Reviewing the recent Netflix documentary Life on our Planet, narrated by Morgan Freeman. For me, the show was a definite mixed bag; far from terrible, but similarly far from reaching the heights of Prehistoric Planet. In this video, I discuss what I consider to be the show's major issues, as well as doing a side-by-side comparison with Prehistoric Planet to show how the latter succeeds where the former fails.
Music:
Teller of the Tales by Kevin MacLeod
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Midnight Tale by Kevin MacLeod
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Suonatore di Liuto by Kevin MacLeod
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Village Ambiance by Alexander Nakarada
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"Entering the Park" and "Beautiful Day" from Prehistoric Park.
This series managed to do the unthinkable: 1- It made dinosaurs boring 2- It made Morgan Freeman boring
agreed and Prehistoric Planet is better
This, I couldn't believe it, but this is so true
@@zookeeperchris ikr? just like how Rick and Morty made dinosaurs boring
@@tyrannozilla1 Oh my gosh yes. That episode was such a train wreck. Some of the most awe-inspiring animals in all of history, reduced weird high and mighty plot about how humans can't be happy and healthy. sad
@@zookeeperchris that show did Dinosaurs dirty
What I hate most about this documentary is that it promotes this idea that the different branches of the evolutionary tree are "dynasties" vying for control against each other over the world, which is only true to a degree. Because the documentary is so obsessed with pushing this "dynasties" idea, it unfortunately has to continue downplaying many prehistoric species just to hype up new ones. In a way, it's actually the exact same problem the Walking with Trilogy suffered from.
The show is basically the Walking with Trilogy with all the trilogy’s flaws and very few of its strengths.
@@BugsandBiologyExactly, and that's not the way it should be.
I think it's really important for people to remember that species don't think of themselves on Team Mammal or Team Reptile whenever they do actually compete with other organisms. They just...do their own thing. That's what results in ecosystems where various clades fill in various niches. This also means that no matter how much they might compete, "dynasties" need each other. Were it not for the "ray-finned fish dynasty" or "cephalopod dynasty", the cetaceans and pinnipeds of the "mammal dynasty" would starve, among countless other examples.
I’m glad I’m not the only person completely annoyed with dynasties crap. It reinforces dated and problematic myths about how evolution and life on the planet operates as a whole.
Dynasty is just a metaphor
That scene with the cave lions and the mammoths irked me so much. A lot of us have seen clips of elephants going all out on rhino, crocs, buffalo, lion, and other animals that bother them. If they wanna flatten you, they're gonna do it. The mammoths acted as if all they could do to defend was to just lazily flay their trunks a few times. I know the herd had a calf to shield but again, we know what an angry elephant is capable of.
Exactly. Modern day herbivorous animals are all NOTORIOUS for having a bad temper. They can and will EASILY attack those they perceive as threat. So what would make you think prehistoric herbivores were any different?
And the trike not able to kill a fricking trex when it proven trikes can
Herbivores are usually more dangerous than carnivores. Hippos kill more people than any other animal.
Walking with Beasts had a much better understanding of the lengths large mammals would take to protect their young.
a Buffalo alos can kill a Lion and it happens still when a Lion aproaches a Buffalo the buffalo will in most cases run away first Nature is not allways on for non stop brawl if you can avoid the fight alltogehter go for it it means oyu dont get injured not getting injured means prob no infection and an infection can kill you in the end @@pierre-samuelroux9364
Apart from the inaccuracies, the lack of focus is what bothered me the most. They clearly wanted to glory hunt on the positive reception of Prehistoric Planet but they didn't want to pay as much. So to save money they came up with the idea of mixing CGI with modern day footage. This meant they couldn't portray a specific time period in the past so they made the show about 'ALL LIFE EVER' instead, which is just too vague a theme to be interesting.
For what it's worth Life On Our Planet was made around the same time as Prehistoric Planet going into production, for me it felt more like LOOP was trying to go for Trilogy of Life's greatest hits with little variation, but forgot that Trilogy of Life managed to feature obscure taxa that became household names, something LOOP very much failed at.
But yeah as a friend of mine said, one of its biggest issues is that it just does not know what it was trying to be.
The main thing I hated was how they made every herbivore weaker than a literal piece of glass, and the carnivores are all more powerful than the Jurassic Park dinosaurs
Impossible. A show that portrayed its dinosaurian carnivores more disbelievingly overpowered than Jurassic Park? Can’t be done.
@kziila0244 'It is impossible for the triceratops to fight off the t Rex and its babies, it must retreat back to the herd.' Meanwhile triceratops being adapted to fight off tyrannosaurus. ( yes, I know that the t Rex killed the triceratops from Jurassic Park, but that's like saying a lion easily kills all elephants because it killed a half dead one
@@kziila0244 lmao 💀
@@MinmiGamer Meant to be a joke. Sorry if I wasn’t clear.
Realistically the two baby T. rex would’ve posed no threat to an adult Triceratops at all. It could’ve run them into the ground without noticing.
I feel this show is emblematic of all Netflix’s worst flaws - never quite giving the budget to do something properly, chasing short term hype in favour of sustained engagement, and dumping and running after release.
This show felt like it was written and directed by a person who had watched the trilogy of life as a child, now with millions of dabloons, setting out to create a show from their fuzzy memories. Trying to make everything seem as grand as the former, with not understanding what made them so great. Good vid by the way.
It’s basically the Trilogy of Life hastily rehashed and retaining all its weaknesses but very few of its strengths.
Do you mean the Walking With trilogy?
@@COVID-19_CrabThose old documentaries produced by the BBC and narrated by Kenneth Branagh. Walking with Dinosaurs Walking with Beasts Walking with Monsters
The Trilogy of Life is another name for the Walking with Trilogy.
Ain't no way this guy is here
I actually remember the exact place in the show I stopped watching it. It was just after the Lystrosaurus scene, and they went into the ocean, and since we were still in the early Triassic, I was like, "Yes, finally some Triassic marine life!"...and then it jumped ahead, skipping the entire rest of the Triassic (my favourite geological period) and showed a Pliosaur instead. I can't exactly place why that jump bothered me so much, but I just lost interest at that point completely. For the most part though, it was the modern day segments dragging on that killed it for me, especially as it gave me a lot of 'Alien Worlds' flashbacks, another Netflix documentary which handled a very similar thing even worse than this show did.
That Triassic episode would’ve been a perfect opportunity to give the massive ichthyosaurs of the time a media debut, but nope, they gotta stick to familiar ground, so Jurassic Pliosaur it is!
Wow, you lasted a lot longer than me, I stopped after the double whammy in episode one that was them calling maiasaura defenceless, then the t-rex attacking the trike from the front, then the trike turning its back and running away for some reason.
The pliosaur scene was really uninteresting too, it was so generic
@@BugsandBiology yeah god like, the Triassic has to be one of the most interesting periods of life on the planet but it was completely skipped over in the doc. The missed opportunity was so egregious.
Your right at that same scene I wanted to see Nothosaurus chilling on the coast like how seals do today. I also wanted to see Shonisaurus.
Morgan Freeman: The art of stopping in the middle of a sentence to let the viewer guess the rest of it before resuming the "narration" !
Me watching with subtitles helped finishing his sentences
i’m not even a huge fan of prehistoric plants but it was actually insane to me that they didn’t bring up archaeopteris when they were talking about trees and instead chose to focus on redwoods. i think that was the moment i decided to drop the show. so many missed opportunities
They were way too bent on sticking to paths already trodden.
what are the things you don't like about prehistoric planets?
@@dolsopolarI think they were talking about actual plants, not Prehistoric Planet.
@@sikucoon1927 ohhhhh lmao
@@dolsopolar : DDDD
When I watched the first two episodes, I immediately had the same issue you did with the show constantly focusing on so-called “dynasties”. It grossly misrepresents evolution as an arms race when in reality there is no set direction or “best” adaptations.
Then again, since evolution is fake, there is no correct way to represent it. It can be represented as however
@@justashark776 You're welcome. God created everything and every animal at once, therefore no such thing as evolution took place. Just wanted to give my take on this. Also you coulda just replied to me instead of copy and pasting my tag and username lol
@@justashark776People give themselves a username like that and then wonder why no one takes them seriously…
There is no set direction or best adaptations, but to say life is not an arm's race of winners and losers is sort of false as animals do evolve due to direct competition and environmental factors.
@@BugsandBiologymammals are the most overrated animals of all time and we have a very long habit of overestimating, exaggerating and sensationalizing mammalian evolution, reptiles are one of the real evolutionary winners. #ReptileSupremacy
The Lystrosaurus/Erythrosuchus scene also shows a number of what are plainly stonecrops, cudweed, and broom plants with visible flowers in the background despite being set in the Triassic.
Angiosperms of some sort are visible in nearly all the Paleozoic scenes (at least the ones on land). Although I’ll let that slide since their prevalence in almost all landscapes makes it rather hard to film on location without them.
@@BugsandBiologyThats what makes the choice of CG habitats in many post-paleozoic scenes, like the trex hunt, extra baffling.
Yeah exactly. If they were going to use CG environments, they should’ve saved them for time periods when it was really warranted. Not the late Cretaceous when flora was already relatively modern.
@@BugsandBiology Listen up paleobros, did the often lacking Prehistoric Planet turn yall into some accuracy or else, paleobro cult? Or was yall being so lame, already a thing underway before it aired? Every take & opinion sure is important, & details matter too much here in Dec 2023. Especially knowing the track record of so called Scientific Accuracy, can be summed up in a word - abysmal. Life on our Planet reminds me of why most kids "like me" went nuts over terrible lizards in the first place. But the accuracy police aint having it, kids loving this stuff the way they got to love it. So selfish, so entitled. I'll be back later after I pick apart the inaccurate crap all in Prehistoric Planet later today you paleobros you!
Oh no, how dare we care about accuracy in educational media? Yes, Prehistoric Planet has its flaws too, as I acknowledged in the video, but it is objectively nowhere near as outright misinformative as Life on our Planet. Plus it was honestly advertised as well - we saw trailers for a dinosaur documentary, and that’s what we got. Also I find it strange how so many people seem to act as if the paleo community puts PhP on a pedestal - if there is one documentary that has a “cult like” following, it’s Walking with Dinosaurs, not PhP.
I’m a complete layperson but a couple years ago I heard of “survival of the good-enough” and ever since I wished this sentence was taught instead of “survival of the fittest”; it’s much more intuitive snd doesn’t carry any different modern meanings the way “fitness” does, and it’d make shows like this, which misrepresent evolutionary fitness, more difficult to exist
Yeah agreed 100%. You may be a layperson but it seems you’ve got a great grasp of the basics of evolution.
Natural selection is better if you ask me
Yeah, the one i heard was "survival of if it works it works"
я, в свою очередь, тоже часто слышал, что выживание это не про сильнейшего, а наиболее приспособленного. Выражение "выживает сильнейший" вызывает иногда недопонимание
@@BugsandBiology I have often heard that, but it's missing the point that what explains evolution is RELATIVE "fitness". "Good enough" sounds like there some sort of imagined threshhold for an individual to clear. But what matters is the RELATIVE goodness of an allele in an environment compared to it's alternatives. So imo "fittest" is way better than "good enough". "Fitter" or "better" would probably be better. "The propagation of the better in expectation".
Speaking of t-rex hunts portrayed in media, i personally like the hunting scene on the original WWD. It's not only or simply because of both the Tyrannosaurus and Edmontosaurus portrayed, but the tremors, branches and sticks breaking, scattered dust all around, all from the battle between hunter and prey, both gigantic, along with the cameraman tries to take a nice shot while trying to follow them, as if he couldn't properly film the scene.
It was almost perfect in that the scene was well-filmed and very well-directed, but to me was ruined the the T. rex roaring as and after she chased the Anatotitan as it ruined the believability of the scene to me.
So this was the video that you strained your eyes editing. I found myself just so excited for a new prehistoric doc after PHP that I completely overlooked stuff at the beginning. Like, Erythrosuchus being included at all blinded me to how poorly it was portrayed. But towards the end I got tired of it, I never even finished the mammals episode after seeing the terror bird scene again.
I was super hyped as well, and initially thought people were overreacting to the inaccuracies, but nope…
@@BugsandBiologythis documentary is full of borderline eugenicist levels of mammalian centric bias!
I honestly find Life On Our Planet to be pretty unengaging and hard to hold my attention especially past the Paleozoic segments, not helped by the fact that it had too many action scenes for the prehistoric segments.
@@BugsandBiologyI remember the comment section of a teaser which was the clip of the T. rex family hunt being a mixture of “it’s not even out yet” and “this looks really bad” . I was the latter.
@@BugsandBiology I was also extraordinarily excited for Life of our planet documentary. I wasn't aware of the fact of the species differences between the terror birds and the big cats. Yet it makes sense from a environmental perspective of apexes differentiation in different territories. You normally wouldn't see two equal sized or powered apex predators in one single area. What did get me and my friends watching together was the rex family targeting the triceratops. Like why would the trike run when it has it's defenses facing the threat and instead backing up or instinctively panic rushing with a goring attempt much like how wild lone buffalo or cattle will do? Or let alone not gore or trample the much much smaller rexes? That was sooo insulting and bad. Not to say a rex couldn't take on a triceratops, but a triceratops has been proven to win over rexes as well. That should've been a tense ambush scene of: This rex family has found a lucky Lone triceratops that has wandered too far from it's herd. The mother/father must be very careful with how they strike their ambush. One wrong move could mean a grievous injury or even death if they do not strike their prey correctly. A lesson their young will be wise to learn. Then proceed to show the rex ambushing the trike from behind, grabbing the back of the frill/crest to pure power it to be thrown to it's side, damaging the crest Frill from the immense biting force before delivering a deadly bite to the more vulnerable areas. Or as the rex parent ambushes and fights to get a bite, one of her young who is too eager joins. Gets themselves gored, but in the process the parent rex is able to take down the triceratops due to them not facing them any longer, and instead freaking out from the biting teeth of the adolescent at it's rump. Showing both the impressive creatures, the struggle of survival, and the cost of not being careful. Maybe a note how their remainder offspring will become a excellent rex if they continue to learn from their parent, and in turn teach their young the trials of a hunt; which even the greatest carnivore ever to live, must respect the power of their prey.
The Allosaurus and diplodocus night storm hunt is actually pretty well handled, if you manage to look past the inaccuracies in the designs of the creatures.
TBH I don’t buy any large theropods going out of its way to eat a tiny hatchling. Juveniles yes (in fact I’d argue that would be the most common prey size). Literally newly hatched babies no. This is why I hate the “baby killer theropods” idea, because its name very heavily implies theropods were only eating ridiculously tiny prey relative to themselves even though that’s not the point it’s trying to make.
@@bkjeong4302It like me licking ants on the road cause I need protein, the logic is just off
but thats how every animal is ? its called opotunistic you ever seen a full grown lion catch an springhare ? they do it even its so small if an Allo and Cera or whatever would walk by and suddenly a Baby animal would walk past it it would stil lsnatch it up or at least try to get it predators cant really choose like nah this is to small i dont like it maybe its the only food you can get in the next 3 days i sene Thuna ..who are gigantic fish who normaly hunt mackarels and other larger fish go after small baby turltes who are jsut hatched thats not evne a bite for a fish larger then a human being then why do they do it ? cause its there and you can get it @@bkjeong4302
no it's literally shit, i cringed immediately the moment the allosaurus tried to attack the pack of Diplodocus and their response? A lil tail tap to push it away, who tf made this? a 10 years old? stop glorifyng the carnivores to be "fearless", " barbaric" and "brave", they thought that made them cool but it actually turned them into a bunch of dumbassess. An allosaurus isn't that dumb to rush into a pack of creatures double its size, Diplodocus aren't that weak or cowardly to only "gently" push it away like that, they portrayed all herbivores as weaklings
An animal is not going to be competent all the time and baby sauropods are fairly decent meals. The tail tap is merely an interaction between two species, not a showcase of the animals' daring nature. The Allosaurus was literally just looking at them, it wasn't planning on attacking them. The tail tap was all that was needed to keep the predator at bay. That ant analogy sucks, most ants are smaller than a person's pupil, young sauropods are around the size of an Allosaurus' head.
There were two scenes that i highly enjoyed: the Arthropleura finding a mate and the young Smilodon interacting with the Doedicurus. I did not enjoy any Dinosaur scenes despite them being the main marketing point for the show.
Yeah the allosaurus and T.Rex looked pretty bad lol
@bbpoisonn yeah, the accuracy and models unfortunately can't hold a candle to Prehistoric Planet
@@RaptorFHWhile I did not expect Prehistoric Planet's-caliber of accuracy, I was still left disappointed with LOOP's sloppiness (and even at times awesomebroism) on their models.
@@juanyusee8197 yep, completely agree
The Smilodon-Doedicurus scene is anachronistic: Smilodon wasn’t in South America 2MYA (it had literally only just evolved) and Smilodon populator (the species shown in that segment) hadn’t even evolved yet.
This crushes me how Life on Our Planet wasn’t as good as I expected and hoped :(
This guy is fussy as hell, I loved even, even knowing the innacuries noe
It fucking hurt me. I was looking forward to it and even was hyped when I saw Scutasaurus look so cute in the intro. I watched all of it and they reused some scenes in some episodes even.
There are other issues with the Smilodon and Titanis scene: the Smilodon have faces too similar to that of pantherines (when sabretooths had a smaller degree of binocular vision, and longer and more laterally compressed muzzles to facilitate their specialized shearing killing bite-something that, ironically, terror birds also independently evolved), the phorusrhacids are misproportioned in general and are missing the sickle claw, and the habitat is blatantly wrong for Titanis (it was not an open-country animal; in fact none of the larger phorusrhacids were). Edit: if you really do want a Titanis vs. sabretoothed cat scene, you could go with the (then) Jaguar-sized Xenosmilus: the bird would still have a significant size advantage, but not quite to the point of being a Hopeless Boss Fight like S. gracilis vs. Titanis was in reality. Or even better, set the scene in the Early Pliocene-Titanis was already in North America even before the GABI (it actually evolved there), and at this point it was significantly smaller than it would become during the Late Pliocene and Early Pleistocene. You could have a matchup between Megantereon (ancestor of S. gracilis and similar in size) and the smaller Early Pleistocene ecomorph of Titanis, for example over a kill or territory, for example. THAT would be an even fight between two well-armed, sophisticated predators of similar sizes (the bird having better stamina but the cat being a better grappler, which evens things out further).
Not to mention the fact they promoted that outdated "Smilodon superior, Terrorbird inferior" belief.
@@kade-qt1zuFr, I’m sick and tired of people saying that Smilodon is superior when they simply weren’t
@@kade-qt1zu I couldn't help but read that in Soundwave's voice from transformers.
@@FlufuxAh, a fellow person of culture here 😁
@@FlufuxSoundwave superior, Autobots Inferior.
I think the scenes of smilodon hunting could have worked if the terror birds were juveniles, and if the young mammoth was already injured or weakened before the hunters arrived. It could have been a good way to show the mammoths caring for the juvenile until they absolutely had to move on with the migration. With the terror birds, they could have shown them teaming up to distract a watchful parent or two to snag their chicks.
The issue with the first one is that terror birds were likely altricial if they were anything like all other Australoaves, so by the time the juveniles first start to explore outside the next they’d already be at full adult size (like with other Australoaves), and if the juvenile Titanis are at a small enough size to be viable targets for S. gracilis they’re going to be near-immobile and not fully feathered babies in a guarded nest, not remotely the sort of predator vs. predator battle most people would imagine by any means. A lot of media depictions of terror birds (and even academic research) assume far too many similarities between them and ratites, even when there’s fossil or phylogenetic evidence to show they were very different animals, not only in terms of diet but in most aspects of their biology. This is why the idea of baby terror birds following their parents around is a thing even though it makes zero sense, and it’s also why everyone thinks terror birds were open-country animals (which most of them weren’t, especially the bigger ones) and why terror bird body masses have been chronically underestimated until very recently (and are still underestimated in publications today). The juvenile mammoth scene could have been fixed just by having the cave lions take a lot longer to bring it down (and have a lot more cave lions involved in the attack as well, as with cases of lions hunting adolescent elephants IRL). The idea isn’t bad in itself, but the execution was horrible. Though the least explicable error is the decision to have galloping Alamosaurus, while the Lystrosaurus portrayal was the most blatantly insulting.
@@bkjeong4302Yeah their nonsense with _Lystrosaurus_ is particularly egregious especially when one remembers that it still had to contend with predators right after The Great Dying (_Proterosuchus_ especially), thus it wouldn't be helpless against predators, and that when _Erythosuchus_ appeared, _Lystrosaurus_ already went extinct
@@juanyusee8197 Also, the idea of a prey animal being hunted to extinction by a predator that evolved alongside it is kinda...idiotic...
@@justashark776with that logic, shouldn’t Smilodon have died out a few years after Titanis?
@@joshuaW5621 Could you elaborate what you mean by that?
I listed everything I found wrong with LOOP on a Reddit post: -LOOP kept flip-flopping between a gloss-over summary of prehistory and trying to tie in modern animals. -It also flip-flops between being a normie show with newbie-level paleontology and making off-hand paleo-nerd-level references. My dad was confused by the one-off mention of the Carnian Pluvial Episode, and I had to bring up a PBS Eons video to explain it to him. -It seemed to simultaneously cram the entire Phanerozoic into 8 hours while also padding it out with modern filler. -The flip-flopping between the present and the past made it seem unfocused (not to mention flip-flopping between points in prehistory). -Pliosaurs died out at the early Cretaceous, they did not make it to the K-PG event. -The Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Cretaceous, and Holocene extinctions were gushed over in detail, while the end-Triassic extinction was just a footnote. -Speaking of extinctions, the Devonian extinction was basically depicted as being caused by a giant algae bloom, rather than the more probable cause of Volcanic activity. -The last episode had this weird Misanthropic undertone when humans appeared (though the Buffalo Jump scene was the only good part of the episode). -The show in general sacrificed depth in favor of scope, and it shows. It almost feels like a bait-and-switch.
To quote a friend of mine, one of LOOP's biggest issues is that it just doesn't know what it is trying to be.
Speaking of PBS Eons, their episode on the CPE also massively fucks up by arguing this event wiped out dicynodonts and rauisuchians and allowed dinosaurs to dominate, even though rauisuchians actually became even more dominant as land predators during and after the CPE and the dicynodonts weren’t much affected. We really need to get rid of the trope of dinosaurs taking over the world during the Triassic: not only were there not that many larger dinosaurs during the Triassic, all the ones that did exist were restricted to higher latitudes because they were poorly suited to the hot, arid Triassic conditions compared to pseudosuchians (so basically the opposite of what WWD argued).
@@bkjeong4302I feel this is one of the other examples (alongside the notion that dinosaurs were already in decline prior to the K-Pg, sauropods getting "replaced" by ornothopods, pterosaurs being "displaced" by birds, terror birds displaced by placental mammals) of evolutionary narratives often repeated in documentaries and books were in fact down to premature interpretation of highly incomplete data.
I really want something to show an in depth look in to multiple different environments of the permian and triassic that's more than just 5 minutes of "this is what was before the dinosaurs" or something like walking with monsters where they try to cram Precambrian-early triassic in the same amount of episodes that a Mesozoic or Cenozoic documentary.
The Paleozoic as a whole needs some much more in-depth coverage. Walking with Monsters is pretty much the only documentary that focuses on it, and that was over a decade ago.
@@BugsandBiology and it crams a period twice as long as the Mesozoic into the same amount of episodes that walking with dinosaurs gets.
@@SYMBIOTEDINOSAURWalking with Monsters is half the length of Walking with Dinosaurs.
As someone who wants to study Therapsids in the future-absolutely in on that idea.
@@BugsandBiology I have an idea for an exclusively paleozoic show.
My main problem is how much it cut from the past to the present & it then focuses for much too long on present animals. The other issues brought up in other reviews also appeared as well.
Couldn't get past the terrorbird depiction. Trying to pass off an obvious mating display as a territorial fight with another male was infuriating to watch when absolutely no animal behaves like that, let alone modern day birds. Following it up by then the inaccurate hunting scene killing them was insult to injury. Terrorbirds are my favourite extinct animal and seeing them done like that was too much to bare.
It’s such an old cliche too. Documentaries should be trying to dispel these long standing myths, not play into them.
For me they spent far too much time on modern animals instead of the prehistoric ones
Maybe there was a version where this could have worked, but this was absolutely not it.
Half the time I can’t even tell if the modern day scenes are meant to be set in the prehistoric periods they’re spliced between.
Here's a tip: Don't watch the other Netlfix documentary 'Alien Worlds'...as it has the exact same problem...only ten times worse somehow.
@@Flufux Sadly, I already have watched it 😞
@@nathaniellippert9238 My condolences.
There really was a weird amount of predator bias particularly with the “big cats.” Whenever they depicted them hunting, the prey animals always go down without a fight. This is especially cringe with the lions hunting the baby mammoth. Given how absolutely dangerous modern elephants are when threatened, modern lions almost never hunt them unless they’re isolated. Elephants have strong herd mentality and will not hesitate to mob and curb stomp a pride of lions when a calf is in danger. Mammoths would have probably done the same but this “documentary” just has them staring at the lions all dumbfounded despite the lions being significantly outnumbered and outmuscled by said mammoths.
Contrast to David's lines in "The Hunt": "The margin for error is tiny, the odds are against them. All any predator can do, is keep on trying."
Even in PhP Attenborough repeatedly mentions hunts fail most of the time. Plus there’s a lot of failed hunts on screen too.
I never got to the mammoth part, but for the whole terror bird scene, I was like "Just peck them with your beak or kick their lights out, they're like half your height! You're an apex predator, not a dodo!"
@Flufux Exactly! I’ve seen geese and chickens put up much more of a fight!
@@Internetpurge I've seen a goose pick a fight with an elephant.
Prehistoric Planet is in a completely different league to Life on our Planet. Its respect to the subject matter and scientific rigour is apparent in every frame. The production had the right approach and the right people working on it, from the paleontologists, the film crew, to the effects house.
The creators behind prehistoric planets thoughts “This series we wanted to show them something that wasn’t an illusion something that was real something they could see and touch and not devoid of merit.”
Prehistoric Planet is definitely the real win of dinosaur documentaries this year. It's not just because of the insane graphics, it was their dedication to the science, they wanted to paint a picture of the late cretaceous in the most realistic and accurate manner possible completely in line with what we know in a way that shows a highly nuanced depiction of how these animals related to the world around them and how they dealt with all kinds of struggles and situations life could throw at them. Plus the credibility, wonder and gravitas David Attenborough lends it through his narration is as amazing as ever. If you haven't seen it, do it! Seriously, every time that show has come out I've bought a month of Apple TV+ just to watch that series and I never regretted a dime spent.
This show annoyed the hell out of me because it was all over the place. It boggles the mind why they wouldn’t feature each episode based on chronological eras in time.
One more thing LOOP fucked up; repeating the myth of Komodo dragons as slow killers that bite prey and just do nothing but wait and follow. Yes, they fell into the trap of perpetuating popular falsehoods with a MODERN animal.
And they claimed horse/zebra teeth do not grind down. I work on and off in a stable during the summertime, and you can tell the horses age just by looking at the teeth.
I guess I should just be thankful the show never depicted Carcharodontosaurs. Cause we all know they’d have gotten the Planet Dinosaur treatment.
I knew it was bogus as soon as I heard the predators, which were ACTIVELY HUNTING, growling and making noises. Like bruh... WHY???
The “make it scarier” thing is something noone who has a surviving sense would aprove, everyone knows Jurasic Park’s movie T Rex but a single video of real, acurate depictions of the sounds and looks of the T Rex has more impact and infuse more fear than any T Rex depiction in any movie because IT FEELS REAL
I believe this is more of a personal issue than an absolute fact, after all there are people who find the T.Rex's fictional roars scarier than its real sounds.
My personal least favorite part was when they skipped over the entire Ediacaran and did a modern day coral-reef saying it was 'similar' to the Ediacaran. Like... that's not at all similar.
Besides, how hard would it even be to convincingly recreate an Ediacaran ecosystem on screen? Basically every animal is sessile and/or has a super simple appearance.
@@BugsandBiology It would be interesting to see any take on it, even briefly!
I went off in a fit of rage during that cave lion scene! My girlfriend didn’t understand why I was so upset.
The reason life on our planet failed where prehistoric planet did well was because loop had this weird opinions on things they had this weird cat OP thing going on and it really killed the whole vibe as for me it was like "Oh guess their playing favorite's."
I have just started your video, but it made me think of the time a few weeks ago where a friend of mine, who I learned had NEVER heard of Prehistoric Planet, told me this dino doco was amazing. I gave it about 5 minutes before I got put off and suggested she watch Prehistoric planet instead.
I think PhP would consistently have new viewers awestruck.
12:27 the fact that predators survived the extinction aswell such as proterosuchids makes it even worse especially when considering that they were quite large at like 3 meters
Yeah that stuck out like a sore thumb to me, even Walking with Monsters got that part right!
13:18 In my opinion this has to be the worst scene in this documentary If this was a young calf, then that would be believable. But this is a teenager, close to being an adult. I’m pretty sure a teenage mammoth would be able to defend itself against a single cave lion. There is no way a single cave lion would be able to take down a teenage mammoth by itself.
Yeah I understand mucking up some of the dinosaur behaviour, but I can't believe they were so incompetent that they fucked up the behaviour of two Ice Age mammals with actual living modern analogues.
This is something I expect to see from Jurassic Fight Club.
@@joshuaW5621 You could argue that the way JFC depicts prehistory is possibly BETTER than how LooP shows it. The awesomebroish cage-fight structure of JFC's episodes is stupid, but interspecific combat between contemporary animals IS at least something that happens. Mass-scale competitive displacement through "superior" animal groups wiping out "inferior" clades using the power of awesome coolness energy doesn't.
I think one of the biggest problems is that this is also on Netflix which has a broader user base, this documentary will be viewed more than prehistoric planet and will reach more of the masses. They will then interpret this as “we made them big and scary = more people like to see this” rather than the fact that people who like dinosaurs and animal documentaries will watch it anyways. This will feed them false information and then the loop of misinformation and scientifically inaccurate documentaries will become more widespread again and then loopty loop of the public being misinformed by documentaries that focus on feeding into the general present misconceptions. Massive shame. I really wish prehistoric planet was also on Netflix or other streaming services too to help spread this well executed documentary about animals that have been misrepresented
Prehistoric Planet should air on tv.
Also found this quote from a friend of mine who said this after watching the show, and addressing some of the defences on this show: "From the perspective of someone who took his evolutionary biology TA jobs very seriously; this show (LooP) does so much more to reinforce incorrect views about how evolution works, how things evolve, that some things "don't evolve" etc that the idea this is good, accessible evolutionary biology feels very wrong. Part of this comes from the narration, and some is a problem with using SO MANY modern stand-ins, many of which are not appropriate."
Evolution isn't 'Who's the fasted or strongest', it's more like 'Whatever works, works.'
A very succinct but accurate way to put it!
Something about that series didn’t sit right with me. They tried, but it was nothing on the level that the BBC have produced with the likes of Walking with Dinosaurs and Planet Dinosaur for example. One thing that bugged me was the Cave Lion taking down a sub-adult Woolly Mammoth by itself. That would have been unlikely.
Not everything that looks cute is safe. Bears also look cute, but a single grizzly bear can easily deal with a group of unarmed people.
Exactly, most dangerous animals today don't look scary. Bears and hippos look even cute, but they would kill you without hesitation. Scientifically accurate dinosaurs (having lips and feathers) maybe don't look scary, but that is exactly the point.
@@ExtremeMadnessX You are damn right
Yup, I'd even go so far to say alligators do look pretty cute and endearing from the surface, and Komodo dragons do have pretty derpy-looking faces.
@@juanyusee8197 Great whites too, when seen from the front.
Here's every inaccuracy some people I know picked up on: - Allosaurus did not have crocodilian scales, and its body proportions are off - Cameroceras did not have squid-like eyes, but Nautilus-like eyes - Cave lions did not have white or grey fur like a wolf. Fur remains show it was just slightly lighter than modern lions. - T. rex has too many teeth and lacks its prominent post-orbital crests (its skull us very off in general) - There's no evidence that Deinonychus hunted in packs. - There's no evidence thar Lystrosaurus couldn't detect predators (dicynodonts lived all the way through the Triassic) or was exceptionally stupid. - Triceratops likely lived in small family groups, and definitely could defend itself against T. rex.
From what I hear the Allosaurus design was likely ripped from Jurassic World.
It infuriates me how such massive or anatomically unadapted animals as Triceratops are forced to gallop. It’s as if they are deliberately making this caricature of the idea that this is a huge bull. I did my little research and roughly separated the Mesozoic animals that ran at a gallop. These are Pterosaurs, since the glop is essentially the only way for them to run fast. I have not yet identified a single dinosaur as an animal that could gallop.
To be fair, Triceratops is actually well-suited for mobility (far more so than, say, an elephant), but even then galloping is a serious stretch. A fast trot would be much more reasonable.
@@bkjeong4302 I completely agree.
I'm glad you mentioned the T. rex teeth issue. There's supposed to be four teeth in the premaxilla and it showed something like twelve. A few months back, I did a Google/Reddit search to see if anyone else was mentioning this and couldn't find a thing online. Yes! Erythrosuchus' gate was another big one. They put in all that time into creating these high quality digital models, you'd think they'd look at the skeleton somewhere along the line. I was so excited about finally seeing this underused achosauromorph in popular media that I didn't pick up on the sprawl right away. While not endothermic in the same sense as modern mammals and birds, It still would've been a highly active. We'll probably never see another reconstruction of it in documentary form again. Lystrosaurus (victorious survivor of the worst mass extinction in earth's history) as mere cannon fodder was disappointing as well. We know it would've burrowed and that could've easily been represented. It followed the same old sluggish/helpless/doomed to extinction trope that was so abundant pre-dinosaur resonance. The Triassic period is severely underrepresented in the media and is my favorite period in the history of earth. It would be nice to have a Prehistoric Planetesque doc that focused primarily on the whole of it. It'll probably never happen but we can always dream.
The T. rex teeth issue is also baffling to me considering that JP/JW Rexes (also done by ILM) somehow had more accurate teeth lmao.
A PhP-style documentary set in the Triassic is an absolute dream for me, but I doubt it’d happen since nothing in the Triassic is especially well-known or marketable to lay audiences.
I agree with most of what you said, but I think the lystrosaurus being canon fodder made perfect sense given the context. These lystrosaurs have had absolutely no predators for hundreds if not thousands of generations. They've completely lost their instinct of fear, and literally cannot feel threatened. It's the same situation as dodos on Mauritius. They had no predators and no sense of fear, people could reportedly walk right up to them and kill them while the other dodos didn't even react.
@@BugsandBiology A PhP sequel set in the Norian of the Late Triassic could work (Chinle Formation, Shastasaurus, Himalayasaurus, etc). Shame nobody really realizes how impressive the cast of taxa would be.
@@yissibiiyte You're basically repeating what was said in the documentary verbatim. You're both wrong. Lystrosaurus co-existed with predators prior to the evolution of Erythrosuchus. In the Lystrosaurus Assemblage Zone, both the therocephalian Moschorhinus and the archosauriform Proterosuchus were large enough to prey on Lystrosaurs and both existed before Erythrosuchus. Two species of Lystrosaurus existed in the Permian period. That's how long-lived this synapsid was. You don't just waltz over the Permo-Triassic boundary, speciate, and then thrive for millions of years only to go extinct because you're unable to recognize that Erythrosuchus wants to eat you. You really think that arguably the most successful organism in the whole of the fossil record wouldn't recognize a predator? The documentary is simply wrong (as most are). No legitimate scientist studying the Beaufort Group would ever make such a claim. Lystrosaurus isn't analogous to a dodo in any way, shape or form.
Without much exception, most of these "documentaries" just look like glorified video game cinematic cut scenes. The dinosaurs act too theatrical (borderline human) to suspend disbelief. Dont get me wrong. By contrast to the old "Walking With Dinosaurs" series, the CGI models look amazing. But there were times when I genuinely thought they'd start singing "hakuna matatta".
Exactly what I thought ! The models are fantastic (at least for prehistoric planet) and accurate but they don’t feel for a second like real, breathing animals. The only real default of walking with dinosaurs is its accuracy
@@Charlie-CharlotEhh not really, looking past the rose-tinted glasses of WWD's nostalgia, most of the time Prehistoric Planet's creatures actually felt much more like actual animals in their behaviour and mannerisms, while WWD has its fair share of moments where its creatures do not behave realistically at all (WWD's T. rex hunt had her roar at her prey while hunting solo and roaring at the end vs PhP's Rex brothers being largely silent in their hunt; the some of the animals constantly making noises (Coelophysis and to a lesser extent the Leallynasaura are the worst offenders) even when there's ZERO good reason for them to do so; Postosuchus, Placerias and juvenile Diplodocus being far too ridiculously slow to the point of comical unbelivability considering elephants were able to run pretty fast despite having similar weight-bearing issues with the juvenile Diplodocus in the show; etc.)
@@Charlie-CharlotAre you sure that you didn't mix Prehistoric Planet with Dinosaur Revolution? Animals in Prehistoric Planet actually behave as animals.
If is this about Prehistoric Planet, you couldn't be more wrong, especially when many behaviors in dinosaurs were inspired by many modern animals. Maybe you should watch some documentaries with modern living animals because you would be surprised of complex behaviors many animals have.
@@ExtremeMadnessX Yeah Dinosaur Revolution was the one with good models but cartoony behaviours (due to it being meant as a live-action cartoon before being shoehorned into a doc format).
For me the biggest issue I had with the series was all of the focus being on modern day life with the prehistoric past I *came* to see being mostly on the sidelines Felt like watching Alien Worlds all over again!
I was hoping you'd make this video. Thanks! You pretty much hit the nail on the head. And whilst your review mainly focuses on biology (understandable given your name and interest), I have to say there are some glaring geology/earth-history inaccuracies in the series as well. From this view, Life on Our Planet is perhaps better compared to BBC's "Earth", which is more or less the geological equivalent of Prehistoric Planet. Of course, it'd be a very long video to grind through everything, and the portrayal of evolution still remains the core issue of LOOP, which you rightly point out. One positive side with this mixed bag of a series is that it can act as a textbook example of how to and how to NOT make nature/paleo documentary. I hope future filmmakers will learn from the response of all these doucmentary series and know how strong the crave for accuracy actually is. The days of "unwitted dodos" are numbered.
Good Lord, that mammoth hunting scene was pharcical. Seeing it pretty much killed even the slightest spark of excitement I had for Life On Our Planet.
I "watched" Life On Our Planet while I had COVID (aka I slept through 99% of it and only remember a couple of scenes).
Hope you've recovered from COVID at least!
I was gonna watch this documentary, I am now glad I watched this. Great job on the vid!
I just find it comical that they prioritized the animals looking scary. Like I remember seeing the first episode where they had the terrorbirds do that territory march and I thought "ain't that neat, they're trying to display these animals in a less violent more realistic way." talk about missing the mark.
The lions and mammoth thing really baffles me considering we literally have living examples of what the result would be now with lions and elephants, unsurprisingly lions almost never even attempt to hunt elephants and if a lion managed to pin a calf down like that (not that a single lion could do that to one of that size) the herd would absolutely come to its defense and drive the lions off. Elephants today regularly just flip over rhinos randomly when they feel like it, and rhinos are far more potentially dangerous than any lion. Not as egregious as the terror bird sabertooth thing but still just makes me scratch my head.
I would actually say the Cave Lion vs. Mammoth was actually worse than the Smilodon vs. Terror bird one owing to the fact that as you said, both animals have closely-related modern counterparts.
Lions can get bodied by a single Hippo, who can easily get bodied by a Rhino, who can get bodied by one pissed off Elephant Not trying to put a hierarchy of power here, but i think it's pretty clear lions are WAY underdeveloped to fight any kind of Elephant
The documentary lost me when i saw the pterosaur design and behavior. prehistoric planet spoiled me with how beautiful yet terrifying pterosaurs can look, and life on our planet disappointed me with the bad design of the unnamed pterosaurs. :(
Prehistoric Planet is single-handedly responsible for getting me interested in Pterosaurs.
I didn’t even finish it. Some of the episodes actually put me to sleep, which is hard to do when I’m watching these documentaries.
Prehistoric Planet definitely raised the bar for Paleo docs, if it didn’t happen LOOP would’ve probably done better. Now everyone’s just lookin for the mistakes and shi
Honestly I felt that I would still be massively disappointed with LOOP regardless of Prehistoric Planet, largely due to LOOP's absolutely misleading portrayal of evolution, as that was what I hated from Walking with Monsters in particular.
The main issue I had was I watched it for prehistoric creatures and thought maybe the last episode or tiny segments would point out things relating to modern day animals. Nope its mostly modern day animals. I was sitting there waiting and waiting then finally something prehistoric happens. For all of two or three minutes.... then thats it. Basically if you saw the trailer you saw all the prehistoric animal parts.
while being a mixed back ill always love the scene where the smilodon climbs on the doedicurus even if the animals likely never interacted irl
That's defo the best Cenozoic sequence in the series. As for best sequence in the series it's second to or tied with ghe Arthropleura courtship scene IMO.
Aside from anachronistic plants in the background, I’d say the Arthropleura sequence is basically Prehistoric Planet tier.
Brilliant video highlighting the show's issues, you've done it even better than I could! Life on Our Planet approached the subject of the evolution of life with probably the worst mindsets one could do in a documentary. Another issue some had brought up is the show's roster of prehistoric life mostly felt like "Trilogy of Life's Greatest Hits". By contrast, other documentaries such as Prehistoric Planet and the Trilogy of Life gave spotlight to plenty of dark horse/obscure critters alongside the well-known ones, with _Barbaridactylus_ even appearing in a lisenced Jurassic World game (Evolution 2) following its appearance in Prehistoric Planet! The lack of incorporation of more recent finds do not help to the documentary at all too, as it ends up feeling "more of the same" because of it.
Thanks! Yeah I should’ve touched on that as well, but I felt the video was already getting a little long, plus there was a pretty tight deadline cause I’m going away in a few hours and thus otherwise wouldn’t have been able to complete the video until I get home in about a week. But yeah, LooP was playing it way too safe. So many things we’d seen before, and I get the impression they were trying to cater to laypeople’s expectations of what prehistoric animals “should” be like.
@@BugsandBiologyFair enough, and yeah the show played too safe for a palaeodocumentary that is supposedly meant to be this ambitious. Another thing I just remembered as well was that Walking with Beasts handled the terror birds a lot better than LOOP's portrayal, as at least WWB gave the nuance that they were doing well in North America despite being pushed into the sidelines by _Smilodon_ in South America. It's still very wrong, but compared to LOOP's, definitely much better. And I also agreee that LOOP's claim that _Lystrosaurus_ was eaten to extinction by the _Erythrosuchus_ was just dumb, especially if one remembers that _Lystrosaurus_ still had to contend with predators after the Great Dying (_Proterosuchus_ for example), and _Erythrosuchus_ only showed up after _Lystrosaurus'_ dying out. I also fully agree with your point about how more "awesomebro" approach to creature designs is the cheapest way to make prehistoric animals scary that may not even work, LOOP AND the Jurassic World films largely using more "awesomebro" designs as a crutch is probably why they don't feel scary at all compared to Prehistoric Planet's hunting scenes and even the first 2 JP movies. All in all, it feels like LOOP put the most effort in the Paleozoic segments, but dropped the ball hard on the Mesozoic onwards, with very few segments in the Mesozoic and Cenozoic that I would genuinely consider "good" or "great".
There's some good sequences, but overall they ballsed it up.
My opinion in a nutshell. Definitely agreed.
It’s biggest problem is not being narrated by David Attenborough like all nature documentaries should be
When it came to Prehistoric Planet i was hooked, and i couldnt stop watching. However, with Life on our Planet i couldnt, i watched two episodes and just forgot to go back - which is crazy as ive loved prehistory since i can remember. Prehistoric Planet is very obviously the superior documentary
Out of many bad scenes in this documentary, the one that stands out to me the most is the arkansaurus and deinonychus scene. Morgan literally says the arkansaurus is "built for speed", only for it to get immediately outrun by the dromaeosaurs, which despite what pop culture says, were not particularly well adapted for fast running. And when they do catch it, it just stands there and lets them kill it, not even a single kick or struggle. Not to mention the continued insistence that dromaeosaurs were pack hunters. But to be fair even Prehistoric Planet couldn't resist that trope.
I wouldn't consider the pack-hunting trope to be that problematic, if anything I feel the resistance against it has gone to overcorrection territory. With _Deinonychus_ in particular, we know most of the _Tenontosaurus_ feeding sites consist of Tenontos that are half-grown, which heavily implies that they do at least hunt together some of the time (whether they stayed in groups in occasions other than hunting is another matter though). At the very least, the notion that _Deinonychus_ cooperatively hunted together is still much more plausible than the idea that _Tyrannosaurus_ hunted in multigenerational family pack units...
I was expecting this to be about why different life forms on earth failed but instead I got a review of a documentary I’ve never seen or care to see and still watched it. Great video! Did not feel like the runtime at all
Sorry for the late reply, but thanks! Was worried this video dragged on too much, so glad it felt faster than the runtime.
My biggest problem with the show that makes it inferior the “walking with…” series is the massive skips over very important evolutionary steps and key species. The depiction of the Permian mass extinction was fantastic though, really great visual to convey “the extinction of 90% of all life on earth”
Great video!! Honestly I never had any intention of watching this documentary because I currently don’t have access to Netflix but I had no idea how glaringly awful it was… I kinda expected it to not be as good as Prehistoric planet but not outwardly terrible, and I hate to say that I was wrong… I’m absolutely sick of these types of supposedly “educational” films literally doing the OPPOSITE of educating and instead just adhering to the general public’s skewed view of our world and the creatures that once inhabited it. Like you said, it’s excusable to suspend your disbelief for movies like Jurassic park because they aren’t inherently designed to be educational, Jurassic park is a fantastic film despite many inaccuracies in its depiction of dinosaurs… but no one is expecting Jurassic Park to be scientifically accurate, people WILL expect a documentary made in the current year to be up to date and accurate in its information. It’s literally just misinformation, I don’t get any entertainment value in being lied to by something that’s meant to teach me something.
Absolutely agreed. Movies can do whatever movies do, but documentaries should be educational. The people behind these shows should know that a lot of viewers will walk away taking what they “learned” as fact, and thus try to ensure the information they are delivering is as up to date and accurate as possible.
like this documentary cares more about looking awesome bro than it does about teaching people dinosaurs were amazing animals and so were so many of animals depicted and documentaries should not treat its animals like movie monsters Terror Bird in this show can join JFC Ceratosaurus in the unfair "punching bag" of the show
netflix + documentaries = great possibility of LOLs of frustration
I generally have low expectations for documentaries these days.
The only Scene worth noting is the Arthropleuras Meeting, really beautiful and cute, and the Animal is rapresented very well. The Rest, apart from some nice Design, is yet another wasted and unsuccessful Opportunity that could have been beautiful. One is what a serious and professional Documentary should be, the other is not.
Alright, I’ll be that guy. I actually really enjoyed the show. I thought it did a decent job explaining the various changes our planet went through over the ages. I especially liked that it didn’t just focus on a single block of prehistory but rather attempt to cover roughly half a billion years of sweeping changes.
The problem is that while the concept behind it is fantastic, its confusing and utterly misleading take on how evolution works (which served as the backbone of the show's narrative) significantly tanked any educational value it had, rendering what should be a great documentary into a mediocre one due to the active misinformation presented. Already posted this elsewhere here, but to quote a friend of mine who has an evolutionary biology background: "From the perspective of someone who took his evolutionary biology TA jobs very seriously; (Life On Our Planet) does so much more to reinforce incorrect views about how evolution works, how things evolve, that some things "don't evolve" etc that the idea this is good, accessible evolutionary biology feels very wrong. Part of this comes from the narration, and some is a problem with using SO MANY modern stand-ins, many of which are not appropriate." Because of it, I can't say it did a good job of even explaining the evolutionary history of well, life of our planet itself.
@@juanyusee8197 Evolution isn't real so they can play with the hypothetical idea as however
@@juanyusee8197Don't reply to the guy who replied to you. Trust me
@@kade-qt1zuI just disliked his conment lol.
This documentary was made by a Hollywood director with little to probably no second opinion from well experts in the field
13:20 It’s even worse when you realise that Cave lions were: A) Solitary B) Almost exclusively hunted deer because cave hyenas bullied them so much. Also can we please get good cave hyena representation in media for once? These things prevented humans from crossing into Americas, they deserve a feature somewhere.
Given the papers on their diet already came out in 2011 and 2015 respectively (before the show went into production), this was also something they should have already known. How embarassingly incompetent.
Honestly could’ve gone on forever with listing individual inaccuracies. Which is why I generally stuck to the more overarching issues.
I wouldn’t call things like reindeer “small prey” TBH compared to a cave lion.
@@bkjeong4302 I meant “Small prey” in comparison to megafauna like wooly rhinos, wisents and mammoths. I’ll change it because it gives the wrong impression to people who haven’t read the papers.
Prehistoric Planet showed dinosaurs as real animals. Life on our Planet showed them and many of the other animals featured as monsters.
I had such high hopes for morgan freeman Shame. FORGOTTEN BLOODLINES: AGETE BETTER BE GOOD
Great review. I loved how you backed up your thoughts & opinions with contrasting examples from the other documentary & facts from your learned knowledge.
I hate how the terror bird is used as the Smilodon’s punching bag. Btw, you sound a bit like Tri-Claw Gaming.
Honestly it's really sad. Because I would love to have an in-depth documentary on the periods in the Palaeozoic and Cenozoic, cause even to this day they're really underrepresented. But yeah.... Maybe something closer to Prehistoric Planet would be nice.
I really wish someone made a show on just the Cenozoic mammals that came before the modern day with the graphics of prehistoric planet and similar story telling (obviously different for many reasons) as that time is just as important and would be better then the Mammoth and Cave lion squence and Smilodon and Phorusracos sequence which were both really bad.
Yeah that’d be amazing. And fairly easy to film on location given early Cenozoic flora was already relatively modern.
Why the hell LOOP skipped past almost the entirety of Cenozoic terrestrial mammal evolution is beyond me. Plus repeating the myth of mammals being tiny in the Early Cenozoic before getting big and outcompeting giant flightless birds, when in reality mammals moved into megafaunal niches first (in both herbivorous and predatory roles).
@@bkjeong4302 Yeah i was really bumbed out when they did that as there was after of course the first million years mayby even 30,000 years mammalian megafauna like the Pantodonts, Dinoceratans and brontotheres existed some of the groups having members as big as asian elephants oh and the avians like the early Thunderbirds of Australia there relative Gastornis and the recently evolved bird of prey family Phorusracidae all these groups had just evolved. Also the whole terror birds went extinct cause of the smilodon genus is just absurd because the only species the phorusracus wouldve come across was Smilodon gracilis who would get killed easily by one of those animals.
@@bkjeong4302 We could have had _Uintatherium_ finally appearing in pop culture here, we could have had it all...
I would watch an entire documentary on the wildlife of South America before it connected to North America alone. Every documentary I've seen on the subject always takes place after that and focuses way more on a cat with unusually large teeth rather than the extreme variety of crazy animals that existed on the continent without interference from the outside world.
Trilobitomorpha
Huh?
@@KOurboi Sorry wrong video. My phone glitches like that.
@@DJLucas-xv7oe ok
I dunno about a kid not being scared by the Prehistoric Planet T-Rex, my nephews went to the zoo once and started screaming just from seeing a lion peacefully sleeping. But overall I agree with your points lol.
Finished prehistoric planet in a day. Still on the first episode of this though. And it's been weeks since I started.
Yeah a recurring complaint about this series from many (myself included) is that it just doesn't really do a good job hooking the viewer in.
You can literally hear a reuse of the jp Trex sound when the rex is chasing the trike
The terrorbirds tail feather placements are upside down. The other feathers should be overlapping with the central one being the top one and the outermost ones being at the bottom
I didn't finish this series. I watched most of it but found myself frustrated beyond the inaccuracies. Such as the constant and unending jumps between the past and present. I love the animals that live today but when I saw the icon on netflix and read the little paragraph, I was expecting a fully immersive and enlightening look at paleo history. I wasn't expecting to spend so much time in the present day, and I wasn't expecting them to not properly explain where we were in time when we did go back. I'm still catching up on paleo history so I followed along relatively well but it doesn't do much to educate if you're literally lost in time. I also wish they hadn't done prehistoric history so dirty with their designs and inaccuracies. To an extent I get it, it takes a long time to put together the visuals and edit and produce these documentaries, and some details will change over that period of time, but it felt like they were leaning on information that had been considered inaccurate for years. Though I'm not surprised about some of the designs feeling more like they were from jurassic park. If memory serves, ILM made the CG dinosaurs for the Jurassic park movies, and ILM was contracted for all the visuals and special effects for this doc as well. Also Spielberg and Amblin Entertainment (his production company) were involved in both this doc and Jurassic Park. It's just a shame. I was pumped to watch this and felt so disappointed in the end. It had everything going for it with Morgan Freeman, the premise, Spielberg's company producing it, and ILM backing the visuals, and they still fumbled the bag.
Definitely agree. There’s enough good in the show for it to be clear that it had some serious potential. So much was going for it, and yet they dropped the ball big time. Again, it’s not terrible, but I definitely paid the price for my high expectations.
I was watching prehistoric planet with my 4 year old son the other day. Both of us enjoyed it immensely :) My takeaway was that dinosaurs are usually depicted as monsters, other wordly behemoths in most media, while in reality: they were simply animals. With very similar lives to their modern day counterparts.
If you really think about it, even a deer could be seen as utterly terrifying, given the proper context, framing, and situation, and no one would have to do anything to alter it's appearance to do so.
I did not realize "Life on our Planet" is the title of a show and thought this would be a general review of terran life...
I hadn't heard of the series 'Life on Our Planet' before watching this video so I thought you meant the title in a more literal sense. Like just life on planet earth, as in living things on planet earth rather than a documentary about them. And I was very confused because you know, I wouldn't really say that life has failed on planet earth, so I thought maybe it would wrap around to say something weird and interesting about how we're all failures after all? That we haven't lived up to our evolutionary potential?? I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting but a documentary review wasn't it. Interesting video regardless, though. A bit of an aside, but I'm extremely fond of that clip where the smilodon is confused by how to go about hunting the glyptodon and starts tapping it awkwardly.
They made a huge deal out of entering the age of dinosaurs then started talking about bugs and flowers after giving us only 2 minutes of allosaurus because it would’ve been too expensive to truly replicate what Prehistoric Planet did. Come on Netflix, don’t you know I’m just here to embrace my inner 5 year old? I wanna see Allosaurus going wild.
A "dinosaur" show being mostly about bugs. Hmm...feel like I've seen that before.
TBH, the rise of flowering plants was a FAR bigger deal in the grand scheme of things than any old dinosaur - and is arguably the most important event since the great dying. And so for a documentary that's supposed to showcase grand evolutionary changes across the whole of life, I think it was more than apt. I have a lot of criticism of the show, and while I see where you are coming from - this is one I can't agree with it.
@@PaleoEdits I’m not saying talking about the evolution of plant life isn’t important, and on its own that would definitely be an interesting aspect that most prehistoric documentaries choose to ignore. However, in the case of this documentary I think it has far more to do with budgetary issues and Netflix trying to rush out something to compete with Prehistoric Planet rather than any creative vision. This approach allowed them to fill most of the show with reused footage from National Geographic and Animal Planet rather than making high quality CGI renders, hell I half expected them to use that one famous slow mo capture of a Great White killing a seal after they reused the crocodiles killing wildebeests.
@@aceofspadesguy4913 That would certainly explain a lot. Many of the evolutionary stories, plant evolution being a prime example, did feel like someone was paraphrasing a summary of 20 year old popular science book. In other words, half-baked script with stock footage. Comparing it to the plant evolution episode of BBC's "Earth" is quite a stark contrast.
I also had a problem with the story as well, The show was kinda boring and I kept falling asleep when I was watching it, I don't think Morgan Freemans voice helped either
Yeah I (and many of my friends) had trouble finding this show engaging too. With most other paleo-documentaries (not just Prehistoric Planet and WWD) I did not have this issue, but with LOOP I found it very hard to finish an episode in a day.
Do you do flight reviews?
Yeah I was so horribly disappointed I didn’t get past episode 3 I think, and aside from the few clips shown in the trailers, etc. (the more “attractive” animal appearances) most of what I remember is trying to stay awake while Morgan Freeman went on about the evolution of plants/fungi/vegetation… Not to say that that can’t be interesting, but it was not what I understood the main focus of the show would be according to the impressions I got from the trailers. You’re *very* correct in that it’s hard to accept any supposed “new paleo documentaries” after the high standards Prehistoric Planet set! Also I’m sorry to be That Person, but the “deinonychus pack hunting” scene was the one that probably irritated me the most; I almost switched off the show right then. At least with PP they made it sound less like “pack hunting” and more like a sort of opportunistic, cooperative hunting event (in season 1) that relied heavily on circumstance and prey abundance, rather than the dromaeosaurids being “highly social, intelligent pack hunters.” Even that suffered from the pervasive “raptors are super social pack hunters” mentality in season 2, but Prehistoric Planet tried a helluva lot harder - and succeeded a helluva lot more - than Life On Our Planet!
When a 1990s p*rno film has a better Allosaurus model than a 2023 high-budget documentary:
What in the butter nut fuck did you just say in this comment section
What?
If I had an arthropleura I would be unstoppable
People who own something bigger than an Doberman Dog: 💀
the phorusrhacid segment, i feel, is a really good showcase of the *worst* aspects of the show. if nothing else. its my *most hated* part. it gets everything wrong. *everything*.
(they actually mentioned this dont look at me pls)
I wanted to enjoy this, but the pacing feels like it’s going 100 mph to track every period in a nutshell, with all the creatures barely getting 5 minutes of screen time each, and the tone is so serious, it’s depressing. Prehistoric Planet knew what it wanted to be, and showed dinosaurs weren’t monsters, they were animals like any modern beast, and combined with Mr. Attenborough’s whimsical, fun narration, made it so pleasurable to watch.
Hey B&B, my tarantula has a really big white bald spot on her abdomen. I know this is normal because this happens to every tarantula, but what's not normal is that the day she had that spot, she refused to eat and she has been struggling like a psychopath. The only thing that I did to help her is give her water. What should I do?
Im not sure if this was true, but it appears to me that much of the modern day animal sections were pulled from other documentaries, such as the sheephead wrasse eating the urchin, which makes me wonder if there was much effort even made to the modern day sections of the documentary.
They were. I noticed a whole bunch of shots from previous SIlverback Film documentaries. In the behind the scenes video on youtube, you can also hear the producer saying that they wanted to film the triassic scene in canada but couldn't because of covid. Well, clearly travel wasn't a restriction for these wildlife shots...
You just got yourself a new subscriber, this was a great video. I'm a layperson who does have an interest in nature, evolution and paleontology but I'm not well-versed unfortunately. You mentioned that evolution was much more than the survival of the fittest, and more about contribution by reproduction at 8:22. But wouldn't contributing to it still involve having the ability to have the necessary skills and attributes to survive and eventually get to that point? Sorry, I'm a layperson. But I do wanna know.
It’s more the fact that evolutionary fitness (reproductive success) isn’t the same as conventional fitness (being fast/strong etc). The latter can certainly play a role in evolutionary success, but it’s not the prime driver