Land of the Mammoth

Rating:
Summary: Mammoth DVDs were very good
Review: I have both of these DVDs, both this one, and the previous, Raising the Mammoth, which I found to be fascinating, informative and entertaining. Granted, they are not Jurrasic Park or some such, but they were not intended to be. They are documentaries, not feature films. And true, the Computer Graphics, in some cases, was not up to the standards of Walking with Dinosaurs, but again, I don't think that was the intent of the producers, although I think they would have liked it to be.

These two films, seen back to back, show the efforts being made and the studies conducted in the scientific field of endeavor, not the made for TV movie. If you really want to learn what is going on with research into these areas, you will really enjoy these films. And, it is true, in the end, they discovered that the animal they had hoped to be intact seems to have been damaged, either by injury, exposure or predation after death, there is still a lot to be learned from these films and I urge you all to view them, if you have the slightest interest in this field of study.

Rating:
Summary: Oh dear
Review: I saw this when It first aired on Discovery. The program is trying so hard to be like Walking with Dinosaurs but it totally fails.

The main problem is there is just not enough footage and so many shots are shown repeatedly. While some of the footage is indeed interesting there are only so many shots of hairdryers thawing out a lump of hairy ice that I can take, and while them finding the first mammoth tusk was interesting by the time they had dug up the 50th I was almost asleep...

There is also a problem with the CG. It is just terrible!! Whereas in walking with dinosaur you really felt that the dinosaurs were alive, in this the mammoths look horrible and dont walk relistically. The program looks like it was rushed so that it could jump aboard the Walking with Dinosaurs bandwagon.

I'd recommend trying to catch a repeat on Discovery before buying this disc

Rating:
Summary: Buy Walking with Prehistoric Beasts
Review: This is good for watch on television once in a while. But if you want a good film about mammoths watch Walking with Prehistoric Beasts. It has just as many mammoth shots as Land of the Mammoth but are much more realistic. Not to mention all the great other creatures beasts describes. Land of the Mammoth had bad special effects. It should have talked more about cloning the creature itstead of digging in the ground and repeating the same shots over and over again. They were diging in the block but the film stops before they got to the interesting part of the block. Now it is good for hard core mammoth fans but I suggest Walking with Prehistoric Beasts.

Rating:
Summary: very good video on prehistoric Ice Age mammals
Review: Well, just saw the Land of the Mammoth special on Discovery. Not bad, nice to have a two hour special on one of my passions, paleontology. It seemed to wander a bit, and if you curious mainly about the Jarkov mammoth it was full of padding, though of course the other stuff was acutally more interesting. The mammoth CGI segments were nowhere near as great as those in Walking With Dinosaurs which stilll remains the standard for these types of programs, but they tried and have more than I have seen anywhere else. The CGI woolly rhinos were pretty good, and it was nice to see attention devoted to them, being a prehistoric rhino fan. I liked how they discussed how they used insect and plant remains to infer the environment and habits of mammoths, good to see that addressed on Discovery.

They discussed the ideas about mammoth extinction, primarily disease, climatic change, and human hunting. I have never subscribed the disease theory and I thought their case for it was weak, but they did a reasonably good job covering climatic and human reasons for mammoth (and other Ice Age megafauna) extinctions.

They also discussed the notion of bringing back mammoths via cloning, one of the main reasons the Jarkov mammoth has received the attention it has. Discovery did hint at the fact that the Jarkov mammoth may be only scraps, but didn't definitely say so. I have read that there is some controvery that the Jarkov mammoth is not a complete specimen, and towards the end of the program they did seem to acknowledge that it might be the complete specimen they had hoped.

All in all not bad. One of the very few videos on extinct mammals, a subject that needs much more coverage. A good buy in opinion.