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What Killed the Mega Beasts
Artisan // Unrated // September 24, 2002
List Price: $19.98 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
Nearly everyone knows about the "age of dinosaurs," the millions of years in which a wide range of dinosaurs dominated all the ecosystems of the Earth, ranging from herds of herbivorous dinosaurs roaming the plains to great winged dinosaurs soaring the skies to the massive pleiosaurs cruising the oceans. What may be less familiar to viewers is the fact that after the dinosaurs became extinct and the "age of mammals" had begun, many mammals in turn evolved to gigantic size. These "megafauna," far larger than their modern counterparts, were truly gigantic: in addition to the well-known examples of mammoths and mastodons, we're talking about eighteen-foot-long beavers, two-ton flightless birds, and marsupial lions the size of small elephants.
With the dinosaurs extinct, these creatures seemed to rule their respective ecosystems, appearing on every continent and in a variety of habitats... but in a period from fifty thousand years ago to only seven hundred years ago, the megafauna all became extinct. Why? That's the question presented in What Killed the Mega Beasts, which mixes re-creations of how these prehistoric creatures might have looked, using computer-generated animation to produce lifelike images, with interviews with the scientists and paleontologists who are studying the question.
What Killed the Mega Beasts starts off with a bit of a rushed summary/preview of the upcoming material before settling down to begin the actual content of the program, which presents three competing theories as to the reason behind the extinction of the megafauna: overhunting by humans, climactic change, and a world-spanning, species-hopping plague. One of the lamentable weaknesses of the program is revealed in the fact that these three theories are immediately labeled with the cutesy titles of the "kill," "chill," and "ill" theories. (Ugh.) The remainder of the program is devoted to presenting scientists who espouse each of these views, allowing them to explain the basis for their theory and how it explains the extinction of at least one type of megafauna.
There are a number of interesting snippets of information and a few genuine insights offered in What Killed the Mega Beasts. The information about the "kill" theory reveals how devastating humans can be to their environment, as scientists excavate a New Zealand site in which an entire flourishing population of giant moas (flightless birds) were exterminated by human hunters in the space of a single generation. In a section on the "ill" theory, a veterinarian explains why larger animals are more vulnerable than smaller animals to disruptions in their habitat, disease, or other destabilizing influences. However, the material in What Killed the Mega Beasts would have been sufficient for a forty-five minute piece, not the ninety-minute presentation that it gets. The result is that the material is dragged out far longer than necessary, with many pointless transition sequences, such as showing the archaeologists driving to their sites, and a substantial amount of re-use of the same computer-animated footage of the megafauna.
The program is divided into sections that obviously reflect the insertion of commercials in its original broadcast... and an expected audience of inattentive, channel-flipping viewers, given that after every single "break," the narrator repeats what has just been presented in the previous segment. Every. Single. Time. By the end of the program, I was ready to throttle the narrator if I heard one more summary of the "chill, kill, and ill" theories.
Watching What Killed the Mega Beasts also gives me a new appreciation of the importance of choosing a good narrator for a documentary. My first choice for any documentary would be an actual scientist, as we get with Carl Sagan in Cosmos; after that, a good actor with a distinctive voice is the best choice, as we get with Kenneth Branagh in Walking with Dinosaurs or Kevin Spacey in Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure. Unfortunately, What Killed the Mega Beasts' narrator sounds distressingly like the "Preview Voice Man" who seems to do the voiceovers on most trailers. His slightly artificial intonation, in which it's clear that the narrator is trying to "add" excitement to the narration, is a distinct failing of the production.
To give credit where it's due, What Killed the Mega Beasts presents reasonably sound science. While the "ill" theory is likely presented more for its sensational appeal and to round out the other theories, the program does make it clear that the proponent of that theory has yet to come up with any actual evidence to support it. For younger viewers, it also does present a snapshot of how science works: scientists discover a puzzle, formulate a possible hypothesis to explain it, and then go to work to find evidence to prove (or disprove) it, possibly changing their hypothesis later on to account for the information they have discovered in their studies.
Video
What Killed the Mega Beasts is presented in a 1.66:1 widescreen transfer that's not anamorphically enhanced. The computer-generated animals are reasonably realistic, though their placement into the real landscape is sometimes less than convincing, especially when combined with live humans or other animals in the same scene. Apart from some blurriness in the image in more distant shots, the picture looks quite good, with a clean, noise-free transfer that offers natural-looking colors and satisfactory contrast.
Audio
The Dolby 2.0 soundtrack is satisfactory, presenting the voices of the narrator and the interviewed scientists clearly. It's a fairly flat-sounding track that doesn't add much depth or richness to the experience of watching the program, but it's fine for what it does.
Extras
What Killed the Mega Beasts is a bare-bones disc with no special features.
Final thoughts
I didn't find that What Killed the Mega Beasts offered much new information for me, but I'm also already fairly well-informed on the subject. The main failing of the program is that it's a lot longer than it needs to be, with the resulting repetition and padding becoming quite evident, but it's watchable, and probably worth checking out for viewers who want an introduction to the topic.
With the dinosaurs extinct, these creatures seemed to rule their respective ecosystems, appearing on every continent and in a variety of habitats... but in a period from fifty thousand years ago to only seven hundred years ago, the megafauna all became extinct. Why? That's the question presented in What Killed the Mega Beasts, which mixes re-creations of how these prehistoric creatures might have looked, using computer-generated animation to produce lifelike images, with interviews with the scientists and paleontologists who are studying the question.
What Killed the Mega Beasts starts off with a bit of a rushed summary/preview of the upcoming material before settling down to begin the actual content of the program, which presents three competing theories as to the reason behind the extinction of the megafauna: overhunting by humans, climactic change, and a world-spanning, species-hopping plague. One of the lamentable weaknesses of the program is revealed in the fact that these three theories are immediately labeled with the cutesy titles of the "kill," "chill," and "ill" theories. (Ugh.) The remainder of the program is devoted to presenting scientists who espouse each of these views, allowing them to explain the basis for their theory and how it explains the extinction of at least one type of megafauna.
There are a number of interesting snippets of information and a few genuine insights offered in What Killed the Mega Beasts. The information about the "kill" theory reveals how devastating humans can be to their environment, as scientists excavate a New Zealand site in which an entire flourishing population of giant moas (flightless birds) were exterminated by human hunters in the space of a single generation. In a section on the "ill" theory, a veterinarian explains why larger animals are more vulnerable than smaller animals to disruptions in their habitat, disease, or other destabilizing influences. However, the material in What Killed the Mega Beasts would have been sufficient for a forty-five minute piece, not the ninety-minute presentation that it gets. The result is that the material is dragged out far longer than necessary, with many pointless transition sequences, such as showing the archaeologists driving to their sites, and a substantial amount of re-use of the same computer-animated footage of the megafauna.
The program is divided into sections that obviously reflect the insertion of commercials in its original broadcast... and an expected audience of inattentive, channel-flipping viewers, given that after every single "break," the narrator repeats what has just been presented in the previous segment. Every. Single. Time. By the end of the program, I was ready to throttle the narrator if I heard one more summary of the "chill, kill, and ill" theories.
Watching What Killed the Mega Beasts also gives me a new appreciation of the importance of choosing a good narrator for a documentary. My first choice for any documentary would be an actual scientist, as we get with Carl Sagan in Cosmos; after that, a good actor with a distinctive voice is the best choice, as we get with Kenneth Branagh in Walking with Dinosaurs or Kevin Spacey in Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure. Unfortunately, What Killed the Mega Beasts' narrator sounds distressingly like the "Preview Voice Man" who seems to do the voiceovers on most trailers. His slightly artificial intonation, in which it's clear that the narrator is trying to "add" excitement to the narration, is a distinct failing of the production.
To give credit where it's due, What Killed the Mega Beasts presents reasonably sound science. While the "ill" theory is likely presented more for its sensational appeal and to round out the other theories, the program does make it clear that the proponent of that theory has yet to come up with any actual evidence to support it. For younger viewers, it also does present a snapshot of how science works: scientists discover a puzzle, formulate a possible hypothesis to explain it, and then go to work to find evidence to prove (or disprove) it, possibly changing their hypothesis later on to account for the information they have discovered in their studies.
Video
What Killed the Mega Beasts is presented in a 1.66:1 widescreen transfer that's not anamorphically enhanced. The computer-generated animals are reasonably realistic, though their placement into the real landscape is sometimes less than convincing, especially when combined with live humans or other animals in the same scene. Apart from some blurriness in the image in more distant shots, the picture looks quite good, with a clean, noise-free transfer that offers natural-looking colors and satisfactory contrast.
Audio
The Dolby 2.0 soundtrack is satisfactory, presenting the voices of the narrator and the interviewed scientists clearly. It's a fairly flat-sounding track that doesn't add much depth or richness to the experience of watching the program, but it's fine for what it does.
Extras
What Killed the Mega Beasts is a bare-bones disc with no special features.
Final thoughts
I didn't find that What Killed the Mega Beasts offered much new information for me, but I'm also already fairly well-informed on the subject. The main failing of the program is that it's a lot longer than it needs to be, with the resulting repetition and padding becoming quite evident, but it's watchable, and probably worth checking out for viewers who want an introduction to the topic.
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