Terrell-4 "It's one thing to find a T-Rex," the narrator David Jason tells us. "It's another thing to take one home." Prehistoric Park takes the fascinating idea of a natural history series on dinosaurs and combining it into a fictional documentary with a real wildlife adventurer named Nigel Marven. Nigel uses a time portal to travel back with a small team to capture or trick dinosaurs in order to return with them through the portal to today's Prehistoric Park. This is an idea that is presented with good science, but is engrossingly odd because it's played so straight. It's hard not to keep smiling at what has led us to this since Marlin Perkins and Wild Kingdom. The series has terrific production values, exciting situations, deadpan delivery and this outstanding, enthusiastic real-life naturalist, Nigel Marven. He's a producer and star of popular British TV natural history programs and was associated with David Attenborough for several years. From the back wearing a bush hat he resembles Andrew Zimern rushing to eat something we don't want to know about. From the front, however, he resembles somewhat a weathered and energetic Rod Taylor, down to his workingman's accent. Nigel Marven is a completely unself-conscious amateur actor in the middle of all the special effects. This integration of live action and impeccable Computer Generated Imagery is what CGI was born to do, not waste its time on comic book movies. The fight between two T-Rexes, one with two babies looking on and Nigel trying to stay out of the way, is far more exciting than the fights between Spidey and Willem Defoe. The CGI visuals with the explanation of the giant meteor strike that most likely led to the disappearance of the dinosaurs is impressive. Nigel and the two hungry T-Rex babies, now orphans that he coaxed through his portable time portal with a sandwich, had only seconds to spare before the meteor hit. During the six episodes of approximately 50 minutes each we'll get to know and like Nigel, as well as Prehistoric Park's head keeper, Bob (Rod Arthur) and the Park's veterinarian, Suzanne (Suzanne McNabb). Of course we'll also see Triceratops horridus, Omithomimus, Tyrannosaurus rex, Mammuthus primigenius, Elasmotherium, Smilodons, Phorusrhacos, and...uh...a lot more. The titles of the six episodes let us know what Nigel and his time portal are up against: T-Rex Returns, Mammoth, Dino-Birds, Saving the Sabre-Tooth, The Bug House, and Giant Croc. During the episodes we often switch back to Prehistoric Park to see how Bob, Suzanne and the staff deal with everything from giving a mammoth a haircut to cool her down during a heat wave to doing an ultrascan to check for a dinosaur pregnancy. Take the time to watch this series, especially if you have kids to sit next to you on the sofa. I think you'll get a kick out of Prehistoric Park while you all learn some good, interesting stuff.

magisterium This is a great show for kids. They'll be sure to find it entertaining, and a lot of good information is given to them in a way that doesn't just ram it all down their throats straight from a book. Nigel's "mistakes" actually are a vehicle for giving that information, I believe, though, as I'm about to lay-out below, some of the mistakes are just plain ridiculous to make.To that end, for the grownups, there are a few plot-holes that can become a bit distracting. If Nigel and his crew can time-travel to an exact, specific time and place repeatedly, wouldn't it be better to go back in time first to just look and see what you have to deal with, film everything you see with a timer running, then go back to the present and figure out a strategy, and THEN go back to your scene a second time and catch the dinosaurs, already KNOWING where they'll be and what they'll do? They will arrive in the exact same circumstances you saw the first time, and do exactly the same things. This method will eliminate ALL of your guesswork. I mean...really!! If you can figure out a way to time-travel, shouldn't you have enough brains to do something like this to make your hunting and capturing easier? Other little things are annoying, too. No one would set up camp in the middle of an open space with T-rex presumed nearby! No one would walk around in a place he KNOWS to be a T-rex lair and be completely defenseless, with no weapons of any kind! No one, having just been chased by no less than THREE T-rex adults, would be "only slightly nervous and out of breath" as Nigel is! Yikes!! Most people would have had a full blown heart attack (I'm SURE I would have!), yet Nigel almost seemed to enjoy the romp...and then, later on, he goes blithely walking around in their lair, totally unarmed! He reacts in similar fashion on other episodes when he is dealing with dangerous bears, sabretooth cats, etc. That's just too much! In the scenario on the show, Nigel is deliberately going to get the T-rex just when they will be wiped out by the asteroid anyway, so he wouldn't need to worry about altering history and possibly changing the fate of the ecosystem. Therefore, he wouldn't have to scruple about killing them to save himself in an emergency (he could, as already noted, always bail out back to the present and then try again with a better plan, and they'd be alive again!). No one would cage the pair of T-rex in a wooden enclosure, especially when it is the flimsy set up one finds on the show!). No one would let a small herd of titanosaurs roam the entire park at will; not only is it dangerous, they'll eventually blunder into all of the buildings and wreck them, not to mention crash through the T-rex and sabretooth enclosures and inadvertently "liberate" these dangerous animals! No one would cavalierly wade through Carboniferous period swamps as carelessly as Nigel does. Even when he gets a bite to the leg, he's almost totally unconcerned about the bacteria in the bite that are completely different from present-day bacteria and TOTALLY foreign to our immune systems. Speaking of bacteria (and viruses), no one explains how the beasts brought back to the present can so successfully fight off the germs of our own day; they'd be as completely defenseless here as we should be in their time.Finally, how, exactly, does Nigel know the PRECISE day that the asteroid hit, ending the Cretaceous Period and wiping out the dinosaurs??? He couldn't possibly guess to within 10,000 years! The dating isn't anywhere near precise enough to travel to the very day such an event occurred! I could name a few more quibbles with the show, but you get the idea.Still, as I said, the show is a pretty good "adventure" for the kids, and it's fairly entertaining for those adults who don't want to think much while viewing. For the rest, it can also be entertaining, but not always in the ways the producers intended, I'm sure! ;-)

sportykat The series is educational, interesting and funny. I got the box set and i enjoy watching it. Alomst everyone in my family does, we have not had the disk that long but it has already been watched millions of times, and I'm surprised it hasn't broken. Each episode focuses on a different time so no matter which part of the prehistoric history you are interested in, it will be there with plenty of fun clips and facts. Another bonus is that the animation is excellent and at times believable. As well as facts there is a story with each one, sometimes sad and sometimes scary. For anyone this is a great series and well worth watching!

Diaboliqa666 So I have read a few reviews, checked out some comments and have decided everyone else is wrong and no not what they talk about. OK, thats a bit much but I'll explain what I mean (And yes, everyone is entitled to their own opinion).First I acknowledge there are problems with the plot - he doesn't explain why he chooses the moment dinosaurs died to first travel back to in order to catch a T-Rex. He does constantly talk about running out of time, yet he can time travel repeatedly, but it doesn't effect my scoring because this show is made for kids.Unlike most dinosaur CGI shows that I have seen Prehistoric Park attempts to show Dinosaurs in a different light - they are not depicted as evil, it isn't all about blood a guts and it has the odd funny moments the whole family will laugh at.In my opinion the CGI was brilliant, I have seen dinosaurs I never even knew existed in this show and, in Australia at least, it was played on a main stream station allowing the educational sections to reach a lot more children then anything on at 6 pm on a weekend on ABC ever will.This show is fun, you feel for the dinosaurs and more importantly they make an effort to show the relation between todays animals and the dinosaurs throughout the ages. If your kid likes giant lizards, they will love this show. This is coming from a person who detests children's programs. It really is entertaining and educational, give it a try!