Thunder lizard threat!

The Mirror’s fearless investigation into the public peril posed by the gigantic carnivorous puppets of Walking With Dinosaurs: The Arena Spectacular

FAST CREEPS, OUT OF CONTROL:
A trio of raptors in Walking With Dinosaurs

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

There’s a big show in town this week, folks. A big production in the big confines of the Bell Centre, full of big—and terrifyingly lifelike—dinosaurs. No, not the rock-music kind. The beady-eyed, blood-crazed prehistoric kind.

A big show—and a big threat to the innocent and undeserving citizens of our fine city!

Nellie Beavers, the show’s associate company manager, offers an illustration of the stupefying scale of Walking With Dinosaurs: The Arena Spectacular. “The first unique challenge we face is physically moving it from place to place,” she says.

“We have 17 life-size dinosaurs in the show and it requires a crew of 65 people to operate the show on a daily basis. As well, we have 25 semi trucks to travel our show. We’re in London this week and they said the most trucks they’d ever seen to date had been Cher, who had 20-something trucks, but we topped that. Most rock ’n’ roll shows have anywhere between 10 and 15 trucks, and we have almost twice that, so just physically, it’s a much larger scope of show than most people are used to seeing.

“And when people see the mama Brachiosaurus come out onto the arena floor, there’s literally a gasp in the entire arena, because they thought it couldn’t get any bigger at that point, and then this enormous dinosaur which almost hits the lighting grid comes out. Everyone’s jaws hit the floor.”

Allosaurus… au revoir, human!

Rest assured, readers, that your humble correspondent’s jaw likewise hit the floor upon realizing that these people, while perhaps respectable professionals in the field of light evening entertainment, are clearly oblivious to the potential catastrophe they’re only a few crossed wires away from unleashing upon us.

Walking With Dinosaurs: The Arena Spectacular is a live extension of the totally kickass BBC miniseries from 1999, the one with off-camera narrator Kenneth Branagh ladling Shakespearian gravitas all over scenes of hideous primeval beasts rending and shredding each others’ flesh in an unending war for survival.

Had these monstrosities remained safely confined to television—and not been painstakingly reconstructed as towering electronic marionettes with the very real capability of going haywire and running amok through downtown Montreal, tearing open cars like bags of Fritos and devouring their helpless passengers while Barney Fife-looking policemen fire their dinky little sidearms and howl, “Bullets won’t stop them!”—Montreal would be a far safer place this week.

Lucas Worth is among the touring actors who play the live show’s narrator and only visible human being on the arena floor, the fictional paleontologist Huxley. Just listen to what he has to say about finding himself within striking distance of these grotesque brutes from a time long before any notion of mercy or morality.

“There are a couple of dinosaurs I’ve grown to enjoy more than others,” Worth says as though it were the most natural and reasonable thing. “I like Allosaurus a lot—he’s the first large predator. I mean, before that, there’s the Liliensternus, which is about raptor-size, and biggest predator is of course the T Rex. So the Allosaurus is kind of in the middle. There’s something about the way he looks and the way the puppeteers work his character that I just like. I can’t really explain it, I just like him.”

That’s right, Mr. Worth, some things defy explanation. Like this choice quote, for instance: “The raptors aren’t very playful, they’re just getting the job done. But the baby T-rex hops around and is sort of cute at times—which is weird, because I still stand close enough to it to go, this thing could just swallow half my person, and yet it’s cute.”

HE CALLS THEM FRIENDS, THEY CALL HIM DINNER:
A hapless Huxley (c) and two dinosaurs

Can you say “vulnerable?”

Worth—who has just admitted to a certain chumminess with a 15-foot-tall, 45-foot-long, dagger-toothed massacre machine that exists only to kill, kill and kill again, and coos his affection for a waddling bundle of blue murder—claims he was hired on the basis of his acting skills. It seems clear that what qualified him, however, was his foam-flecked, suicidal psychosis. Read now what he says about tiptoeing through a pack of savage raptors.

“Of the predators, they’re the smallest and the quickest, and I get the closest to them. In a way, it’s not as scary for me personally, because in that segment, I’m very close and we suspend the disbelief—okay, they can’t see me. I’m in my bubble, walking around them and observing and talking about them, but they can’t see me. But that’s the only reason they don’t freak me out.”

Excuse me—“They can’t see me?” Mr. Worth is of course applying the logic of a toddler who assumes that, having covered her own eyes, she is invisible.

Given such astounding naiveté, Worth and his collaborators, were they to be sent back to the Jurassic era by means of some wacky mishap in a mad scientist’s time-travel lab, would clearly be dino-kibble in less time than it takes to utter the names of some of these cold-blooded reptilian abominations.

Worth says he has little trouble pronouncing the appropriate paleontological terminology, the Ornithocheirus over here and the Plateosaurus over there. “I’m pretty good that way,” he states, and then confesses, “Last night, though, I totally tripped up on a pretty simple word—‘vulnerable.’” There’s no discernible note of irony in his voice when he says this.

Bludgeoned by science!

Here’s another disturbing little confession from Worth—he’s a complete amateur when it comes to confronting these horrifying creatures. “I don’t know all that much about paleontology, personally. I’ve learned a lot doing the show, and done a little bit of research on my own just because it piqued my interest, but I love the fact that the show is [scientifically] accurate. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I don’t think we’re hitting the audience over the head with information. It’s not a lecture-y kind of script and I certainly don’t present it in a lecture-y way. I think that if they’re interested in those facts, then it’s like, ‘Oh wow, cool,’ and they’ll remember some. If they’re not and they just want to see the spectacle, that’s fine—they’re not beaten over the head with science and facts, but they are there.”

Here’s a scientific fact that Worth, Beavers and their scandalously irresponsible colleagues ought to be thumped gently over their heads with—dinosaurs are dangerous enough, but as sentient animals can perhaps be repelled with immediately apparent threats to their survival. Rampaging robot dinosaurs, on the other hand, cannot be stopped by anything short of atomic weapons (this true fact can probably be verified by a reliable source such as Wikipedia).

Just listen to their mealy-mouthed assurances—the ol’ “nothing can possibly go wrong” routine. “Some of the kids get a little freaked out,” Worth admits, but adds, “I think more by the noise. It’s not a violent show, it’s not a bloody show by any means. The dinosaurs do confront each other, but it’s not a scary show.”

A bigger problem

Beavers is even more blithe than Worth in her refusal to acknowledge the blood-curdling prospect of mass mayhem. “The dinosaurs certainly fight among themselves, but we don’t let the dinosaurs loose into the arena to attack children. You don’t have to worry about your kid getting eaten.”

So she claims!

“But they do have conflicts among themselves. There are dinosaur fights. The Torosaurs fight among themselves, the Liliensternus and the Plateosaurus get into it, and the Brachiosaurus and the Allosaurus definitely have a moment of contention, so there are dino-fights.”

In other words, the beasts will be gotten all riled up before they go nuts and destroy the downtown area. Should that occur, Beavers—who, giggling, admits to being unfamiliar with the film Westworld, in which robot cowboys on the fritz exterminate hapless tourists—essentially acknowledges that the show’s production team has absolutely no contingency plan for such an event.

She can only say, gamely, “If that happens, we have a bigger problem on our hands!”

As if that were any reassurance.

AT THE BELL CENTRE THROUGH SUNDAY,
AUG. 23. ENGLISH PRESENTATIONS
TONIGHT, THURSDAY, AUG. 20,
7 P.M. AND SUNDAY, AUG. 23, 3 P.M.,
$19.50-$79.50, ALL AGES