Walking with Dinosaurs

So on Sunday my friend Sarah, her husband Jesus, and their 5 year old Tony and myself all went to the Idaho Center to see the Walking With Dinosaurs Live Show. We had purchased our tickets back in October and were really excited to see the show.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Walking with Dinosaurs television series, here is a brief explanation from Wikipedia:

"Walking with Dinosaurs was a six-part television series produced by the BBC, narrated by Kenneth Branagh, and first aired in the UK in 1999. The series was subsequently aired in North America on the Discovery Channel, with Branagh's voice replaced with that of Avery Brooks. It is the first entry of the Walking with... series and used computer-generated imagery and animatronics to recreate the life of the Mesozoic, showing dinosaurs in a way that previously had only been seen in feature films. The program's aim was to simulate the style of a nature documentary and therefore does not include "talking head" interviews. The series used paleontologists such as Peter Dodson, Peter Larson and James Farlow as advisers."

So if you didn't know, now you do. The show lasted about an hour and a half and it was really amazing. Tony kept asking through the show if the dinosaurs were real or not. The smaller dinosaurs had actual people in them moving them around and the larger dinosaurs were driven from underneath their body by somebody in a small cage. All the sound effects and body movement on the larger dinosaurs were controlled by people using computers and joysticks from behind the scenes.

Tony was perfectly fine through the show until the big momma T-Rex came out. Then he instantly cuddled up to Sarah as soon as she roared. He even cried a little bit. We had to keep telling him it wasn't real. It sure sounded real though. I have two videos. One is the promo video which shows all the dinosaurs they had in the show and the other is a short one with the T-Rex.

(I got really excited tonight when I figured out how to put YouTube videos in a blog post. I told Mike it is the most geeky thing I have done to date.)