Last night Brendyn and I jumped into old faithful yellow truck and went down to the St. Pete Times Forum, formerly known as the "Ice Hockey Arena" to see 'Walk With Dinosaurs".
What a fabulous show this was! The entire floor of the arena was the walking space for full sized dinosaurs. On this picture you can see rocks in the middle, these represented the shifting continents and moved around the floor slowly at different times. The teeth frame the screen where habitat information and weather conditions were shown and also the area from which the dino's entered and exited. These two long necks were fabulous!! Right above the teeth you can see a square of lights -- when the biggest long neck stood straight up with his neck, it looked like he barely cleared those lights. We were 21 rows up and I could have fed him out of my popcorn bucket if he had leaned our way.
Some of the smaller dinosaurs had people inside - kind of like 'Big Bird' does on Sesame Street. These, according to the 'Walk With Dinosaurs" website and study guide were all made with lightweight aluminum frames, mesh fabric that was painted and tons of animatronical energy. The website talks about how they used different kinds of balls: rubber balls, styrofoam balls etc to mimic muscle or fat. Some of the bigger dino's operate by the use of a 'voodoo rig'. There is a little dino, and they operate him with controllers. Then whatever the little dino does is interpreted by a computer and sent as a command to the big dinosaur. Kind of like a radio-remote little car would in turn be operating a full size car. Very cool!
On this guy, you can see the base clearly. The feet were attached to this T shaped base and, if you looked closely you could see that the feet were kind of like on a bicycle pedal device. I watched for things like this a lot at the first ... but I have to tell you that it was very easy to slip over the line of fantasy and reality and to forget that you were watching machines and not real dinosaurs.
As we sped through time at an alarming pace of 20 million years at a clip, at different times there would be differing
kinds of vegetation. These were, we think, air inflated, similar to the big decorations we put on our front yards at the holidays. You couldn't see them at all, and then they started popping up. When the volcano erupted, they all deflated and disappeared again. These are the flowers and foliage from one of the time periods. In the center there were big tree's. It's probably hard to get a sense for how big some of this stuff was, but even being there, I had to watch for the man in some of the scenes for a sense of true size He said, up front, that he was 6 feet tall.
We saw fog, smoke, volcanic eruption, fire, rain and changing scenery's. All nice background for the true stars of the shows: the full sized Dinosaurs!
This guy was my favorite. I don't know the real names to these dinosaurs, I only know the names the kids call them. This one is known as 'Club Tail'.
He was an herbivore and his boney exterior plates probably made him very difficult to eat. His tail was a formidable weapon and he did not hesitate to use this against another dinosaur who was trying to intimade him. For some reason, he makes me want to call him 'Artie' ... as in Artichoke! LOL! I am funny to me sometimes!
'Raptors!! We all know these from the Jurassic Park movies. But if you look closely you can see the human legs in front of the dino legs. Even so, these guys were scary. Here they are standing and perusing the front rows of the audience like they were looking for a snack. The heads moved, the eyes moved, the tails moved. The raptors hunt very keenly and communicate with each other as they do so.
Toward the end of the Jurassic period a new player comes onto the scene. This was a funny part of the show. While they guy is talking about the T-Rex, we saw a shadow image of a huge T-Rex on the screen. As the curtains opened you were bracing yourself for the full sized T-Rex to come out -- instead -- out comes a 'baby', with a little baby roar.
But, true to his genetics, he thinks he is a bad ass and starts trying to intimidate the 'Club Tail' and the Stegosaurus and finally they get him isolated between the two of them and one of the continental rocks. Then he starts crying and out comes Mama T-Rex who lets it be known in no uncertain terms that her precious baby is not to be messed with! Her roar, you could feel through the center of your body!
Here's mama and baby together. Look at the legs of the little dino, the dino legs bend back to the left and the human legs bend forward to the right. On the Mama T-Rex you can see a stabilizing bar and the voodoo rig base. Trust me when I tell you, that last night when Mama was on stage, I wasn't noticing the bar nor the base. She went around the arena shaking her head, showing her teeth, mouth open, roaring, hunting, swinging her tail in a very ferocious manner. Several small children were clawing their way up their parents body to get away from her. The 'baby' here is about 8 foot tall -- if that give you any idea of how big mama was.
Afterwards I told Brendyn that I thought little brother Tyler would have been 'scar-ar-ar-ared'. And Brendyn told me to 'add in about 100 more 'ars' Grammy!'
This show was, in a word, spectacular. I'd also throw in awesome, amazing, magnificent, well-done, fascinating and loud.
So: tickets, parking, 2 popcorns, 1 soda ($4.50 for one 16 oz bottled soda!!!), McDonalds Big Kids Happy Meal on the way home, and the intent on buying little brother some play dinosaurs equals PRICELESS!
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