Customer Reviews

Eyewitness - Dinosaur [VHS]

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was amazed but would you believe my 3-yr old loves this video? He starts to whine towards the end - hoping to get an encore presentation. There is just enough dinosaur cartoon, special effects to keep him watching. He quotes from the narrative so he is obviously listening too. On the good side, he has learned several dinosaur names and plenty of obscure facts - on the down side, the tape is only about 30 minutes and he is HUNGRY for dino info (but not very patient with the EyeWitness Dinosaur book yet) so we watch it again and again. If you have a young dino lover consider this video in conjunction with the younger DK books (they come in board book style) or the early reading DK books (we bought a fairly simple Level 2 "I can read" to read together).

The Eyewitness series is an excellent educational video set for children! My two and four year olds love them.

This video doesn't know what it wants to be -- it's written for adults but has graphics meant strictly for kids. As a result, kids will not be reached by the narration, and adults will find the animation and graphics silly.

Worse, even judged on their own, the graphics and the writing are quite poor. For instance, having only a limited amount of time (around a half-hour), the video chooses to fritter that precious time away by drawing obtuse analogies between dinosaurs and construction equipment. Sheen at times struggles to pronounce the dinosaur names, and some of the science is dated. The video actually gives serious exposure to the idea that dinosaurs became extinct because they died of boredom.

The graphics rely largely on creaky, outdated stop-motion footage of dinosaurs from old movies from the 20s-60's, which we now know are wildly inaccurate. The central graphic of the show is a little green clay dinosaur that will simply reinforce old, inaccurate tail-dragging stereotypes.

The Eyewitness nature series are generally excellent, as they can rely on stock footage and can easily use current animals for their in-studio shots. Of course, this is not possible with dinosaurs, and the Eyewitness crew -- normally experts at improvization -- utterly dropped the ball on this one. Save your money and find one of the many excellent current dinosaur videos to wow your kids. This one will quickly bore them, and you as well.

I usually love to show Eyewitness DVDs for my science classes. The kids enjoy them and they usually remain engaged. This video, however, did not keep my students interested for longer then 10 min. The graphics are very outdated and some of the information seemed pointless (comparision of dinos to building machinery). I realize they cannot have live shots, but the claymation was obviously far older then the dvd production. A few CGI scenes would have helped immensely.

This documentary about dinosaurs is a little too focused on making everything lively, and not focused enough on any particular target market, in my opinion. The narration by Martin Sheen seems to be mostly targeted at a more sophisticated audience, but the graphics are often more kid-oriented. Worse, while the name-and-vocabulary-laden narrative sounds very authoritative, it often makes sweeping generalizations or asserts theories about dinosaurs as though they were facts. I noticed this particularly in reference to assertions about the characteristics of various specific dinosaurs (and when statements are made that presume that all dinosaurs were very large animals, something we knew was false even ten years ago, when the film was made).

One nice thing about the video is that it lays out both sides of a couple of debates, such as whether dinosaurs were cold-blooded or warm-blooded, as well as what triggered their mass extinction. The special effects and constantly changing scenery are pretty well done, considering that it's not a multi-million dollar movie.

Overall, I would say that this would appeal to a particularly inquisitive pre-teen who would like to learn more about dinosaurs. I just have a hard time seeing young kids absorbing the narration considering the language used, but parents who have reviewed on here seem to feel otherwise, so maybe I'm underestimating kids here.

Let me just say, this video is only 30 minutes long. In comparison, Walking with Dinosaurs is 180 minutes long. Don't bother with this. It's just a waste of money. The animation is OK, but nowhere near as good as Walking with Dinosaurs. THe narration - useless. Now, by no means I like the Walking with Dinosaurs narration, yet I can't stand this one's narration. Okay, if you are REALLY REALLY desperate, you might want to check this out, yet I wouldn't waste your money if I was you - just get Walking with Dinosaurs.