Apparently they’ve created life-sized animatronic (or whatever) dinosaurs, coming soon to an arena near you: link. Near me, very soon. I’m geekily tempted to get tickets – any Aussie Dopers seen it?
Of course, it’ll be in Edmonton but not Calgary.
grumbles
…I just peed myself a little bit.
pleasecometoLApleasecometoLA
As cool as this seems, I prefer the static (but more accurate) full-size dinosaurs at the Mall of America’s “Dinosaur Walk” exhibit. http://www.dinowalk.com/moa/exhibits.html
$50-$70 per ticket? I’d love to see this, and they’re coming to SC, but Damn
Crap on a stick!
Yep, I saw it with Mrs Smurf in Brisbane, must have been last year some time.
I was a huge dinosaur geek when I was a kid, and have kept my interest in the natural world ever since. I’m just mentioning that to give a baseline.
It was definitely worth going to see, I don’t regret plonking down the cash. That being said however, I think it is pitched more at the youngster demographic. All the shows in Brisbane were matinees or early evening times, and the families were certainly in the majority in the crowd.
I imagine there are many people who quite easily lose themselves in the set up, and dramatics of the show, and they would come away stoked. I know my wife jumped in her seat at one “shock” point 
However for me, while I did enjoy the show, I just couldn’t completely suspend my disbelief to really get into it, I spent a fair bit of time working out how the bigger dinosaurs “worked”. I’m not sure which of those two things caused the other though.
If I could figure out how to do one of those spoiler boxes, I would share my insight into their workings :o
Having said the above, would I have gone knowing what I know? Yes I would. Even not getting into the ‘theatre’ of it completely it was still an enjoyable show and a good experience.
Giant robot dinosaurs!
The only way it could be cooler is if they were also pirate ninjas (or ninja pirates) in addition to being giant robot dinosaurs.
I am totally in awe of/in love with the raptor suit one. If I were going to a Halloween party in a huge space, I would build one of my own. Or at least say I was, and maybe get the legs done, then run out of time and wind up putting on a hoodie and some sunglasses and being the Unabomber, again.
So have they just not published west coast US dates, or did it come and go already?
I’ve heard that it is incredible. I wish it was coming to somewhere in Texas. I’d drive to see it.
It’s coming to Cleveland in June. Anyone else seen it? I think my eight-year-old boy would probably love it. Newsweek had a brief blurb on it awhile back and praised it.
It was featured in a Jeopardy category today.
Pretty impressive looking tech.
We saw this show last fall, I think I wrote about it at the time on this board, but search is not digging it up.
It was a great show, and the kids loved it. But there were issues. The show was MC’d by a “paleontologist” who came out and talked about different eras and what kinds of dino’s (and a couple of nods to plants) evolved during a given era. Then a couple or three of representative animated dinos would come out and snurf around, perhaps take care of their young, that kind of thing.
There was a big part in the middle involving flying dinos (pterosaurs) that was a big drag on the show – they basically lowered a big dino puppet from the rafters, and set it against a screen, and MC guy narrated as this puppet swooped and soared. Except we saw this in a hockey arena (San Jose Shark Tank) so anyone (80% of the audience) who couldn’t see the flying dino against the backdrop of stuff he was flying over saw a big puppet hanging over a hockey arena, which isn’t that enthralling. That was a pretty tedious 15 minutes.
My only other criticism would be that the parts with the grounded-dinos was repetitous – in each era there were big dinos who were good mamas and papas who cared for their kids and then On Nos! here come the mean old whateverRaptors or TyrannoGuys, mean old meat eaters!! It was good the first time, but the drama was lacking the second or third try.
Overall, I give it a thumbs up. The mechanical dinos were awesome and the illusion was sometimes really compelling. It’d get a fifth star from me if they either made the air-dino’s less awful for most of the audience, or also found a better narrative than doing meat-eaters attacking plant eaters the second time. But the nods to science were great – hammering on the idea that the world of living things has been different in the past, and has changed several times, and that a lot of really unlikely (to us) things have lived before our time was clear and compelling in the narrative.