Walking With Dinosaurs – Wise Cafe (International)

We don’t really review dinosaur documentaries for 12 Days Of Dino Dicember, we haven’t yet, i guess the closest we did was the Walking With Dinosaurs film, but that wasn’t a documentary, and neither is today’s subject, 2004’s The Last Dragon, also known as Dragons: A Fantasy Made Reality or Dragon’s World: Fantasy Made Real, a docufiction movie made for TV (specifically for the British publicly owned Channel Four) and directed by Justin Hardy.

As to why we’re talking about a docufiction film about dragons during our dinosaur films retrospective… it’s that i feel it’s close enough in subject, dinosaurs do factor in to the argument, and the occasion is as good as any.

Also, after being duped into watching and reviewing a sub par italian cannibal flick without dinosaurs, i feel excluding this one wouldn’t quite be fair, in a way.

In terms of what it’s actually about, its what the title and the genre implies, as in, a speculative docudrama that labors on the hypothetical situation of dragons not being things of fantasy or a Pokemon type, but actual creatures that existed, speculating their evolution from the Cretaceous period up to the 15^th centhury in regular scientific fashion by basing the idea on how widespread and ubiquitous was the dragon in any kind of mythology around the world, implying there was actual truth in the legends.

In fairly typical docufiction fashion, it sets out to do so by alternating between CG recreations of “dragosauruses” in their speculated natural habitat throughout history and the live action story of a modern paleontologist, Dr. Jack Tanner, whom works at a museum and believes in dragons, having his interest piqued when he learns that the frozen remains of an unknown creature have been discovered in the Carpathian Mountains, alongside many carbonized human bodies.

So, with two collagues of his, Tanner travels to Romania to examine the creature, and possibly salvage his reputation by actually finding and proving you found an actual dragon of the non-maid variety, so he can shows those miscreants that Falkor didn’t die for our sins in vain.

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Figured we would eventually feature a dinosaur documentary film into Dino Dicember somewhat…. not yet, because we’re not talking about the BBC’s prolific and historically signifcant series of dinosaur documentaries, we’re talking about the movie based on those.

Which doesn’t mean much since i didn’t grow up seeing that BBC miniseries, quite odd given i was interested in dinosaurs as a boy, and you can bet by me making a recurring yearly rubric about the dinos, i still am.

Though doing some research on the BBC series made me wonder why the fuck was the point of making a movie when the series’ main appeal, one that would influence later prehistoric life documentaries, the idea of making a traditional nature documentary but using advanced state of the art CG to recreat the extinct creatures that once romped n stomped on planet Earth.

Exactly the kind of concept that really doesn’t need to have a plot attached, but i guess because any IP of some success has to have a movie, even just to remind people that the series still exist.

And to make some movie tie-in videogames, because dino moolah.

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Tag: Walking With Dinosaurs

12 Days Of Dino Dicember #46: The Last Dragon AKA Dragon’s World: A Fantasy Made Real (2004)

12 Days Of Dino Dicember #35: Walking With Dinosaurs 3D (2013)