It was either whim or destiny that made me buy those tickets to the Walking With Dinosaurs live show many weeks ago. Based on the CG faux documentary of the same name, it all went down last Saturday night at the Continental Airlines Arena...better known as the Meadowlands.

I'm a huge dinosaur nut, but I admit to a certain level of apprehension as the show approached. Somehow, my dino love blinded me to the very obvious fact that a circus starring audio-animatronic dinosaurs was intended for children. As the show has been traveling to and fro recently, a number of reviews sprung up online to confirm this. Dinosaurs are great, but going to this thing was beginning to feel like I'd just bought tickets to Disney on Ice or some shit.

I freely confess that I did everything in my power to get out of going, but my girlfriend wasn't having it, for two very important reasons. One: I paid 150 bucks total for our tickets. Two: This marked maybe the third time in recorded history that I made plans for us that were outside the realm of going to a buddy's house to get conked and pass out.

So, we went. We went to see dinosaurs.

And the show was...good, I guess. No, it was good...it was just a little odd. I guess that's par for the course when you're packing sports arenas and parading robot dinosaurs around, and I don't know what I was really expecting, but something about the whole presentation just felt mighty strange.

The general "storyline" had us time traveling to different prehistoric eras to see how life and land evolved. ("Land" in this case equating to a rather small prop boulder that gradually split into pieces, to suggest Pangaea's evolution into the continents we know and love.) It's really just an excuse to usher out oodles and oodles of animatronic dinosaurs, many of which aren't exactly full-sized adult models, but they were all still big and impressive enough to have made at least a dozen of the kids in our section weep.

From a pair of brachiosaurs to a stegosaurus, all of the key players were on hand. We were seated next to the dinosaur control booth, so I can tell you a bit about how they work: Some dudes use what appeared to be modified bike handlebars to make the dinosaurs shimmy and shake. The dinosaurs all sauntered out with wheeled stands attached, and while that hurt the realism a bit, I'd rather see robot dinosaurs with wheeled stands than no dinos at all.

It was really interesting to see what the crowd reacted strongest to. In an effort to warm my heart, the T-Rex was given the kind of welcome usually reserved for hometown sports heroes, and despite being neither the largest or the most impressive of the animatronics, he was definitely the star of the night. Take that, you lousy raptors.

In fact, the only thing the audience came more alive for was a little sequence where a triceratops took a shit. No, seriously. Walking With Dinosaurs included a patented "triceratops taking a shit" scene, complete with flatuentastic sound effects and a giant ball of prop dung. People went absolutely out of their minds for the prop dung. Trust me, you simply have not lived until you've seen thousands and thousands of people cheer in unison because a robot dinosaur took a fake shit.

I can't wholeheartedly recommend the show as the tickets are so ridiculously expensive, but I dunno...how many chances will you otherwise have to see dinosaurs walking, snarling and shitting?

One caveat, if you're considering going: The souvenir peeps sell a lot of things, but the most popular items are these little light-up dinosaur spinners. Half the kids in the Meadowlands had one, and 90% of them kept the things blinking and twirling throughout the entire show. Three of these spinners were within thirty inches of my head, and I still can't close my eyes without seeing light-up pterradon heads flying in circles.

Oh, and on the way home, all of the lights in my car went out, including my blinkers, as well as my speedometer. I can't really blame the dinosaur show for that, but I think I'm going to anyway.

I'll try to post some videos later, once I figure out how to make them not be 5,000,000 MB in size.

Happy Halloween!

Posted by Matt on 10/11/2007. E-mail me!