Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs are ace. I think it was something I liked from a very young age: giant, marauding, dim-witted lizard-monsters. Partly, the interest was down to my love of all thing scientific. However, I think a great deal of it was down to having a father who loved monster movies (in fact this extended to all sorts of trash cinema including science fiction, cowboy films, dodgy horror movies and Kung Fu pictures – he was deprived of much of this as a child in the 1930s as his big sister  controlled the cinema budget and took him along to Busby Berkeley type song and dance movies). For me, the pinnacle of dinosaur pictures were the Ray Harryhausen stop-frame animations such as One Million Years B.C. and The Valley of Gwangi. All complete nonsense, of course, but enjoyably so. In 1974 it was with great delight that Doctor Who decided to do a six-part serial called Invasion of the Dinosaurs. The problem was that the dinosaurs were crap.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs was re-released earlier this year on DVD and I watched it with the kids. The main dinosaurs were badly realised glove puppets against a flimsy London skyline set. There was also a larger-scale one that Sarah Jane appeared alongside that was a tad better as was the pterodactyl that attacked the doctor from the vantage point of a zip-wire. I actually saw the pterodactyl prop at the Blackpool exhibition a couple of years later and it looked much better than on screen (then again, it wasn’t moving in Blackpool). Even my daughter (who is 4) could see they were duff effects but I knew this anyway as my brother failed to hide behind the sofa when it was first shown in the 70s. It’s a pity as the story behind Invasion was actually rather good but it seemed to put the Doctor Who production team off the giant lizards for good – at least they did once try it in the Zygons adventure but even that looked like it had fallen out of a cornflakes box.

The problem with doing dinosaurs is that the game changed beyond all recognition in 1993 with the release of Jurassic Park. I can recall the review that one of my friends gave at the time: The dinosaurs were very good and the people were not so good – but the dinosaurs eat most of the people so it turns out well in the end. I went along to see the film with my (now) wife. She is a dinosaur nut as well and we were both completely blown away by the special effects. The thing was, we knew that this was all done with CGI trickery but THESE BEASTS WERE REAL! I have become rather blasé about special effects in films, mainly because they tend to be used as a substitute for a script, but I still think the realisation of the dinos in Jurassic Park are magnificent. I can watch them over and over again – which is quite handy as ITV seems to have the film on a 3 month rotation.

This week Doctor Who decided to go for Dinosaurs again. Dinosaurs on a Spaceship is possibly one of the naffest episode titles that they have ever come up with but at least it let us know that this was not going to be a particularly serious episode – even by the standards of modern Who. However, what would the dinosaurs be like? I was hoping for something better than glove puppets or an escapee from a Kelloggs box but given that TV budgets are a fraction of movie ones I wasn’t expecting too much. I needn’t have worried: the dinosaurs were fantastic (in every sense of the word). The episode wasn’t too bad either and I loved the Doctor playing “fetch” with a triceratops. Mark Williams as Rory’s dad is possibly my favourite extended cast character since Bernard Cribbins : I just wanted him to say “I’ll get me coat”. Possibly the finishing touch was Mitchell and Webb’s camp robots.

The story itself seemed rather inconsequential – the basic plot premise of a Cretaceous period space arc was intriguing but actually seemed little more than a ruse to get a silly title and the excuse for the cast to chase around with pre-historic creatures. The villain of the piece, too, looked a little contrived. In some ways it seems a pity that the script wasn’t as well thought out as Invasion of the Dinosaurs but for dinosaurs this good I can forgive a lot. Overall it’s not a bad start to the series. I’m still intrigued by last week’s episode and next week’s looks like it owes a debt to Westworld – I wonder who they will have in Yul Brynner’s role?