Some things... including dinosaurs and space opera

This last weekend, I was listening to one of my favorite classical pieces of music: Franz Liszt's Les Préludes and I had a thought.

I'm a real philistine. In fact, not only am I a self-professed philistine, I'm obnoxiously, fiercely and zealously philistine. Prejudicially philistine even. I have an aversion to "high brow" culture if I can have "common" culture instead.

"But waitaminute Mr. Dark•Heritage blog writer," you may be saying. "If you're so philistine, why were you listening to Franz Liszt's Les Préludes this weekend instead of something like Fergie or Justin Timberlake?

Well, see... you have to keep in mind that to me, Les Préludes isn't a fancy piece of classical music with a fancy French name. To me, it's the themesong of Flash Gordon. In fact, as a little kid, I actually thought that the music was written to accompany the old Republic serial; I only later found out that it had a life of it's own completely unrelated to Flash Gordon.

Then again, classic music is my kinda departure from my almost quixotic obsession with low brow entertainment. Flash Gordon, however is not. I'm a huge fan of the idea of the Republic serial. Of pulp writers. Of comic books and the trashy literary ghetto of genre fiction. The idea that James Joyce wrote the greatest novel of the 20th century is completely foreign to me. James Joyce wrote a novel that has been celebrated by a tiny, tiny number of people in the literati elite. Few others care about him in the least. Tolkien has a much better claim in terms of influence and popular appeal both.

See, that's where I think George Lucas really dropped the ball, and he did it way back in about 1978-1979. I read a fair amount of the ebook The Secret History of Star Wars right before the holiday started, and frankly I already knew every conclusion that he came to. My own conclusions were based on common sense, gut instinct and vague memories, while that book tracked down almost every comment in every interview, every draft script, every scrap of information he could and proved what I believed to be the case all along. That is:

George Lucas never set out to write a grand "mythic" story based on Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey. George Lucas didn't have a grand plot about "The Tragedy of Annakin Skywalker" in mind from the beginning. Darth Vader wasn't Luke's father until the second draft of Empire in 1979 or so. What Lucas wanted to do was write---basically---a Republic serial, just like Flash Gordon. In fact, he wanted to actually make Flash Gordon; he tried to buy the rights to the title but couldn't afford it, which is why he wrote his own. In any case, what I really salute about George Lucas---and where I think he got it right, even if he for whatever reason now disagrees and wants to portray the genesis of Star Wars differently---was that he tapped into that low brow fantasy vibe that our society was sorely missing at that point. His timing was impeccable; it was due to come back in.

Anyway...

Some of you (does anyone read this besides me anyway?) may recall that I have a problem with the documentaries produced to date on dinosaurs. Walking With Dinosaurs has good writing and narration, and pretty good technical competence on the graphics, but the artistry is terrible. Some of the dinosaurs would need to have malformed, pathological or dislocated bones to actually fit inside the computer models made for them. I prefer the artistry of When Dinosaurs Roamed America but the technical competency isn't as high (the CGI looks plastic on several occasions) and the writing and narration is almost painful to listen to. Dinosaur Planet is almost as bad (and obviously by the same people) while Chased by Dinosaurs was probably my favorite, as an improved follow-up to Walking With Dinosaurs. The idea of having Nigel Marvin be a time-traveling zoologist humanizes the experience and is just fun anyway, which really helps.

I recently discovered that a few months ago another series was released called Prehistoric Park. It also features Nigel Marven, production by Impossible Pictures and CGI by Framestore (like Chased) but apparently was not funded by the BBC. This led to some obvious budget cuts; they shows do some noticable frame repeating, for instance. However, other than this minor problem, Prehistoric Park is clearly as good as Chased by Dinosaurs. The artistry and technical competence is pretty good (although still not perfect to my very high standards on dinosaurs), Nigel running around like a prehistoric Crocodile Hunter is fun to watch and for the most part, his selection of critters to focus on is just about right.

The premise is that he travels in time to "rescue" extinct animals and bring them back to a modern wildlife sanctuary kinda place. There are six episodes, and although he focuses each episode on a single critter, he usually ends up bringing back more than one. In the first one, he goes for T. rexes for instance, but also comes back with a Triceratops horridus and a whole herd of Ornithomimus velox. Three of the episodes focus on the Mesozioc era (although in the last one, he's actually looking for dinosaur hunting supercroc Deinosuchus hatcheri. He also makes two trips to the Ice Age; one looking for mammoths, and one to the tropical savannahs of South America to get a giant sabertooth; Smilodon populator. The penultimate episode stands out (in a bad way) in my opinion, since Nigel and team go to the Carboniferous and wallow in swamps looking for giant millipedes and dragonflies. That's the least dramatic (or interesting) from a zoological perspective, so they have to up the ante on the narrative to compensate.

All in all, I highly recommend this as a DVD purchase (or at least a rental or library checkout) from anyone who likes dinosaurs or prehistoric animals even a little tiny bit.