(ITA - 2001 - 1a Fase)TV CRITIQUEAmid the majestic

(ITA - 2001 - 1a Fase)

TV CRITIQUE

Amid the majestic sequoias of what could be a state park in Northern California, the silence is broken by a guttural bellow. An enormous beast plods across the television screen. She kicks out a shallow nest and begins to lay her eggs. Each white egg, the size of a soccer ball, slides gently down an ovipositor and comes to rest in the ground. (...)
It looks and sounds just like a wildlife documentary - so much so that, if you watch long enough, you almost forget that the animals it shows have been extinct for more than 65 million years. But this is Walking With Dinosaurs, a sometimes stunning dinoextravaganza that uses computer animation and detailed puppets to resurrect the creatures and place them in real landscapes. When the $10 million program aired in the United Kingdom last fall, 17 million people - almost a third of the population - tuned in to the six weekly installments making it the BBC's most watched science program ever and one of its top 20 programs of all time. It also stirred up a controversy.
Some researchers were unstinting in their praise: "This is going to stand out as one of the best dinosaur shows ever done and certainly the most novel one," says Tom Holtz, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Maryland, College Park, who consulted with the BBC on the project. But others cringed at the way it blurred fact and fiction. Most of the egg-laying sequence, for example, is screenwriter's fantasy: There is no scientific evidence that the giant dinosaur Diplodocus had an ovipositor or abandoned its young. "Some of the arguments were just so far-fetched, so ridiculous," says Norman MacLeod, an invertebrate paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London. "I was embarrassed for the profession." The British media debated whether docudrama was a suitable way to convey science to the public. Would TV viewers be stimulated, misled, or just confused? On 16 April millions more will get the chance to make up their own minds as the Discovery Channel airs a revised 3-hour version of the show in North and South America. (...)

SCIENCE
VOL 288 7 APRIL 2000

 

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