When the angry, life-size mama T. rex came roaring through a curtain to defend its young during the St. Paul, Minn., run of "Walking With Dinosaurs -- the Live Experience," Kristi Curry Rogers momentarily stopped thinking like a professor and responded like a protective mom herself.
"I have a 5-year-old daughter, and at that moment I thought, 'I'm really glad she didn't come with me,' " said the dinosaur expert from Macalester College in St. Paul, who was there to apply the cool eye of science to one of America's hottest entertainment tours. "The adults gasped, and almost all the young children started crying."
Since last summer, what's likely the BIGGEST cast ever to command a spotlight has roamed America's arenas, to the accompaniment of smoke, sound, light effects and dramatic music -- and a fact-filled narration by an actor-ringmaster playing the part of a paleontologist.
Starting Wednesday, the 42-foot-long T. rex and nine mobile giant dinosaurs will make their Southern California debut with 10 performances at the Honda Center in Anaheim; a seven-show Staples Center engagement runs Sept. 25 to 28. At the controls are a driver at the bottom of each creature, and two-member teams of high-tech puppeteers stationed in a booth high above the floor. Five smaller carnivores that round out the cast are inhabited by realistically dinosaur-suited actors who have no intention of being confused with Barney.
For natural history museums, it may be a bit discomfiting to have traditional displays of fossilized remains potentially upstaged by fully fleshed-out facsimiles that do a lot more than just stand there.
"I'm sure some rational-thinking scientists think it's a bad thing," said William Brown, president of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. But he is happy to see an "edutainment" spectacle like "Walking With Dinosaurs" pack families into sports arenas for dramatic lessons in evolutionary biology.
The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, a bastion of traditional dinosaur research and exhibitions, has decided to embrace rather than shun the newfangled competition. Discounts to the Staples Center performances are available at the museum, in Exposition Park, and "Walking With Dinosaurs" attendees can get reduced museum admission through year's end by presenting their ticket stubs.
