Dinosaurs!
It’s no fun being a logical, rational-minded rejecter-of-the-absurd, is it? Say what you will about fundamentalists who refute the natural laws of our existence, at least their thrills when viewing dioramas of cave people intermingling with exotic (if erroneously-rendered) members of the Jurassic period at the new Creation Museum are not tempered by the niggling little concern that… it’s all a big load of crap! After all, if you live in a world where the laws of nature may be defied at any moment, the future holds a terribly wonderful promise of excitement. But now this excitement may be coming, kind of for real, to a city near you: North America is about to be invaded by dinosaurs. There’s no warp in the space-time continuum (naturally), just a lot of clever special effects—and $20 million invested in the for-profit spectacle, which is scheduled to tour big arenas in the U.S. and Canada starting this summer. The enterprise is called “Walking with Dinosaurs, The Live Experience” and originated in Australia. Purchase a ticket (prices look to be between $35 and $80) and you can coexist with some pretty spectacular, size-authentic, recreated dinosaurs in a football stadium. I won’t say how they do it, since that’s part of the fun of watching this clip:
Walking with Dinosaurs is the production of Immersion Edutainment, for which I can find virtually no information, in association with the BBC. The good news? The opening announcement on the show’s website thunders, “For 200 million years, the dinosaurs ruled the earth…” Obviously this is not part of some subversive young-earth agenda to hypnotize stadiums full of people with adrenaline-induced nonsense. What a relief, because everybody loves dinosaurs. It would be such a bummer if dinosaurs and our popular imagination of them were co-opted by the anti-science agenda.
June 28th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
This show looks pretty fantastic. Is there a storyline at all? I guess it could be a little devastating for children if you take the history all the way up to the point of extinction…
June 28th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Oh, and seeing dinosaurs to scale like this would give the average person a better idea of how large Noah’s Ark was….
http://www.angelfire.com/mi/dinosaurs/dino_ark.html
June 28th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
The whole animals on the ark thing poses some serious problems for effective population size. I had never really thought about this. Talk about bottlenecks!
July 1st, 2007 at 11:03 am
I saw a piece on this on the Today Show. Forget children being traumatized by the eventual destruction of the beasts; they will be traumatized by the huge, stalking dinosaurs walking around them, making eye contact! Even the herbivores are frightening! (Here’s your chance to see a “real” pteradactyl!)