LONDON — It looks and sounds like a typical TV wildlife documentary, with cameras surveying animals in their natural habitat, and the calm, objective voice of a narrator explaining their actions.
But look and listen again. The creatures under scrutiny actually died out nearly 70 million years ago; what we are seeing is real photographed landscapes, inhabited by prehistoric animals created by computer animation.
This original idea, both simple and sophisticated, has made "Walking With Dinosaurs" a global TV phenomenon. The $9.6-million miniseries, created in Britain by the BBC and co-funded by the Discovery Channel, arrives in the U.S. with a three-hour premiere on Discovery Sunday.
"Walking With Dinosaurs" has already been sold into some 30 international TV territories, and has attracted sky-high ratings in most of them, including Australia, Germany and Portugal. When it debuted in Britain last fall, some 13 million people tuned in. That's about a quarter of the entire population. No wonder it has been billed as the biggest thing on TV in 200 million years.
Series producer Tim Haines predicts: "It may be the most popular science documentary ever."
Haines is eager to stress the word "science." Though he is a qualified zoologist, "Walking With Dinosaurs" is not a wildlife or natural history series. It is specifically science programming, using computer-generated imagery to create the Tyrannosaurus rex, diplodocus, torosaurus and their gigantic cousins; a team of eminent paleontologists was consulted to reinforce what is known for certain about dinosaur history with their reasoned speculation.
So the series traces the era in which dinosaurs roamed the Earth--a period of some 170 million years--with a series of mini-dramas. We see cynodonts (an early evolutionary link between reptiles and mammals) abandoning their burrows and heading for extinction when they are discovered by the coelophysis--a precursor of dinosaurs. Later, many dinosaurs, among them the appealing young diplodocus, perish in a forest fire started by lightning.
"We could have made the stories even stronger," Haines said. "Yet it might have looked like we were outrageously manipulating things, and since we're manipulating anyway by 'creating' these dinosaurs, we didn't want to do that."
But the series can be watched as a story. It's designed so that it gives a mass of information, so people are learning as they watch. But it's not meant to make people aware they're being educated.
