I keep meaning to watch this show, but I have managed to miss every single episode so far. Is the show any good? Opinions, please!
It’s not bad. They take two prehistoric animals that probably did fight, discuss them both, look at each of their offensive and defensive capabilities, how they would fight each other, and then have a computer generated image showing a possible fight between the two.
I mean, it’s not going to win an emmy, but it’s not a bad thing to watch if there’s nothing else on.
It’s good, until the part where they reveal that there never was a Tyrannosaurus - it was the Brontosaur the whole time.
Goofy as it is, I love the concept of the show.
That said, the show itself is kind of difficult to sit through.
The problem is that each episode has just about a half hour of material that winds up getting stretched over the course of an hour. They’ll repeat everything they tell you about twenty times, and they illustrate each battle with a one or two minute snippet of CGI that you will see constantly repeated during the episode. And I do mean constantly.
Each episode basically looks like this -
Tiny clip of CGI dinos fighting
“What could have led this wounded T-Rex to attack a mother Triceratops?”
10 minutes of wild-ass speculation
CGI clip repeats
A little bit of info on the dinos
“But what could have led this wounded T-Rex to attack a mother Triceratops?”
CGI clip repeats
Wild-ass speculation repeats
CGI clip repeats
Little more info on the dinos
“But scientists wonder - what could have led this wounded T-Rex to attack a mother Triceratops?”
Wild-ass speculation repeats
Info on dinos repeated
CGI clip repeated
Out come of fight summed up while CGI clip plays in full
It would be a really fun, goofy half hour show, but after thirty minutes you’d wish they’d just tell you who won the fucking fight and quit showing you the damn CGI Triceratops.
*Forgot to add: The first episode is, I believe, a free download on iTunes, and would make a fantastic drinking game if everyone had to take a shot whenever someone says “Majungasaurus.”
That’s the problem with a lot of these shows. 30 minutes of filler and 10 minutes of content. 20 minutes of commercials. :rolleyes:
I would think a lot of their fight portrayals are perfectly wrong too. Just theory and speculation.
I’ll 3rd Shy Guy’s post. 10 minutes of content at best stretched rather monotonously over the course of an hour.
This show is worth a look but only to confirm its mediocrity.
Meh, when a show starts telling you what a dinosaur is thinking, it’s time to change the channel. I guess it’s decent entertainment, but you gotta take it with a grain of salt.
I think they are accurately reflecting the dinsaurs’ thoughts: “The first rule of Jurassic Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Jurassic Fight Club!”
What shy_guy said. Far too often the show presents guess work as fact. The CGI work is, for the most part, quite good (though the frequently get theropod wrists wrong, and it does not look like the dinos really interact with their environment as much as they should). If you view it as 100% entertainment, then it’s not bad. It’s not a documentary, though.
Win.
This is the biggest complaint I’ve seen about the show from paleontologists. A good example is when the host, “Dinosaur George” (not an actual paleontologist that I’m aware of, just a “dinosaur expert”) when referring to Ceratosaurus, says something along the lines of:
“There’s no evidence that they hunted in packs, but I have no problem believing that they did.”
:smack:
Second biggest complaint would be that some of the anatomy seems to have been taken from 1970s era children’s books, particularly the “raptors.” Some of the models are incorrect by any standards. For example, there’s currently a lot of uncertainty about whether or not Nanotyrannus is simply a juvenile specimen of a T. rex. In the show, a Nano and juvenile rex duke it out. Even if they aren’t the same thing, they’d look basically identical, so they just shrink down the adult rex models, resulting in juvenile T. rex models with outlandishly inaccurate proportions.
If you can look past the outdated/incorrect models (though admittedly good CGI), illogical scenarios (“Allosaurs would attack the sick, young, and weak”–cut to allosaurs running right past, weak, mud-trapped stegosaurs to attack gigantic healthy adult sauropod) and lack of much actual science, it might be entertaining. But they fill in the CGI segments with so much speculation that the actual fights don’t even get much screen time or are too fragmented. Pretty much fails on all levels, IMHO.
Thanks for the info about the show!