Following closely in the footsteps of Jurassic Park, the BBC unleashed Walking With Dinosaurs for television, but wisely left out the mad scientist and annoying brats, allowing the dinosaurs to do all the talking (well not literally, though It wouldn’t have been too hard to do!! :)

WWD takes us all around the globe and into our ocean, pieced together very much in the vein todays documentaries, by ‘filming’ the animals in their natural environments as they go about their day to day activities. Coupled with narration by Kenneth Branagh., WWD comes across with great authentisity and sucks you right into the theoretical (and very believable) story of the evolution of dinosaurs over 160 million years!

Broken down into 6 stories running a whopping 3 hours in total, each story is as equeally compelling as the next making WWD a must see TV (DVD) event!

So How Does This Transfer Hold Up?

VIDEO

One thing you gotta love about the Brits is they like their widescreen TV and WWD was shot in Widescreen and presented on DVD in all it’s Anamorphic Widescreen Glory.
Beautifully transferred and encoded on DVD, you only have a minimal of problems (like light amounts of aliasing here and there, and the odd bit of dirt flecking) to contend with. Generally speaking, the image is clean, clear and sharp, with accurate colour saturation and a very good black level resulting in great detail and picture depth. (The dinos all scrub up very nicely and don’t look too glossy, so blend in with their live surroundings very well indeed!)
With a Picture like this, you’re best to sit back and let your eyes have their feast!!

AUDIO
Made for Television, WWD comes with a 2 channel stereo track (Dolby Digital 2.0 encoded), and it actually works very nicely in Pro-Logic Mode. The Narration takes centre stage and a nice stereo mix spread right across the front!

EXTRAS
Who would have thought one could do much in this department! Despite this fact, there are some terrific extras included in the 2 disc set, starting off with some very snazzy animated menus (full motion background) with all sorts of dinos running and flying around, complete with jungle sounds.

A very cool feature to rival the Matrix is a Picture in Picture option when if selected, a small full motion video window pops up on screen briefly detailing the on-screen action (this feature is what must be meant by Director’s commentary on the DVD slick!). It really is very cool!

The Making of Walking with Dinosaurs makes up the 2nd Disc and runs almost 50 minutes. This doco goes into a hell of a lot more detail than the Picture in Picture on the making of the dinosaurs….great stuff!

Each Episode of WDD contains 6 chapters, however, without a counter to keep track of the time for these episodes, you have no idea of what chapter you are playing or even how far into an episode you are. (this would really have to be my only real complaint with this otherwise terrific DVD!..i just gotta wonder why this was done as it’s a pain in the arse)

 Overall WWD is an awesome DVD and worth every cent! If you though The Planets was good..this leaves it for dead…HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!