On May 23, Apple released the first episode of the docu-series Prehistoric Planet on their Apple TV+ subscription service. A co-production with the BBC with Jon Favreau as executive producer and starring longtime documentary narrator David Attenborough, Prehistoric Planet is a series that highlights Dinosaurs 66 million years ago with the most up-to-date research on these animals and modern CGI work. As a kid growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s, I was part of what we could describe as a post-Jurassic Park generation. After the release of Steven Spielberg's 1993 classic, it inundated the world with various dinosaur media. From toys, TV shows, movies, and other forms of media, as a kid, I was obsessed with dinosaurs. Right out of the gate, the first thing the series nails is showing that dinosaurs are animals. While media such as the first Jurassic Park and Walking with Dinosaurs tried to portray dinosaurs with some sense of realism, most of modern pop culture basically portrays dinosaurs as kaiju that actually lived on earth. But in the first of many vignettes within this episode, we see a family of T-Rexes swimming across the ocean to find food off the coast. This episode focuses on life around coastlines and the oceans of Earth 66 million years ago as well get vignettes of various prehistoric animals in their daily life surviving this ancient world. We get a wide variety of animals such as various species of flying Pterosaurs such as Phosphatodraco, marine reptiles such as various Mosasaurs, the long-neck Tuarangisaurus, and even a segment on the extinct cephalopod ammonites. This works perfectly to defy any common notion of what many would assume a T-Rex is like in pop culture as we don't see a T-Rex as a mindless mini-Godzilla, but just an enormous animal just living its life. In fact, I was surprised Prehistoric Planet showed a T-Rex this early in the series (but as shown in the trailers, it's probably not the last) as normally this kind of dinosaur documentary usually saves the T-Rex towards the end. Again, it's clear the makers of this series looked at the dozens of dinosaur media that informed this series and are making this one something truly special.
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