Walking With Dinosaurs:Up close with another era

By GUY D’ASTOLFO

dastolfo@vindy.com

Walking With Dinosaurs has walked around the globe over the past three years.

But no matter what country it visits, the show elicits the same reaction from those who see it.

“Complete awe and mesmerization,” said Matthew Rimmer, WWD spokesman.

The Walking With Dinosaurs tour, which began in 2007, makes its first Youngstown appearances Tuesday and Wednesday, when it comes to Covelli Centre for three shows.

The show attempts to answer the question: What would it be like to stand next to a dinosaur? And it does so with a great degree of accuracy.

“No creature has ever been this big, and no one knows what they were like,” said Rimmer. “But showing people what it might have been like to be in the presence of dinosaurs is our goal.”

Walking With Dinosaurs was conceived 10 years ago, when the Creature Production Co. decided to bring to life a BBC Worldwide TV series.

“The idea was to take ‘Jurassic Park’-style graphics and put it into a TV show,” said Rimmer of the BBC series. “For this arena spectacle, the proposal was that they would move around, fight and walk and roar.”

A team of artists, sculptors and engineers began the project in 2001. Six years and $20 million later, the arena show was ready.

More than 3.1 million Americans already have seen it.

Walking With Dinosaurs is a theatrical experience that combines entertainment with education.

“The show goes over 170 million years of history in 90 minutes,” said Rimmer. It includes 17 life-size dinosaurs — including a flying dinosaur with a 38-foot wingspan.

Included are the Tyrannosaurus Rex, as well as the Plateosaurus and Liliensternus from the Triassic period; the Stegosaurus and Allosaurus from the Jurassic period; and Torosaurus and Utahraptor from the Cretaceous. The largest of them, the Brachiosaurus, is 36 feet tall and 56 feet from nose to tail.

Bringing the dinosaurs to life requires a mix of puppetry, interior operators and radio-controlled animatronic motors.

“The smaller ones have people in them,” said Rimmer. “The big ones have operators that control things like head and tail movements and eye blinks. We make you believe it’s real. A lot of time has been spent on detail and scale and on the way they move and walk.”

The creative team studied large animals such as elephants, as well as reptiles and birds, in order to replicate their movements.

Walking With Dinosaurs is narrated and begins with the Triassic era.

“The audience experiences the dinosaurs along with a paleontologist, who interacts with them,” said Rimmer. They also witness changes that occur in the earth, such as the breaking up of Pangaea, the change from desert to forest that took place during the Jurassic period, and volcanos erupting.

Although the dinosaurs in the show have different personalities, Rimmer stressed that the show is not cutesy or cartoonish. They behave in a natural fashion. “For example, a mother dinosaur is fierce when protecting her baby,” he said.

The show has scenes of interactions between dinosaurs and also depicts their evolution. For example, the audience sees how the herbivores fended off their more-agile predators and how carnivorous dinosaurs evolved to walk on two legs.