If you've ever wanted to believe in dragons, this will fuel your fire. And if you've doubted their existence, Dragon's World will make you think twice.
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Television networks are slowly adopting an interesting new marketing strategy for DVDs: issuing them the week of or shortly after the initial broadcast. It happened with the "Friends" final episode and with "Slavery and the Making of America." Now Sony is releasing "Dragon's World: A Fantasy Made Real" just one day after the show airs for the first time on Animal Planet this March 20th. The DVD also includes a behind-the-scenes feature that will be shown on Animal Planet later.
Dragon-lovers will find "Dragon's World: A Fantasy Made Real" pretty high concept. It's played like an "Unsolved Mystery" or "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," with actors portraying scientists who study a full specimen of a young dragon that was discovered frozen like a mammoth inside a Carpathian Mountain cave alongside human remains. That "In Search of" narrative thread is interwoven with a "Walking with Dinosaurs"-style speculative recreation that shows dragons coexisting with dinosaurs, but surviving the K-T event that made the terrible lizards extinct. That recreation eventually gets around to telling the story of a particular male and female mountain dragon and their sole offspring—all of whom run afoul of the locals in medieval Romania.
The CGI FX are created by the high-flying Framestore CFC, the same production studio that did the FX for "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" and "Walking with Dinosaurs." As you might expect, given the additional time to hone their skills, the FX here are even better than on "Dinosaurs." The producers also had scholarly consultants from the Natural Sciences and folks like Neil Gaiman to advise on the artistic side. And you know what? You quickly forget that this is about as real as "This is Spinal Tap," because the mockumentary is so well conceived and executed.
Paul Hilton plays Dr. Tanner, a discredited "bad boy" scientist who's scoffed at for believing in dragons, but gets the last laugh when Romania contacts the London Museum of Natural History asking them to send a team to investigate an astonishing find. Tanner goes there with a biologist (Katrine Bach) and data analyst (Aidan Woodward), and the three of them sort through clues first in a makeshift morgue where bodies of the dragon and humans had been relocated, and then to the cave itself where the bodies were discovered. As Tanner does an autopsy on the creature and works through theories with his team, then goes to the scene of the "crime" to try to figure out how each of them died, it's pretty easy to get wrapped up in their investigation.
For one thing, the theories that are advanced are scientifically possible, says lead consultant Dr. Peter Hogarth, who's joined by experts Sean Morris and John Sibbick. What inspired this feature was the idea that dragons, though mythological, were nonetheless described in great detail by the Chinese, the Aztecs, the Polynesians, and Europeans at a time when each group had no cultural contact with the others. Like the similarities in creation myths, they could be attributed to a kind of collective consciousness. Or, they could have existed in some form or another. That's not the take that Dr. Hogarth has. He says that "Dragon's World: A Fantasy Made Real" offered details about "an animal that might have evolved, but just happened not to." Yet, director Justin Hardy and his filmmakers build an interesting case for dragons by trying to anticipate and answer all of the important questions related to dragons.
Like, how could they fly? They type data into the computer and conclude that the ratio of weight to wing proportion was insufficient to produce flight. Then again, the same physics formula argues that the common bumblebee is incapable of flight. But Tanner discovers some sacs inside the winged creature and begins to piece together a theory that explains how flight was possible. The same thing happens with that legendary trait of breathing fire. The investigative team actually comes up with a theory that provides ONE possible explanation for how such a curious animal kingdom superpower might have occurred in nature. How did the dragons survive the K-T event that wiped out the dinosaurs? That's another question the investigative team tries to understand. Same with the ultimate one: how is it that dragons finally became extinct?
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