My review of the sixth and final episode of the 2001 BBC Show Walking With Beasts, Mammoth Journey. Covering accuracy, plot and personal thoughts. Enjoy!
@@pbh9195 fr, I really wanna see a more fleshed out take on Ice Age Australia than what we saw in Monsters We Met, but as you said, there's so many other places to look at that deserve attention.
43:36 The museum also has Utahraptor head puppet (but now with a complete body) from WWD & a Plesiosaur model that was also made by Crawley Creatures for a TV special known as "Loch Ness Monster - The Ultimate Experiment"
Prior to Prehistoric Planet I would have called this series the best piece of paleo media ever created and now it’s only slightly behind. A magnificent series
That last line gives me chills "If there's one thing all of this has taught us. Nothing lasts forever." One day humans will be gone But like the monsters, the dinosaurs and the beasts Our legacy will live on
The Saiga has now as of last year been re-listed as near threatened after much work into their conservation with 922,600 - 988,500 in the wild. So there is hope. A lot of work being done. But still more to be done.
I love the multiple mentions of Prehistoric Park and the use of clips from the show. The Walking With series might get the most attention, but I'll always have a soft spot for Prehistoric Park. It's an old favorite of mine. Also, I like how you mentioned this episode's use of music. The series as a whole always had great music, but I've always loved the music used in this episode. The piano is perfect, and the music used throughout was all very memorable. Mammoth Journey was a great ending to this series. Great soundtrack, great models for the prehistoric creatures, an iconic time period and animals used, and an absolutely iconic ending scene.
The final bit of this episode still terrifies me to this day. The vocals in the soundtrack were subtle in Next of Kin, then got very noticeable in Mammoth Journey, and then basically overwhelmed the instruments in this ending bit, all while the camera pans out and the realization that humans have spread across the entirety of the world kicks in. It feels similar to finding a bit of a termite trail in a wall, only to dig a little deeper and find out there's a billion termites living within your house. This is no longer your home, it's theirs, and they're tearing it down. This is no longer the mammoth's home. It's ours. And we are the ones tearing it all down.
9:21 Those bison were actually American bison of the wood bison subspecies. There’s a clip from an older documentary about wolves and wood bison that was used at this point in the episode.
I think an ideal Neanderthal hunt to show in a documentary would use a mix of the hunting methods we see in Walking with Beasts (2001) and Walking with Cavemen (2003). You could have Neanderthals using fire to spook mammoths into a ravine or corner an individual against a cliff, while hunters on top through boulders and spears onto the animal, like what the hunters did to Manny's wife and child in Ice Age (2002).
One thing i do like is that this final hunt with the Neanderthals shows how humans used fire to hunt, and while some birds do use fire to hunt too, the entire walking with series has shown that fire is a dangerous and horrifying thing that all animals fear. And yet, humans are shown to be the first to use and only creatures to truly use fire as a weapon, showing pur dominance to come in the future
What i think a lot of people miss with the last shot of the episode, is that the series ended the same way it started. It all begin with a shot of the Earth and meteor crushing onto it and eneded with nearly identical shot, following "No Species Last Forever". I see this as addittional warning on behalf of the series, that we aren't that special ourselves. We as a species, just as any other before us, won't last forever, and all it takes is one more meteor to end it all.
This episode wrestles the first spot of my ranking with Land of Giants,although is more likely to earn the second one. Regardless of the spot,it's always been the most special for me,there's just something about it that I just love so deeply,the score,for example,is incredible and certainly my favorite,it also made me completely fall in love with Mammoths and the Proboscidea order in general,as well as with Cervidae thanks to the gorgeous Megaloceros. Heck,it might also be as well the reason for my deep love of the winter season and the snow! I wonder how many other people caught on that Doctor Who reference 👀. I also really appreciated all the Ice Age references,which were,of course,a no-brainer given the episode. I remember my older brother trying to convince me (and maybe also to traumatize me) that the Megaloceros that escaped killed the hunter with his hooves,but I still felt incredibly sad for the other one as he was dying. I used to get a kick out of reenacting the woolly rhino chase of the Neanderthal with a regular white rhino plush and a poor teddy bear,which makes me think in dread I have a torture-loving side inside me somewhere 😅. The Neanderthal's Mammoth hunt,man,what a scene,my favorite of the episode and extremely close to being my favorite of the show: the action,the fights,Mammoths falling all over the place or getting stuck on the edge,adding to the tension. A Neanderthal gets kicked on the ground and one gets crushed under a Mammoth's feet,something I've always found particularly brutal,and I'm pretty sure there was a female Neanderthal screaming like a damn Banshee while pushing with a spear a Mammoth stuck on the edge. Everything about it was so beautifully primal! I really,really enjoyed these retrospectives on WWB,and I'm so looking forward to more of them on Walking With! To sign off,here's my ranking: 1. Land of Giants 2. Mammoth Journey 3. Sabre Tooth 4. Whale Killer 5. New Dawn 6. Next of Kin
Damn the 3d book brought back memories (as did the whole walking with retrospective) but that was the only walking with book I was able to find at any local book stores/school book fairs as a kid. Least secondary prehistoric park media was everywhere a few years later for me
I hop if BBC ever makes a remake of Walking with Beasts like what they are doing for Walking with Dinosaurs, that they do an episode tacking place during the Miocene Epoch. It is my favorite Epoch with some of my favorite Cenozoic Animals.
I remember being disappointed that Toyway never did any figures for Walking with Beasts but the closet were the Schleich Ice Age Animal models back from 2004. Also Mammoth Journey feels the most realistic to me and asva kid, I actually thought that the crew went back in time a filmed real Mammoths.
I would like to see you review Walking with Dinosaurs (1999). All those references to it you've made in these reviews make me want to see you review that show even more.
i hate to hear people say mammoths went extinct largely by hunting like its a fact, despite all the evidence recently pointing to it being far more likely due to climate change. people seem to forget all the facts about how mammoths lived when they talk about extinction so they can default to the easy answer. mammoths traversed half of the northern hemisphere every year, if only one major span of it like say western europe or siberia were to be altered by climate enough (which they were) that could easily constitute an extinction to the mammoths, unlike a few humans taking down one from the herd to last them all winter.
U gained a new subscriber. I hope U also do retrospectives on Walking with Dinosaurs & Monsters & also add clips of Spongebob & Regular Show 4 jokes & laughs.
There is a couple of merchandise of walking with beasts in America for god sake’s there was a discovery channel version copies you can get on VHS which I have a couple of years ago and you get these binocular things that you put the photo in that way you can see. I forget what it’s called. I am actually shocked that the one Neanderthal that was attacked by the woolly rhino survived because I was a kid. I thought that well he’s dead but now you’re actually right and it’s amazing that Neanderthals were really tough humans back then.
This is perhaps the most in-depth review you ever done for Walking with Beasts' final episode. It's very well done.👏👏👍👍 Quick question: have you ever used the Megatherium arm prop to pull pranks on your friends?
33:31; Uh, what do you mean they’re clipping through the… (looks closer) Ooooohhhhh. Uhhh, nah. I’ve seen a worse shot than that. It’s when we get a side-view of the Megaloceros rutting (with the females in the background), one of the deer’s antlers passes through the rival’s antler. One minor computer-generated error, but, you tell me.
2:48 absolutely agree. were losing some of the most amazing animals on earth - east asian rhinoceroses like the sumatran rhinoceros, or african forest elephant, an animal that really doesnt get much attention as its getting poached to extinction.
I have to wonder if they had to use the Cave Lion model, why not just call it Homotherium? It’s not only appropriate for the time, but they have direct evidence of hunting mammoths. That being said I love the scene with the two lions eating a human, sort of acknowledging how we are still just another animal, and we’re not the focus of this episode. 9:57, Saiga actually bounced back pretty hard and are now doing really well compared to being critically endangered.
Here's my personal ranking of the episodes from this series 1. land of giants 2. Next of kin 3. New dawn 4. Whale killer 5. Mammoth journey 6. Saber tooth
2:49. on the topic of brining back Mammoths. I thought it was also a bit silly, but then i learned of the Mammoth Steps (Grass land from Europe to Siberia.) and how useful and recent it disappeared. Killing all the mammoths was one of the first effects mankind had on the climate and climate change. Considering how recent the mammoth died and how slow climates changes. I say it could be a good idea to bring back a the Mammoth. so we can terraform the earth and bring back the Mammoth Steps. See "World Atlas" video called "Pleistocene Park" on it to learn more.
I can't really rank them but putting Next of Kin that low is ridiculous. lol. loose ranking... 1 Mammoth Journey 2 Whale Killer 3 Next of Kin 4 New Dawn 5 Sabertooth 6 Land of Giants
Honestly the big issue with this episode is an adamant denial of the reality that we had anything to do with megafaunal collapse, even though by the time of WWB that’s something that should at least have been mentioned.
30:14 That Neanderthal should’ve died, I’m sorry but there is no way that he could’ve survived that, a Woolly Rhinoceros horn would’ve gored his back paralyzing him from the neck down and if the impact didn’t kill him then it would be predators waiting nearby I know Neanderthals are built for this tough lifestyle but I highly doubt they were built to survive getting their back gored by an angry Woolly Rhinoceros, but yeah the Neanderthal should’ve died
