Walking with dinosaurs spares much expense

By Alfonso Zapata     4/10/08 7:00pm

Walking With Dinosaurs? More like Walking With Dino-SNORES! Walking With Dinosaurs: The Live Experience should have been amazing. With a $92.5 million budget, it should have been balls-to-the-wall dinosaur action. It should have provided lots of dinosaur carnage for the bloodthirsty first-grader inside of me. It should have shown dinosaurs that caused the Toyota Center to tremble with each step. It should have boggled the minds of young children everywhere and then blown them away with a mighty roar. But it didn't. What it did have was a couple of incredibly lifelike robot dinosaurs that didn't really do anything.The dinosaurs are very detailed. Their skin hangs off of them like a fat lady's cellulite, their tails sway back and forth with every step they take and one can even count the number of teeth inside their giant dinosaur mouths. Much time and effort has obviously been spent on making them look as realistic as possible, or like what one might imagine dinosaurs looked like back then.

Upon first glance, the giant blocks attached to the legs of the larger dinosaurs distracted me. The creatures appeared to be walking while holding massive pieces of wood between their limbs, but after the first few minutes, I had completely forgotten. The larger problem was with the smaller dinosaurs, which were actually humans in dinosaur costumes. And the human legs were visible. Very visible. The dinosaurs had two sets of legs: dinosaur legs and human legs. It looked like the dinosaurs were pooping out humans, which was just too jarring and distracting.

Aside from that, the dinosaurs looked fantastic. They also moved fantastically. The brachiosaurus moved majestically and gracefully. Human pooping aside, the pack of utahraptors actually moved together like a pack, pausing every now and then to converse with each other like the raptors from Jurassic Park. The only disappointment was the ornithoceirus, which didn't do anything but hang from the rafters and float there. I want my flying dinosaurs to actually fly, not hang from the ceiling. Get some of that Pink Power Ranger shit up in here.

---

---

The dinosaur "fights" were horrible. The torosaurus fight consisted of two torosauri circling each other for what seemed like hours with crazy battle music blaring throughout the stadium. Finally, one of the torosauri bumped the other torosaurus with his horns and the battle was over. The most exciting moment of the night occurred when the tyrannosaurus emerged to save its baby from the stegosaurus and ankylosaurus. While the fight itself was rather anticlimactic, I enjoyed seeing the tyrannosaurus roar and make all the children cry.

In the end, I liked how the dinosaurs looked. They looked really cool. Cool and fierce. Unfortunately, looking cool is all these dinosaurs have going for them, and in this day and age, coolness can only take you so far. The entire "theatrical experience" consisted of a paleontologist talking to the audience, announcing the dinosaurs, stating a few facts about them, and then watching them move around for a few minutes. For all of the children at whom the show is targeted and for people with very short attention spans, like me, the moving dinosaurs only entertain for so long.

Throughout most of the show, the kids in the audience played with the $25 dinosaur shoes their parents had bought them from the souvenir stands. During the really boring parts, I entertained myself by looking up at the ceiling of the Toyota Center, seeing the back to back NBA championship banners hanging up there, and just thinking about how intense it would be if Dikembe Mutombo ran out onto the floor and started dribbling around the dinosaurs. Dikembe Mutombo is the greatest thing to happen to the Houston Rockets. And to dinosaurs.

---