nigel Marvin, which is very thematic to what we're gonna be talking about in this episode.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, three episodes in, and I'm already breaking my own rule that I made up about primarily looking at dramas on this podcast. Because for this episode, we are looking at our very first. Did you call this a documentary or is it a mockumentary, would you say?
SPEAKER_02I'd say a mockumentary is it's more like an education drama, dinosaur drama. It's it's uh yeah, but a mockumentary, I would say as well, in a sense.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, well, anyway, prehistoric park. Yes, I'm gonna be able to do Alright, so here is the Jurassic World style hybrid of Wikipedia description and my own input, so here we go. Prehistoric Park is a six-part British docufiction television series that aired on ITV on 22 July 2006, and on Animal Planet on the 29th of October that same year. The programme was produced by Impossible Pictures, who also created Walking with Dinosaurs and later Primeval. The story, which is told in the style of a documentary, focuses on wildlife presenter Nigel Marvin leading missions to find and collect extinct animals from the distant past by use of a time portal and bring them back to the present day where they are housed in a wildlife park called Prehistoric Park. The series focuses both on Nigel's efforts to collect the animals in their home periods, which include the Carboniferous of Scotland, the Cretaceous of the USA and China, and the Pliocene-Pleistocene of Siberia and South America, and on the challenges faced by the park staff in caring for them in the present. So, Alex, let me ask you about your thoughts on Prehistoric Park, because when I came to you with a choice of episodes for you to guest host, this was the one you specifically said you wanted to do the most. Why was that?
SPEAKER_02Well, I remember as a kid, it left a quite big impact on me. Um, the dream of seeing basically Jurassic Park but run properly. And also, it is a show that I just hold very dear to my heart and have rose-tinted glasses, I must say, a little bit when I'm looking back at Prehistoric Park. And a lot of my friends that are dino enthusiasts as well, a lot of them also mention prehistoric park being one of these shows that helped them during the golden age full love of dinosaurs, even more.
SPEAKER_04So, this was to you what primeval was to me then.
SPEAKER_02Basically, yes, I think that's a very fair comparison.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, this is your sacred cow of paleo media.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, if you take the Walking Whift series, um it I think it's my favorite paleodrama, if you call that. So for people who don't know Thomas, he's very much into paleodrama, like primeval, for example. I'm much more into the doc leaning onto documentaries, but in prehistoric park, this is kind of where our interests really combine because it is a mockumentary paleodrama in a sense.
SPEAKER_04I I like documentaries too, but I find that dramas the reason I talk about dramas more is that they fit more into the things I'm more interested in nowadays, which is the structure of storytelling, character development, and how stories gel together, how the mechanics of them work. You know, what does this element contribute to a story? What does it detract? That sort of thing. And that's why I'm more into the dramas now. But like you said, this actually does have quite a few elements of that. You know, there are characters of sorts, there are storylines, you could call them. It's kind of almost a bit like a soap opera where a lot of stuff is happening within this park. Um, I'm trying to think like what's a good um what's a good soap opera related pun I can use here.
SPEAKER_02I don't watch much CW shows, so I wouldn't know that many.
SPEAKER_04Okay, well, never mind. Um, yeah, and it even also has its own season finale climax, which we will no doubt talk about in some detail. Um, so um anyway, Alex, let's just get into your personal history with Prehistoric Park.
SPEAKER_02Well, uh I must have been around eight years old, I presume, and I loved it so much, and because Nigel Marvel was in it, I started downloading it with a VHS recorder, but I watched every episode multiple times. And it really um, like I mentioned before, really helped kickstart my dinosaur romance full on from that era onwards. At that time, also I was a lot into Animal Plan, it must have been that Animal Planet where I watched it, I think. There's a show, I don't know if you know it, Thomas. It's called Dragons an Impossible Animal or something like that. Dragons of Fantasy Made Real, yes, I do know. Yes, yes, exactly. So it was around the same time, I guess, when Dragons of Fantasy Made Real came out, and it kinda as a kid, this prehistoric park thing and dragons of fantasy made real really made me fall in love with paleontology and speculative evolution, kind of go hand in hand there.
SPEAKER_04Actually, it's funny you mentioned Dragons of Fantasy Made Real because the very first time I came across that show on YouTube was actually while I was in the countdown phase, as it were, of waiting for Primeval Series 2 to come out. So I have these memories of watching Dragons of Fantasy Made Real and at the same time looking at all these new promotional images for primeval. And so these two things are kind of inextricably linked to each other in that respect.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah. See it all seeps in together. It's all seeps in together.
SPEAKER_04It's all part of the mythos.
SPEAKER_02Exactly, exactly.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Um, well, I guess my history of prehistoric park is, I guess, a little bit more colourful. I first saw it when it came out in the UK in the summer of 2006. I remember seeing a few little teaser trailers for it, not realizing at the time that it was another Nigel Marvin documentary, although that didn't detract him a thing from it when I did see it, on first viewing at least. And then when I did check it out, I thought it was fine enough. I liked seeing Nigel in the first episode trying to find the T-Rexes and the Cretaceous of Montana, and him coming across the Triceratops herd as they're drinking by the river, and the T-Rex hunt on the Triceratops. And then we got to the part where he brings Theo, the Triceratops, back to the park, and that's when it really hit me that this is something really special. Like the moment that they bring Theo through the time portal into the observation pen. And I remember especially the scene when he's released into his new enclosure, just seeing him coming down the ramp out of the truck and the interactions between Nigel and the park keepers with him seeing that. I remember thinking literally, my god, this is fantastic. Like there was something about that that just really captured my imagination, and I really realized this was something really unique. So after that, I was completely hooked. I made sure to watch every episode after I remember actually my family. We went on a glamping holiday in the forest of Dean. Like my uncle had rented a cabin or something down there where we all were. And we were due to go home on the day that the third pre-historic park episode was coming out. And I remember just hounding my mum to just drive faster along the motorway as fast as she could. Like, come on, get home, get home quickly, quickly, quickly. And I think we got in with about five minutes to spare. So we'd like pulling up in front of my grandparents' house. And then later, because I left the UK before the series was over, I then got my grandparents to record all of the remaining episodes and send them to me in Hong Kong.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yes, yes. Oh, a lovely story. I can totally understand the inner child so excited.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, like that summer 2006, that to me is defined by the Pink Panther movie, the SpongeBob SquarePants movie, which I watched on DVD that year, Beyonce, and Prehistoric Park. Those four things. That was my summer 2006. Okay, so it's important to know that this was the last documentary produced by Impossible Pictures during what I guess you could call the Nigel Marvin era. So this began in 2001 when Impossible Pictures decided to make a two-episode Walking with Dinosaur special with a wildlife presenter. Part of this was to lend scale to the size of the dinosaurs, but it was also because they wanted to experiment with a new format of having a presenter, as opposed to just footage with narration, which is what they'd had previously. They felt a presenter would help people to connect more with the program, although definitely not everyone agreed with that opinion. So Tim Haynes, who, as those who listened to our pilot episode will know, was the creator of Walking with Dinosaurs and later Primeval. He actually handpicked Nigel Marvin for the job after watching him in, I think it was his debut documentary, Giants, because he was really impressed with Nigel's passion for reptiles in that documentary, and also felt that he could draw on his previous experience as a wildlife presenter to deliver a believable performance, which I think was definitely a good choice.
SPEAKER_02Yes, I would agree. Nigel Marvin has this charisma about him. I think Tim Haynes did a very good job.
SPEAKER_04So anyway, they run this little experiment to see if it works. And then those two episodes, Giant Claw and Land of Giants, collectively titled Chase by Dinosaurs, were broadcast to award-winning success. They won an Emmy for Outstanding Animated Programme in 2004. Nigel Marvin was nominated for a Royal Television Society programme award in 2004, in part for Chase by Dinosaurs, and also for its follow-up documentary, Sea Monsters, which I think was actually made around the same time as Chase by Dinosaurs. So you could tell they were pretty confident about this presenter format. And likewise, Sea Monsters was also an incredible success. It won a BAFTA award for best visual effects in 2004. And then that in turn led to Prehistoric Park two years later. So do you want to maybe talk about the format of Chase by Dinosaurs and Sea Monsters?
SPEAKER_02So the format is Nigel Martin goes back in time, basically like on a safari. And it's very much, like you said, like a nature presenter. With sea monsters, it's a little bit different. It's actually very cool. I like sea monsters a little bit more in this aspect. It's a little bit more realistic because when they go diving, they actually talk about what kind of strategies do they have to stay safe. So they just don't go in diving with a dunkleostis, for example. They go in a ball cage. Or when they go for the li pleuridons, if you remember, they have like this um shark repeller. It's especially made for a lily pleuridon. So it kind of goes into the more realistic how would you do it if you could go back in time. And he does show and present all these animals as if they were real, which I think is Michael Marvin's course ring.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, a lot of the stuff that he does in his modern day documentaries is carried over into Chase by Dinosaurs and Sea Monsters. There's an episode which he explicitly says he has done this before, where he sticks his head in a giant crocodile's mouth, which mirrors what he did with a real bull alligator a few years earlier. And then he also he does a lot of interactions with the subject of his documentary. So in Chase by Dinosaurs, he tries to go up to a Therizinosaurus to touch on the thigh, and he swims with an Arcalon turtle in Mosasaur-infested waters and sea monsters. He has a very cavalier risk-taking mentality a lot of the time. He's very bare grills in that way. Yes. So in that respect, like you say, he was really perfect for this position.
SPEAKER_02Yes, and the format of Chase by Dinosaurs and Sea Monsters generally is very similar to Prehistoric Park, where they go back in time and he presents everything as if he were there.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and uh surprisingly that's actually a problem, as we will get to later. But before we do that, I also think it's worth mentioning how unusually for an Impossible Pictures documentary, Tim Haynes was not actually involved in this, possibly because he would have been developing primeval at that point. So this was helmed by his longtime collaborator Jasper James. And interestingly enough, I've noticed that most of the Impossible Pictures things that don't do well or don't do as well as Walking with Dinosaurs or Primeval are the ones that were made without Tim Haynes' involvement. Which brings us to why we're actually discussing Prehistoric Park. Because despite the previous track record of Nigel Marvin documentaries, this one actually was not a success, being cancelled quietly after just one season. The most common explanation on the internet for this is because primeval was a lot more successful, and so ITV decided to invest in making that instead. But that explanation actually doesn't really hold up when you consider that Primeval was released in February 2007, over six months after Prehistoric Park ended in August 2006. And actually, according to a Guardian article I found from 2006, Prehistoric Park was actually canned several months before Primeval even debuted. Like the first episode only got 3.3 million viewers, which is only 21% of the viewership share. By comparison, the first episode of Primeval got 7.09 million, over 1 million more than the usual viewing figures for its time slot. Tim Haynes, where were you? Yeah. I mean, the show's distributor did attempt to get a second series made, but it wasn't successful. So if the ratings weren't high enough, then presumably that means something about the program just didn't really click with audiences. And to be honest, I can kind of see why. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love prehistoric park. I'm way less conflicted about liking this than I am stroke was about Dinotopia. Um but but I do think on balance it is a mixed bag. It has some really good elements to it and really good ideas, but it's one of those things where the sum of its parts is not as strong as the individual elements, by which I mean that there are things about it that I think did drag the show down. Some of those are hangovers from its predecessors, but there are also plenty of others which I think are more unique to the show. So here we aim to discuss what those elements actually were. And also what they did right. Yeah, exactly. Rose and a cons, basically. Yeah, you know, like yeah, like this is not an episode where we just bash pre-historic part for like 40 minutes. Yeah, this is not this is not us bashing pre-historic part for 45 minutes, whatever. Um, no, like we because like I said, we both loved this. Like we enjoyed it so much as kids, and we still love it even now, in spite of its flaws. But you know, we're here to give an honest appraisal of it, and that is gonna mean we're gonna have to say some stuff that some of you may not like. So you have been warned, don't add us on Twitter.
SPEAKER_02Yes, exactly. Uh, also, I just want to add something that I think both for for for me and maybe also as well for you, Thomas, is like you mentioned, we really love pre-historic party, it has a special place in my heart. So I had these very rose-tinted memories of it. But now this is me checking out how good is it against what I really remember it as, and what will the adult Alex think about it. Because sometimes, if you know as a child, you'll watch a show, you'll think it's really good, and you watch as an adult again, you just go, Whoa, really? I don't need I don't remember that, I don't remember that, and so on. So, this is what's really about with us.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I I kind of feel like for me that started within probably map maybe five years of first watching it. I think it was because I started to develop a more critical mind for the media I consume when I was in my late teens. So we're talking maybe like 2009, 2010, and then especially when I started watching YouTube videos by Lindsay Ellis and others on story structure and how it works as applied to movies. That's when I started to really notice things that I felt were possible weaknesses in the show and things that had actually kind of gone really kind of underdiscussed. So uh that's why I want to do it because I've had a lot of thoughts about this and I've wanted to get them out into the world for quite a long time. So now is my chance.
SPEAKER_02All right, let's get to it.
SPEAKER_04Well, just before we do, I just want to also quickly mention this is an analysis of how prehistoric park works as a show in general, not of its pain's logical accuracy. If you're interested in that, YouTuber Idafosaurus, it's spelled E-D-A-P-H-O Saurus, did a pretty good series where he nerd splains the science of prehistoric park. So I'd recommend checking that out if that's what you're into. So let's start with what works about the show because there's plenty here to say.
SPEAKER_02Yes, and I think for a lot of people who know prehistoric park, one of the biggest strengths is the premise. The premise is really good, very creative, kind of what many people wish they had after Jurassic Park. Why is the premise so good? I want to go a little bit more detail about not just oh, it's a good idea, but also I think it was also a product of its time. So it was after the Jurassic Park high, it was a lot of walk of dinosaurs, there was a lot of other media out there, but something was missing was where they brought dinosaurs and our real world together in a more, and this is of course before primeval, right? So this is when it brought it together in a more realistic sense. And like Thomas mentioned for him when the triceratops walk down the ramp, or for me, it was the onothhomos when they go into the pen. It really sells you on this zookeeping aspect, and I think that's really one of the biggest strengths, bringing them back to the present and taking care of them, the struggles of what they have to deal with, what the animals have to deal with. And that really builds a nice premise, which is very unique as well, especially when it came out.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it's very much an untapped scene. The only other media I can think of that does it in any sort of detail is Jurassic Park, the novel, which does touch on some of the challenges of caring for dinosaurs, much more so than the movie does. Just thinking also as a paleo fan myself, there's an element of wish fulfillment here as well. Because I think we've all had periods where we wish we could save our favourite prehistoric animal from extinction. Funny thing is, actually, when prehistoric park came out, I kind of wrote my own fan fiction almost where I was like the Nigel figure. And I was actually writing stories where I was rewriting the episodes of certain Walking with Dinosaurs or Walking with Beasts episode, like where I saved the baby T-Rexes at the end of Walking with Dinosaurs, just like Nigel does in Prehistoric Park. But also I'd went back to um the saber-tooth episode of Walking with Beasts and stopped most of that episode from happening. Um, so there's definitely an element of wish fulfillment in this. And like you say, the really big strength of Prehistoric Park, part of it at least, is the fact that it does feel so much like a real zoo. The production team actually visited real zoos to get ideas for the park's aesthetic and management. And actually, if you've ever seen a behind-the-scenes zoo document, they've got plenty of these in the UK. Uh, there's one, I can't remember the name, but it's one set at the Longley Estates, where they actually go behind the scenes of the park and how the keepers manage the animals and care for their everyday problems. And prehistoric park very much feels in the vein of that sort of documentary. They've even got a vet and a park keeper as characters in the show.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, exactly. But not only that, uh, one of the interesting tidbits is that. Suzanne McNabb, the vet character in prehistoric art, is a real vet, which I find interesting, pretty cool, but it does have its flaws as well, as I'll get to.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, um, there's a snippet of the prehistoric Bahawk behind the scenes documentary where she's telling about how she found out about it. They actually apparently advertised uh job for a dinosaur vet in a veterinary journal. I'm pretty sure she must have thought it was a joke, but um that is so funny.
SPEAKER_02And it said, I think it said, Do you want to be a dinosaur vet? And I thought that sounds quite cool. I do have to say though, although we're talking about the pros now, I could really tell that she was not an actor. For example, and that's for me personally. I know Tom has a little bit of a different view on this. Um the parkeeper, Bob, he's played by a real actor. And he never got me out of it. I was always when he was in the show, I was always in the show. I didn't need to suspend my disbelief that much. But sometimes with her acting, when a new dinosaur comes in, for example, it's seen very mellow. Like if you see a prehistoric animal, my first reaction would be screaming out at being fraud. I remember the T-Rexes, it was just like, wow, so beautiful. It reminded me as you know, when I'm picking up a dog from the van. Like, oh, you're so beautiful.
SPEAKER_04I I half agree with that assessment, but I think she does it better with Theo, the triceratops. She is better at showing off a sense of awe, at least in the voice. Like she says, Oh, it's a triceratops, our first dinosaur. Look at him. But thinking about it now, like her facial expression does not convey what her tone is saying. She's very she looks very casual, like you know, she's got the sort of grin you see, like if you saw an elephant in the zoo.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_04She's acting with her voice and not with her face, shall we say?
SPEAKER_02Great for the radio.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. But actually, speaking of Suzanne, one of the recurring themes in the show are the veterinary problems that the animals have to deal with. And this is some of the strongest stuff in the show. Like, you actually sometimes see animals being treated in the surgery. There's one episode where they have an ornithumimus, which, for those of you who don't know your dinosaurs, is like the Gallimimus in Jurassic Park, but smaller. They have one who they realize is pregnant, and there's a really great scene where they have her on the veterinary table. It's this great big life-size animatronic, and they have her head covered like you would in real life to calm her down. The vets hold her in place and talk to her to soothe her, and then when they put the ultrasound gel on her, she actually screeches and recoils from hits like a real animal would, and it's done, it's so believable. Like I remember there was a part of my brain, like the stupid little kid part, that actually can't this was being done so well, I kind of was legit not sure if this was fake or real.
SPEAKER_02No, I I can totally understand you. I think for many people, this order for Mimas scene that you just mentioned is one of the best scenes in the show because it plays on its strengths so well.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and then there's the behavioral issues they have to deal with. Like going back to theo of the triceratops, quite early on, they find out he's having problems controlling his testosterone levels, and they build this tractor with horns on it for him to charge and have like rutting practice on. And apparently, this is based on something that they do in real zoos with rhinos.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah, interesting.
SPEAKER_03The tyre padded tractor is a worthy opponent for Theo, giving him something to take his aggression out of.
SPEAKER_04Now, sticking with creatures, another real pro of the show was there was a really wide range of them. You had the famous ones, T-Rex, Woolly Mammoth, Triceratops, basically most of the creatures I've mentioned so far. But alongside that, you also had some less well-known ones. One that really stands out is the Microraptor, which is a tiny feathered dinosaur from China with four wings. If you've seen House of the Dragon, you might know the body plan I mean. It's Caraxes, two wings, and then a pair of flaps splaying out from the legs. And that was the first time that species had ever been portrayed in mainstream media. So there was a real educational value to it as well. I mean, I don't know about you, Alex, but there were some species I've never even heard of before, like Toxedon, Elasmotherium.
SPEAKER_02Also, the uh I forgot the name, the the rabbit-tooth dinosaur when they were in ancient China. Incisivosaurus. Incisionosaurus, exactly. And there's also the the Scottish amphibian that Crassagurinus nobody knows. Crassuranus, yes.
SPEAKER_00This is Crassagerinus Scoticus. It's a fossil that's only ever been found in Scotland, a real Scottish speciality.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and like you mentioned the Incisivosaurus. That's also a really interesting departure from the Walking With series because they were really bringing new environments we'd never seen in any of the previous shows. Like that episode in particular, they go back to prehistoric China. And the previous two, they've gone back to Late Cretaceous Montana with the T-Rex and Triceratops. Then there was the Ice Age with mammoths. Like people know these ecosystems. People had never seen the early Cretaceous of China on the screen before, and that was really unique. I don't think it's ever been portrayed outside of documentaries. And prehistoric Park, I think, may have been one of the very first to ever do that. And even going back to the drama elements, if you could call them that, some of the animals are characters in their own right. Yeah, we have Martha the Mammoth.
SPEAKER_02We got Matilda and Terence, T-Rexes, of course. Especially Matilda plays a big role as one of the characters.
SPEAKER_04Um I'm just gonna say it now. Matilda and Terence are stupid names for T-Rexes. Yes, yes, so cringy. Hence why, in my unofficial prehistoric part fanfiction, I called my T-Rexes Fred and Wilma. But then again, is that really any better?
SPEAKER_02Uh at least there's the Flintstones reference there. And then as you said, back to the point, these animals are characters onto themselves. Some of the best ones, I think the ones that people really got emotionally attached to were Martha and the flock of Olif Mimas with their babies.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, Martha, I agree, is the best animal character because she has so much pathos to her. So when Nigel finds Martha, she has been in bad shape. Yeah, she's been attacked by Ice Age hunters, her herd has been killed, and you really see this poor thing just suffering so much. Like she's attacked by wolves in the night, and then when she comes back to the park, she has just a litany of health problems. Like she doesn't eat when she first comes because it turns out she's lonely. So then they put her with a herd of elephants, which I'm kind of like, why? Like that was that was the weakest part of that episode, I felt. And then, as you'd expect, she's got overheating problems. So she goes through the most. So she actually goes through development as well. That's kind of what we mean when we say she is a character onto herself. It's very Dumbo-esque in terms of how much they're able to get you to really love this thing.
SPEAKER_02And um, I want to especially mention one of my favorite. Uh I don't think many people share this view, but one of my favorite characters is a dinosaur, and I think it's done in a very special way. Because somebody was saying, You want to say what a dinosaur says? Uh yes. That was the giant crocodile, basically the dinosaur-eating crocodile from the last episode. And the dinosaur, what they do there, instead of portraying the specific dinosaur as a character, they portray the whole species as a character. So there's this one scene, and you know you got the Albertosaurus as other predator in the past, and there's this one scene where there's a Parasolophus carcass on the beach, and you got the Albertosaurus and the Dinosuchris fighting you out, and the Dinosuchris win the fighting. And the narrator says, Oh, the Dinosuchris are the most badass. Which I find very interesting because they didn't characterize the specific Dinosucris in Prehistoric Park, but they characterize the Dinosuchris as a whole species.
SPEAKER_04That's a really interesting take. I'd never thought of it that way. Like you portray them all as being the same. So when you have this one individual, you don't have to build a character for her, like she's representative of her whole species, and you've already established them as a badass.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, as the badass, the one that can beat the Tyrannosaurid.
SPEAKER_04And I also want to say, for all of its flaws, you can tell this show was really made with passion. Everyone in it was here for it. You know, Nigel is passionate, Suzanne is passionate, Bob is passionate, even David Jason, who narrates it, is really passionate. You can tell everyone really put their all into this.
SPEAKER_02Yes, and and when Nigel, as previously mentioned with Suzanne, when she sees an animal, it's a little bit more subdued. But when Nigel's in the past and these pteranodons fly over him, and he's smiling, like, whoa, yeah, look at those. This excitement spills over out of the screen into you. Such a good wildlife presenter. I have to put my hats off to Nigel because he he's faking it all, has done so well.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, that's the thing you can never fault Nigel Marvin on is his charisma and his enthusiasm. Although I wrote this down in my notes when I was watching episode six with the Dinosaurs. I do wish they brought Steve Irwin on as a cameo. That would have been amazing. Yeah, and he would still have been alive at that point. Like, can you imagine Nigel Marvin and Steve Irwin tackling a giant crocodile together?
SPEAKER_02I think that would have made Priority Park legendary if Steve Irwin would have joined.
SPEAKER_04Well, they did have, um they did have uh in episode four when they were catching the saber tooth, they did have Sabah Douglas Hamilton of Big Cat Diary, but nobody really knows her outside of hardcore African wildlife enthusiasts.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I didn't know her. I had no idea who that was. So well, that definitely is a con that Steve Irvin wasn't part of the sixth episode of Dinosuchus.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, we stand Steve Irwin on this podcast. Yes. But of course, the question remains with all of this going for it, why did pre-historic park ultimately underperform?
SPEAKER_02Well, I think one of the first things that would pop into my head is that the CGI hasn't age well for a lot of the creatures. Not all of them, before anyone writes angry comments or tweets at me, but some of the animals, the CGI really hasn't aged well. It takes you out of the experience. One of them that I can remember for me was the cave bear when episode two, when that cave bear came out, I I started giggling and laughing. It was supposed to be a tense scene, but the CGI was so bad against the snow, I couldn't take it serious. It was looking like a PlayStation 1 boss.
SPEAKER_04I was gonna ask, what was that 2000s video game you said it looked like it came from? Oh, oh, I have to remember here.
SPEAKER_02I I didn't I don't have this written down. But it reminded me, it reminded me like you know of the bear in in ace a little harsh, but like a bear in Zoo Tycoon or something like that. Um definitely did not age well. Also, the smilodon, I must say, the CGI and the stat the design, both of us, me and Thomas have talked a lot of bad stuff about the smilodon, just very uninspiring. And again, the CGI just really feels outdated there, which is I don't want to be one of these people that puts a lot of weight on it, but it is very important in paleo media that the CGI is good enough that you can subvert your disbelief.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I've never liked that saber-tooth design in pre-historic parts, it's just a really boring and I dare even say unattractive looking animal.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I agree totally with that.
SPEAKER_04Also, I'm gonna say this now, I don't like the T-Rex design either. I mean, people complain about the walking with dinosaurs T-Rex nowadays, but at least that one was accurate for the time. This was inaccurate even for 2006. It's way too slender, it's too agile. You know, T-Rex, even back then, we knew was a really uh well, I don't want to say lumbering because it was probably quite fast, but it was bulky, you know, it was big. And this thing looks like you put a T-Rex on diet pills.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, like the T-Rex is a little bit more like a bull massif, less like a wind dog.
SPEAKER_04Although I will say I do wonder if it did influence the design of the Giganotosaurus in Primeval Series 3. Like it has the same slender build as that one, and even a broadly similar head shape, although the Giga has longer arms than eye crest. So I do wonder if there was some influence there.
SPEAKER_02Could be, could be. Um, they all were part of the same production company. Uh, I think all in all with the CGI, this is not why Prehistoric Park failed. There are some other things. We already talked about the pros of animal characters, but not all of them are done well. Tom has a favorite, uh least favorite animal character when you were a kid. Which one was that?
SPEAKER_04Oh, I hated the titanosaurs, like the long neck sauropods. I hated those things so much as a kid.
SPEAKER_02I I, for one, actually really enjoyed them, but I they're so annoying.
SPEAKER_04They're the most they're just the most irritating things because they just wander around the park smashing everything up. And it's the thing. I've got a lot of sympathy for characters who have to deal with a lot of shit from things they can't control. And Bob has to take so much shit in the form of the titanosaurus. Sometimes, literally, there's the scene when they first break out of their pen and he's trying to herd them back and one diarrhea is in front of him. Remember that?
SPEAKER_02There's no need to have that. Uh, I couldn't, I do not know how if Bob were a real life character, I do not know how he could stay sane, working in those conditions. Uh, yeah, so Titanic souls do have some issues. Um how come you didn't have the same feeling towards them? Honestly, I think it's the rule of cool. Long neck dinosaurs, it's just i I think they're bloody cool. I do understand where they break everything and trample everything. It's a huge pain for everyone. But I feel like I have more issues with Nigel Marvin's character, which we're gonna talk about later. I don't want to go into too much detail yet about it.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, thinking about it in retrospect, I realize a lot of my titanosaur hatred was probably me projecting my things about Nigel onto them. Um so yeah.
SPEAKER_02And for me as well, some animal characters just aren't animal characters. For example, there's the micro raptor, one of my favorite dinosaurs. It was brand new, I didn't know about it, it looked so cool. And in the episode, he repairs the wing of this one micro raptor, and he's feeding it next to his parrot in the end, kind of building up like, oh yeah, he's just gonna be hanging around in the background with the rest of the animals, but they never show up again, they never get mentioned and never show up again, which for me was kind of saddening because anticlimactic.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah. I I didn't have an issue with that so much. It's probably because as a kid I was just like, well, there's other cool stuff happening, so you know, I can understand why they did it because you know, budget, you gotta pick and choose what you put on screen for your CGI.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_04I guess maybe let's talk about something that even people who like this show think is a major flaw, the security. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Nigel Marvin's Dinosaur Park has wooden fences.
SPEAKER_02Um I think what you're mentioning there is part of a bigger problem. The suspending of disbelief is so hard at times with this show, especially as an adult. Wooden fences. So they have wooden fences for dinosaurs. And in the first episode, when when what's the triceratops called again? I forgot the field of the triceratops runs at them, they reuse that shock the whole time, by the way. Runs at the wooden fence and is cracking it, and it kind of shows oh, these are not the most stable fences. It's not even these are wooden logs with you know real planks, these are sticks and ropes tied together to hold dinosaurs. Who's financing this? Um, anyway, it really made me I I I couldn't suspend my disbelief. It was a real problem for me every time I saw those fences.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, Nigel uh spared every expense, you could say.
SPEAKER_02Yes, he did. He left it to Bob. He's like, here's a penny, Bobby, you go out, find everything you need.
SPEAKER_04But like we say, most of this stuff is minor detail. That's not the main problem with pre-historic park. The main problems of pre-historic park, I would say, are ones of repetition and contrivance. There is a lot of stuff here which is on repeat from previous Nigel Marvin documentaries. We've already said the format is very similar to Chase by Dinosaurs and Sea Monsters. Yeah, they got the stuff where they take care of the animals in the park, and that's all great. Problem is that's only about a quarter of each episode. And all the stuff with Nigel in the past, fundamentally, there's really not a lot of difference between that and Chase by Dinosaurs and Sea Monsters. It's the same format. Nigel goes back in time, encounters dinosaurs, talks about them, has a questionable encounter or several with some of them, walks away unharmed, lava, rinse, repeat.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. The thing about the premise of prehistoric park, which makes it so unique, is it's a prehistoric park. It's not pre-historic safari. And they do not show enough park screen time. Like a lot of the stuff we love, I think a lot of the people loved it as well. Watching a show was when the owner for Mimus had problems, you know, when they were in the park, when they're dealing with the animals. That was so unique, it hasn't been seen before. But as the show goes on, the screen time never really increases for the park. And the prehistoric parts stay the same, and it gets really repetitive after a time.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, this format works fine for a two to three episode special, but it really starts to overstay its welcome when it's played at over six episodes. I think it would have been a lot better if they'd taken a primeval-esque approach and mostly stayed in the park. And you have Nigel go back in time through the time portal and bring the creatures back, and then it focuses more on caring for them in the present, whereas you don't see very much of the past on the other side of the portal.
SPEAKER_02And it would have saved a ton of money and production value. I think that's one of the major issues, is it's only six episodes long, but already after three episodes, it is a very rinse and repeated formula.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and in a way, prehistoric park, I think, was kind of a victim of the Nigel Marvin era's success. Because you already had this formula that had worked spectacularly well before, you know, it won them all these awards. So the showrunners probably didn't feel the need to change it. The problem was because it had been done twice before, audiences probably felt they were just getting more of the same. And that I think probably would have turned off a lot of people, hence why the ratings weren't so great. I think if it had come out before or even between Chased by Dinosaurs and Sea Monsters, it might have done better.
SPEAKER_02I think so. I think this show would have never existed without Chase by Dinosaurs and Sea Monsters. They paved the way for this show.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, the better situation would probably be if it had come out after Chased by Dinosaurs, because I think if it had done that, that would have been fresh enough so as not to be repetitive. And then I think you might have been able to keep audiences more engaged that way. And the other thing is, these documentaries have always had their detractors, even from their early days. I mean, I mentioned how the reason why they even did this was because they felt a presenter would connect better with people. That's actually not necessarily been the case. One of the most famous detractors was evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who felt that using Nigel Marvin detracted from the science education aspect of it. His exact quote was Isn't it at least patronizing and condescending when television people assume, without even asking them, that their audiences can't cope with science unless the pill is coated with the sugar of personal anecdote? That cuts deep.
SPEAKER_02I can understand though where that's coming from, his criticism of it being very night or mark and focused.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. And repeating this formula for a third time, I think really didn't endear the show to people who shared that view. Although I guess it wouldn't really matter because they probably wouldn't have watched it in the first place.
SPEAKER_02No.
SPEAKER_04So then there's the second problem with prehistoric park, which as I said is contrivances. And what I mean by that is things like plot armor, lucky coincidences, that sort of thing. Prehistoric park is full of these.
SPEAKER_02Agreed.
SPEAKER_04Full of fake outs. Yeah, yeah. We'll get to fake outs in a second. But I think the thing that I think really holds up not particularly well as an adult, as far as contrivances go, is how well all of these prehistoric animals from drastically different environments, climates, etc., to the modern day adapt to living in the park. Martha the Mammoth is one of the only exceptions in that she has difficulty adjusting to the heat, so she needs haircuts regularly. But everything else adjusts just fine with minor, if any, problems.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, exactly. Especially with the herbivores eating modern plants, they should have real problems.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, they do hint on this with the titanosaurs. Like it's established quite early on that eating modern vegetation is giving them gut problems and diarrhea. And that should be a really difficult problem to solve. But then they give them stones to swallow to help grind up their food, and suddenly it's like, yeah, it's all better. Problem fixed really quickly. Let's move on to Nido's next mad escapade. I mean, like in something like this, you need to throw in serious problems and complications in order for it to seem more realistic. And actually, Jurassic part of the novel does this so much better. There's one part where a character is listing off all the problems the dinosaurs are having to John Hammond. Like the T-Rexes get sick drinking the water sometimes, the stegosauruses get blisters on their tongues, the triceratops fight each other all the time and have to be separated into herds smaller than six, and they just don't know why any of this is happening or how to solve it. And it really highlights just how difficult it would be to care for animals that no one has ever observed nor tried to care for before.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. And and you say Martha is one of the only exceptions, but even with her, they are contrivances. Like you mentioned, when they put her with the elephant herd, it's a real long stretch.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. So basically the The reason why this happens is because Martha does not eat when she first arrives in the park. And they later figure out it's because she's a social animal, like elephants are in the modern day. And so because she was the only mammoth they brought back, she's basically refusing to eat because she's lonely. The way they solve this is to introduce her to the park's resident African elephant herd. And even as a kid, I thought this was a really contrived ending to what was otherwise the strongest episode. Because I was thinking, like, they're two separate species. They even establish in dialogue saying that matriarch African elephants will sometimes kill members of their own species trying to join the herd. But with this one, she just accepts a woolly mammoth. I'm like, this would so not happen in real life.
SPEAKER_00Matriarchs have been known to kill elephants trying to come into the herd, but there's nothing like that.
SPEAKER_04And then there's the bigger problem, contrivance-wise, which is like you said, Alex, this show never really creates any sense of danger and tension. Like the show sets up all these situations where you think Nigel should be in real peril and then he gets away fine. I mean, to be fair, some of this is because, again, prehistoric park being a victim of its own formula success, people had already seen Nigel get away fine from these things in chase by dinosaurs and sea monsters. So they probably weren't really expecting him to be in any real danger in prehistoric park. But even taking that into account, this show creates so many fake outs where it sets up something that you think is going to be a really tense action scene and then just pussies out at the last second. I mean, like a really great example of this is all the time.
SPEAKER_02And we have quite a lot of examples, but we we've had pick the best ones that have irked us the most. One of my favourite ones, and one of the ones that shocked me the most when it happened was when they're in episode five, and Nigel has a scorpion, and throughout the whole episode, they've been showing this giant scorpion over and over again. And this scorpion stings Nigel on the hand with its stinger, and the music and the tone is like, Whoa, that just happened. And they build up like, oh, scorpion venom can be deadly, and so on, etc. etc. So they get back and he misses the vet, and the vet's like, oh, you're fine, don't worry. And that's it. That's it. Which feels like, you know, they build this all up, and every time they drop it again.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, primeval did the getting bitten by a venomous insect thing way better. Like the guy was actually dying when that happened. Yeah. If we don't find out exactly what fit him, he will die though. Then there was the one, because I mentioned earlier how Martha the Mammoth was attacked by Ice Age hunters. They had these really great suspenseful scenes where they have these hunters moving through the trees just as shadows. You see these shadows carrying spears. You never see their faces as well, which I think is quite effective. And there's a lot of build-up for them showing up because they talk about them all the time, especially the bit where Nigel is sitting up in the dark with Martha. And then finally the hunters do show up, and you think there's going to be some sort of showdown between them and Nigel, but then literally they just run away as soon as they see him. And I'm like, fucking really? Sorry. Fucking cop out.
SPEAKER_03Perhaps it's just the sight of Nigel, but fortunately they don't come in any closer.
SPEAKER_02I mean, for me, it's actually a quite funny story because uh I was watching the I was re-watching episode four, and I was watching that at night. Uh, my girlfriend was next to me, she was sleeping, and uh, I was watching with my headphones on, and then there's a scene where he is in the car of the cat lady. I forgot her name again. Sabah, Douglas Hamilton. Sabba, and out of nowhere, the male saver tooth jumps onto the windscreen the reaction is just Nigel doesn't even say anything, he just turns the engine on and drives away. And it it came out of nowhere, supposed to be more of a jump scare or shock moment, but for me, it was a comedic moment. I literally, literally, true story laughed out loud. I woke my girlfriend up. She's like, What are you laughing at? I was like, a supposedly tense moment, and um it's it's it is it's and this is just what like these these few uh fake outs that we've chosen here, that they're there are many, many more. Yeah, I mean we mentioned chasing with dinosaurs and sea monsters a lot because even those previous shows, they were also quite a few fake outs, but they were much less, and they had some generally scary moments. For example, where he puts the tracker onto the giant shark and he falls into the water, and the team thinks he's dead, so the team is going like oh shit, he comes out alright, but for these few seconds, you're caught up in the moment, and they do it very well.
SPEAKER_04No, no, the reason in the reason why it works so much better in C Mont is because the bit you're describing where the Megalodon jumps out of the water in front of the platform where Nigel is, that is where that episode ends, and it's a big cliffhanger. You had to wait a whole week to find out if he actually made it. Like I remember watching that, and I was just like, shit, like like what happened? Like, I thought there was a chance he may not have made it.
SPEAKER_02And prehistoric park does not have this once, and it wouldn't be a problem if they wouldn't keep trying to build the tension with Nigel being in danger.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, well, you were saying this the other day, like this is them trying to be family friendly, isn't it? Yes, yes, a very misguided attempt to be family friendly, if you ask me.
SPEAKER_02And you want to be family friendly, but it's they're just playing it way too safe.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and it's just really toothless as a result. Being family friendly does not mean you have to compromise on tension and stakes. Primeval technically is family friendly, but you know, you had characters die, there were genuine scares to it, especially with the futuristic creatures. Hell, even Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous, a quote unquote kids show, has more tension than this.
SPEAKER_02And a big problem for me as well is that they build this tension with stupidity. So, for example, from the last episode, he's in a dinosucus-infested swamp. So a swamp infested with giant crocodiles that literally could bite a kayak in half like a toothpick, and he's there rowing on a little boat through the swamp, and then they build this tension. Oh, the dinosaur comes and bites the boat, and then it goes away and leaves Nigel alone. Yeah, which makes sense. I forgot about that. It doesn't feel earned. Yeah, because the stupidity of Nigel doesn't help it. I guess you can kind of might be going a little bit of a ramble here.
SPEAKER_04I I know I agree with you. Or do I do I will just say for playing Devil's Advocate, you could kind of make the argument that that's what a real animal would do. Like it would bite the boat and then realize it wasn't edible and then swim away.
SPEAKER_02Yes, but what would a real person do? Would they jump into a little kayak hitting crop-infested waters? Um anyways, let's move on to the next point.
SPEAKER_04Well, before we do, on a quick side note, we mentioned primeval a lot. There was an episode in series three where Nigel Marvin shows up to an anomaly site and is almost immediately eaten by a jigonotosaurus. Um, and I kind of feel that was he pops up in primeval? Yes, he does. One episode, and I kind of feel that was Tim Haynes saying to the audience, yeah, we know you're sick of this guy always getting away.
SPEAKER_01Exactly.
SPEAKER_02Um, and as much as we adore Nigel, he is a part of the problem.
SPEAKER_04Or rather, we should just say the fictionalized version of him. Again, don't add us Nigel Marvin. We we we stand the real you, not the you in prehistoric park.
SPEAKER_02Yes, but the character of Nigel Marvin in the series. He's a little bit of a Marisou in the sense, because he knows everything about animals and prehistoric animals. How are they going to react, what their behavior is, and he's always proven correct. All we can do with dinosaurs is we can guess. Yeah, it's all just educated guesses in paleontology. Yes, it's all educated guesses, and it's always proven correct by Nigel. So one of my favorite examples for this is the Ornathomas. So we have the broody ornothomas who is pregnant. Nobody knows what's going on with her. And it's like, oh, is she just walking around being antisocial and all of that? Nigel comes back, hears about it, doesn't even see the ornathomimus, just hears about it. It's like, oh, she's pregnant. I've seen it in ostriches.
SPEAKER_04And that's another thing. Like you mentioned how he doesn't even see this. He takes surprisingly little role in running his own park. Like he's never involved in any of the responsibilities of day-to-day care. I don't think he even does any admin work at all. He's just going off, bringing more and more stuff back, probably driving the place into bankruptcy with the cost of feeding all these things alone. Like in the opening of episode six, he talks about bringing back the dinosaur, this 50-foot-long crocodile. And he's so excited, like, oh, like here's this skull I had made. It's like as long as I am. Now I'm going to walk down to the end of this 50-foot-long rope bridge, and here's where the end of the tale is. And he's got this tone where he's like, Yeah, you're really excited. I'm guessing you probably haven't really thought about the practicalities of this. And the show itself even kind of acknowledges that when Bob is like, I think he's bitten off a bit more than he could chew here. But it's very clear that Nigel just doesn't really think about the practicalities of bringing animals back, which is fine for like a kid's fantasy thing, but that's actually kind of a problem with his character.
SPEAKER_02And he just keeps adding more and more and more creatures, and it creates this feeling of Nigel really not taking this seriously.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, like he doesn't really care about the people who have to mop up after him. He's just off to have his joy ride, and then everyone else is left to pick up the pieces. Probably the best encapsulation of this is him bringing the titanosaurs back. So something else is like Nigel goes off to collect certain creatures, but usually he comes back with a lot of ones that were not planned for. And in this episode, so he's rescued the microraptors, and suddenly a volcano is erupting. And he's like, Oh, the titanosaurs, they're heading straight for it. And he runs down to the lake, sets up the time portal, and now he's got nine titanosaurs coming through this portal. And the very first thing they do is smash down the fence of the observation pen. And Bob's like, How many of these have you got? It's like, oh well, you know, I think nine. And it's like, yeah, yeah, you got nine, nine of these things that have just smashed down your park fence already. And then later, when they inevitably do break out of their wooden fenced pen, he's completely unfazed. Like he drives up to one, it's like, oh, hello, what are you doing now? You know, it's like it's a puppy. Like, no, it's a very big, very dangerous animal. It is a security threat to your whole park that's basically made out of matchsticks. You should probably take this seriously, but then he just drives off, it's never even brought up again by him. And then it leads to the disaster everyone could have seen coming at the end when the titanosaurus actually smashed down a whole load of fences and it's a massive Jurassic Park lights breakout. We have the Onothemimus breakout, Terror Bird breaks out, Matilda, the T-Rex is out. All of this happens because of Nigel's irresponsibility, and the show never holds him accountable for it. Like none of this would have happened if it wasn't for you being a dickhead.
SPEAKER_02And this is where I want to build upon Thomas, where he said that the show doesn't criticize Nigel for his decisions, and that's what makes him a Maori Soup character, which is never a good thing. Because he knows everything, he always gets away, and for the bad thing he does, the show doesn't treat it as a bad thing. The breakout wasn't his fault. That's how they see it as. Although it really was.
SPEAKER_04And it's super lucky no one was killed or hurt. Like I say, you have a T-Rex, you have an Elasmotherium, which is this giant rhino-like thing running around. Someone could have been killed easily.
SPEAKER_02Easily, easily killed.
SPEAKER_04I would have loved to have seen a series two of this where they have to deal with the fallout of the breakout, and when Nigel is actually held to account for it, like maybe his investors decide to withhold funding and they send like a Donald Gennaro style lawyer down to safety check the park. That would have been so good. Actually, also like playing off my uh playing off my 12-year-old titanosaur hatred. One of the things I wanted to see in series two was Nigel being forced to take the titanosaurs back to their home period under threat of litigation. You would have loved that, wouldn't you? Yeah. Actually, here's the thing like in the real world, there would be a very strong case to hold him liable for criminal negligence. That would really spoil my weekend. So I actually looked this up. So an incident can be classified as criminal negligence if one, a person acted recklessly with knowledge of a danger and created a high risk of death or personal injury. And two, a reasonable person would have known that these acts would create such a risk. So Nigel brings these titanosaurs back to the park completely on a whim. So there's your acting recklessly, box ticks. And then the other thing is he knew these things were destructive. He saw them smashing down trees, bashing things up in their home period, you know, trees made from the same materials as fences. And he still brought them back. He'd even, and even when he, as like we say, when he saw they broke out of that enclosure, he made no attempt to address this risk. He didn't even try and strengthen the fences that were up. You know, he just said, Oh, we'll just let them roam free. They're too difficult to pen in. I'm not a lawyer, but I think we're talking about at least a crippling lawsuit here.
SPEAKER_02So, all in all, what does this lead up to?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, what are the lessons we can take away from prehistoric park?
SPEAKER_02Well, I'll start with the first point. I think the show didn't know what it wanted to be. It tried to be traveling back in time, it tried to be like a real-life animal planet zoo documentary almost. It tried to be a thriller with dinosaurs, but tried to be family friendly. Many of these components just butted head against each other, which made the show fall flat on some of them.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I mean, it had a good premise, but it needed to evolve its storytelling and format as the show went on, like having more time focused on the park per episode. And it needed to add more to the existing formula than it did. Like you can have a simple or formulaic story that is still really compelling if you add other things to the mix. Let's take Titanic for one. Starcross lover story, you've seen it a million times. It's still really compelling because you have characters who are really solid, and you have even something that's quite unique to, which is the setting is a character in and of itself. So there's enough there where you don't really care that the story is formulaic because it has all these other things to make up for it.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. And I wish prehistoric park would have taken a little bit more from that.
SPEAKER_04And also, it needed to have more of a sense of consequence. That would have added a much greater sense of realism, and it would have helped us to relate more with what was going on. Like Alex says, we don't like Mary Seuss, we don't like characters who just get away scot-free all the time. We like to see people actually deal with the consequences of their actions.
SPEAKER_02Yes, and and at the end of the day, although we're going through all this criticism, me and Thomas we do like the show on the hall. We wish there would have been a second, a third, a fourth season. We wish it didn't stop after the first.
SPEAKER_04Um, well, I both do and don't. Um, because I kind of feel Oh really? I mean, well, I think if that had happened, then we may not have ever gotten primeval. And for my money, primeval is a far better product than prehistoric park is.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, okay. Well, for I I've ever watched Primeval here, spoiler alert. So um for me at Prehistoric Park, I would have loved it to continue on. Um, but in the end, it didn't ruin Nigel Marvin's career. He's still doing fine, he's still beloved by the paleo media community, and it's large part because of prehistoric park, chased by dinosaurs and sea monsters. These this holy Nigel Trinity.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I mean, like we say, the problems with him in prehistoric park are not because of him himself, it's the fictionalized version of him we have issues with. And like Alex said, Prehistoric park is still very funly remembered. You can see its influence even in some forms of perimedia that are being produced today.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and I want to do a little shout-out here. If you want to see more pre-historic park or if you want to do it yourself, it has left a legacy. There's actually a game called Prehistoric Kingdom, and this is where you build up a much more realistic prehistoric park. And Nigel Marvin is even a narrator in the game in itself. So if anybody like knows Jurassic Park Operation Genesis or Jurassic World Evolution or Planet Zoo, it's a combination of all of those. So it has left a legacy, it hasn't died out and been forgotten in the dust.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah. So I mean, like, definitely a misfire on Impossible Pictures' part, but not the worst one they ever made, and definitely one that is still quite well beloved by a lot of people, including us. But to be honest, I think it's one of those cases where it's just as well, both that it came to an end and also that it brought to an end Impossible Pictures documentaries, Jeek, because I think the train was running out of steam. And I think it was good that they then shifted more towards dramas because that helped to keep them fresh and that kept things going for them for quite a few years more. So, yeah, that's about it. If you've not tweeted abuse at us, thank you very much. Um, hope you enjoyed yourself, and we will see you on our next dig. Take care.
SPEAKER_02Thank you so much.