#i only really listen to dubs when i'm rewatching a show or if i hear that they're good so. yeehaw :3 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

maxwell-grant · 3 years

Note

Having been extremely excited by THE DINOSAURIA trailer, might I please ask if you've ever seen WALKING WITH DINOSAURS? (The BBC series from 1999, rather than the later animated film); if you haven't seen it yet, then please be assured that you've missed a Treat!

Anon, I definitely appreciate the recommendation, don't get me wrong, but -

Not only is Walking With Dinosaurs my actual favorite piece of media ever, the thing you'd find the closest to my heart if you cut it open, but I literally would not be able to talk to you right now if it wasn't for it. Allow me to explain:

To say that dinosaurs were one of my very first obsessions (or hyperfixations) is to understate the hell out of just how utterly strongly I loved dinosaurs and acted on it, and I don't state more because I don't quite feel like revealing the face and name of who's writing this just yet. I grew up watching dinosaur documentaries (and documentaries in general) more so than even cartoons, and I was definitely extremely obsessed with dinosaurs before WWD arrived in my life.

But all of the documentaries I had watched to that point, whether I caught them on tv or DVD or casette, had all been dubbed in Portuguese (since, y'know, I live in Brazil and all). But when my mom brought over Walking With Dinosaurs, there was no Portuguese dub option, so I had to watch it with subs on.

And I watched this series so, so many times, that I picked up the basics of English from it. I started watching other documentaries I had with English subs, and then movies, and then I started taking English classes and the works to tune it, and I was speaking English at an adult level at age 12 (likely earlier, but my memories are spotty and the oldest email I have from a conversation overseas dates from that age) and I kinda just never stopped writing and thinking and talking to myself in English since then.

I never really had an easy time picking up other languages when I tried them, but it was specifically because of Walking With Dinosaurs that I picked up enough English to become proficient at it early on, and that's informed a lot, pretty much everything, of my life ever since. To be honest I still speak with a slight British inflection, because Kenneth Branagh was my frame of reference for the English language. So trust me, I have absolutely seen Walking With Dinosaurs, maybe as much as anyone can possibly see it short of gluing it to the eyeballs 24/7. I've also watched all of the other Walking With series and spin-offs (and yes, even that horrid film, I refuse to discuss it further) like The Ballad of Big Al and Walking With Monsters and Walking With Beasts and of course all of the Nigel Marvin spin-offs, including Prehistoric Park. I've been wanting to give the extended Walking With universe a rewatch recently.

But every year, without fail, I make it a point to rewatch Walking With Dinosaurs. Doesn't matter when or how, my DVDs of it don't really work anymore, but I find a way to rewatch it. I know exactly what's gonna happen every year and it's impact has never been diminished. Every year, I get chills when Brachiosaurus shows up looming over the teenage Diplodocus pack and the music just SWELLS in dread and awe alike. I dread the scene of the Cynodonts eating their baby to spare it from the Coelophysis pack. I eagerly await the nefarious joy of just waiting for Liopleurodon to pounce out of the water to eat the theropod, because fuck off if that's physically impossible, that scene absolutely still kicks ass. I'm writing this post while listening to Islands of Green because you bet the soundtrack to this series lives rent free in my head as well. I can immediately hear the specific sounds and roars of each animal in it just by thinking of them.

I cry every year when Ornithocheirus dies alone after such a grueling journey just to fulfill a biological drive he cannot resist, and I still cry when the baby T-Rexes try to get their dead mom to wake up just as the meteor strikes and swipes them all away to nothingness, not even joking I'm actually getting chills right now just describing that scene and the "This is the end, of the age of the dinosaurs" line, God. Every year I find some new moment in the series that makes me incredibly emotional in a way it hadn't before, whether it's the Postosuchus getting eaten from the inside out after being toppled by a minor injury, or the forest fire that tears through the jungle and leaves charred dinosaurs behind. I'm getting chills just listening to the end credits theme right now.

Even today, there has never been anything in media that's ever made dinosaurs feel more real than Walking With Dinosaurs did, and that was the trick that all of it's imitators failed to understand: Even through it's dramatic soap opera lenses, it depicted dinosaurs not as great and glamorous movie monsters, but as real animals, no more or lesser than the ones living on the planet now. It doesn't make dinosaurs exciting by showing them as some mythical fantasy cooler than our current reality, it made dinosaurs exciting by showing they WERE reality, and reality can be just as cool and exciting and mythical as anything fantasy can give you, if not more so, if you stop to look at it with the same unclouded fascination and curiosity you'd reserve for something not real.

There was a time where I distanced myself from my love of dinosaurs for, a lot of reasons really, but I'm thankful that I never succeeded in making it go away, that I got to watch Jurassic Park at a movie theater a couple years recently and cry at the reveal of the Brachiosaurus in a way I never did in the over three dozen times I watched the movie at home, that I got to finally read Raptor Red, that I still get all these feelings over just thinking about Walking With and it's spin-offs.

More than maybe anything else, I think this series is what informs my storytelling and my sense of adventure. Everyone has that story, that adventure, either one or several, that's imprinted on them from an early age and subsequently defines everything they do or undertake as storytellers no matter how distanced from it. And I think if I was to point at anything from my childhood, I would point to Walking With Dinosaurs and the lives it depicted, regardless of how real or accurate they were.

Even right now, the fact that I'm typing this out to talk to you, that I'm confident enough in my English skills to even record audio in English for coming projects, that I made this entire blog full of essays in English about things I find creatively inspiring, is owed in no small part to my childhood adoration for Walking With Dinosaurs, the bedrock of what I am as a creator, and even if the show didn't have that particular impact on me, I'd still carry it to the rest of my life.

Everything about this show is ingrained into my bones and soul, maybe as deeply as anything is ever going to be.

Hmm. Who did I find it most difficult to work with?

Animators! Definitely animators!

You know? “Chase this dinosaur”, “Chase that dinosaur!” You’d swear we couldn’t act!

It’s sooo degrading

#replies tag #dinosaurs #dinosaur tag #walking with dinosaurs #walking with #sadly I have never been able to watch the arena show #bbc

65 notes · View notes