SIMULATING NATURAL HISTORY: Walking with Dinosaurs as Hyper-Real Edutainment

摘要

No one will know what it was like, but this is the most accurate vision anyone has ever produced (Tim Haines, series producer, Walking with Dinosaurs, BBC Online live web chat 8 November 1999). Walking with Dinosaurs is a six-part TV series co-produced by the BBC, Discovery Channel and TV Asahi in association with Pro Sieben and France 3. The BBC first screened the series over six weeks in October and November 1999 (repeating it in August 2000) and it has enjoyed a widespread international distribution reaching far beyond the borders of the countries involved in its initial production. One of the series' most noted features is its use of special effects and computer animation, extensively employed to help fabricate the illusion of wildlife film footage from the time when dinosaurs walked the earth over 200 million years ago. Certainly, this technical facet received a great deal of attention in the pre-publicity hype for the programmes―and the fascination has continued. It is evident, for example, in subsequent reviews, in the programme The Making of Walking with Dinosaurs (screened by the BBC in the same week as the first part of the series itself), in many of the proliferating subsidiary forms of circulation attached to the series, particularly those that have appeared online, and in the plethora of similar programmes and series which it has generated worldwide [e.g. Discovery Channel's When Dinosaurs Roamed America (2001) and Walking with Beasts (2001), the internationally co-produced follow up to the original series].