Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) was my favourite show as a kid, and it holds up just as well 25 years later…
Walking with Dinosaurs Got Everything Wrong (and I Still Love It)
This show’s like 30 years old and the dinosaurs still look amazing and I’m going to tell you why I love it so freaking much.
Let’s get this out of the way right now: Walking with Dinosaurs got a lot of stuff wrong. Like, a lot. But here’s the thing: I absolutely adored it, and I don’t think it really suffers from the outdated science.
Let me take you back to the turn of the Millenium. I was five or six years old when the original BBC series aired in 1999. Too young to stay up and watch it when it was broadcast, so I had to rely on my parents to tape it off the telly (on VHS, no less). You know, back when you had to earn your dinosaur documentaries. I remember the whir of the tape rewinding and the fuzzy static before the majestic opening shots of computer-generated monsters and a title sequence that kind of freaked me out. Those drums, man. But from the very first frame, I was hooked.
And yeah, maybe it was all just one big, beautiful lie, filled with best guesses and well meaning bullplop. But it was my lie. My entry into the world of palaeontology. And honestly? If the price of childhood wonder is a few inaccurate sauropod necks, I’m more than happy to pay it.
If you’ve somehow never seen it, Walking with Dinosaurs was a groundbreaking nature documentary that treated prehistoric life like it was just another David Attenborough series, only this time with Gildroy Lockheart narrating. No talking heads, no human presence—just dinosaurs, animated with what was (at the time) cutting-edge CGI and animatronics, doing their thing like any modern-day wildlife doc. It was dramatic, cinematic, and genuinely quite emotional in places. Basically, Planet Earth with more teeth.
The show was split into six episodes, each focused on a different time period—from the late Triassic all the way to the final days of the Cretaceous. Each episode had its own cast of prehistoric stars: the massive Diplodocus in “Time of the Titans”, the magical Liopleurodon in “Cruel Sea”, the pint-sized terror of Coelophysis in “New Blood”. And of course, the big finale—Tyrannosaurus rex facing the end of the world in “Death of a Dynasty”. Peak dino drama.
But my lord, not all of it has aged well. Since 1999, there’s been massive strides in palaeontology. Feathers? Turns out that shit kid at the start of Jurassic Park was right. Colouration? We now know at least some patterns thanks to fossilised melanosomes. Behaviour? More complex than we gave the pea-brained monsters credit for. And don’t even get me started on how Liopleurodon was portrayed as a 25-metre sea monster when in reality, it was probably closer to 7 metres. I don’t care how magical it was, bit of a size exaggeration there, lads.
Even Kenneth Branagh doing his most serious Attenborough impression—sometimes said things with such confidence that it’s almost funny in hindsight. Like when he solemnly declares that Ornithocheirus travels thousands of miles to mate… except there’s literally no fossil evidence for that migratory behaviour. It was guesswork dressed up in gravitas. But at five years old? I believed every word.
And here’s where I get a bit soppy: it didn’t matter that it wasn’t accurate. Because it felt real. Walking with Dinosaurs wasn’t trying to give you a lecture—it wanted you to experience prehistory. To stand on the shores of the Jurassic and watch a Liopleurodon breach the waves and surprise us with one of the best fake outs ever. To run with a herd of Iguanodon as they stampede from a predator. It was cinema dressed up as science, and it worked.
The late ‘90s were a wild time for dino-mania. Jurassic Park had burst onto screens just six years earlier, and every kid worth their salt had a plastic T-Rex knocking about in the toy box. But where Jurassic Park was Hollywood blockbuster, Walking with Dinosaurs was BBC prestige. It had the air of authority—the school-approved version of dinosaur obsession. You could learn from this show (or at least, think you were).
And the production values were unreal. For 1999, the visual effects were astonishing. They used a combination of animatronics and CGI, filmed against real-world locations to create something that felt far more grounded than it had any right to be. Sure, rewatching it now, some of the movements are a bit stiff, and the CGI’s showing its age—but at the time? Mind-blowing, and still not too shabby today.
It even won Emmys. Actual Emmys. For a dinosaur documentary! It was the most expensive documentary series ever made by the BBC at that point—£6.1 million, if you’re curious. That’s Doctor Who money. All for a bunch of extinct lizards stomping around in the desert.
And let’s not forget the music. The soundtrack was this sweeping, orchestral score that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Lord of the Rings trailer. It added a whole extra layer of drama—like yes, obviously I needed strings to accompany a herd of Plateosaurus migrating through a storm.
Was it speculative? Hugely. But all palaeontology is, to a degree. Fossils are puzzles with missing pieces. Scientists take the evidence they do have and fill in the blanks with educated guesses. And in 1999, Walking with Dinosaurs made some big, bold guesses. That’s part of what made it exciting—it wasn’t afraid to be dramatic. To tell a story.
It also arrived at a really specific moment in time. CGI was finally just good enough to make this sort of thing possible, but science hadn’t advanced to the point where the inaccuracies were glaringly obvious to the public. Plus, we were right on the cusp of the internet becoming truly mainstream, so there wasn’t a Reddit thread ready to rip it apart the moment it aired. It could just exist in that glorious bubble of wide-eyed belief.
There’s also something very British about it. The tone is serious but never sensationalist. The visuals are ambitious but not over-the-top. And the narration has that distinctly BBC flavour—reserved, informative, a little bit posh. It wasn’t flashy American TV, and it didn’t need to be. It was ours. The sort of thing they’d wheel into science class when the teacher couldn’t be bothered that day, and somehow it was still thrilling.
Now, fast forward to today. We’re getting a brand new Walking with Dinosaurs in 2025. A full reboot. Which is wild to me—not just because I’m now old enough to rent a car, but because it’s a reminder of how much that original series meant to people. It left an impact. It sparked careers. You can talk to any palaeontologist under the age of 35 and there’s a good chance this was what got them hooked.
And sure, the new version will (hopefully) get the science right. Feathers, sizes, behaviours—it’ll have 25 years of new research behind it. But it’s got a tough act to follow. Because no matter how accurate it is, it won’t have that same sense of first-time wonder. That moment when CGI dinosaurs walked across your living room floor for the very first time. That thrill of thinking, this is what it was really like—even if it wasn’t.
I think there’s something beautiful about that. About the idea that something doesn’t have to be perfect to be meaningful. That sometimes, the feeling of truth can matter just as much as the facts. Because feelings are what stick. Facts evolve, but awe is forever.
So yeah, Walking with Dinosaurs got a lot wrong. It turned some animals into monsters, gave others dramatic arcs worthy of a soap opera, and sprinkled a healthy dose of fiction into the fossil record. But it made a five-year-old kid in the UK fall in love with deep time, extinct creatures, and the idea that science could be as thrilling as any Hollywood epic.
That’s worth something. Actually, that’s worth everything.
But did you watch Walking with Dinosaurs back in the day, and are you excited about the new series? Please let me know in the comments below, I’d love to read your thoughts. And while you’re down there, don’t forget to like and subscribe for plenty more videos on all things film and TV, check out our video game channel UDS Gaming, and you can always visit upsidedownshark.com to keep up with everything else we’ve got going on.
Until then my name is Tom, this has been UDS and we’ll see you next time. Bye!
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Tom Baker
I like Star Wars, heavy metal and BBQ Pringles.
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