The Discovery *SCIENCE* channel is running a program on Dragons

[Orrex]

Narrated by Patrick "after ST:X I'll take any script" Stewart, it presents the "real" story of the evolution of dragons, tracing their development back to dinosaur times and using that nifty CGI from "Walking with Dinosaurs."

I don't care if brain-dead networks like Animal Planet or The SciFi Channel want to run this crap, but WTF is it doing on Discovery Science, for pity's sake?

[mr blur]

1. Dragons are a scientific fact -

it says so in The Babble so it must be true.

It was a dragon secretly trained by the Bush Evil Empire that brought down World Trade Tower 7.

[Orrex]

2. I should have mentioned that the show is, ultimately, fiction

And it doesn't really make any claims to the contrary, but it's presented in that same pseudo-scholarly tone as all the rest of those speculative animal shows, so a casual viewer could be forgiven for inferring that the Dragons show is for real.

:puke:

[salvorhardin]

4. Oh

Well then ignore my other post. I agree. :puke:

[salvorhardin]

3. I don't know. It depends on how it's presented.

I could see an excellent program using this topic, talking about the historical evolution of dragon myths and attempting to talk about what they might be based on. You could even do a Physics Of Star Trek style approach and see what would have to be true for dragons to exist as they do in myth (for instance, how could a dragon make fire).

[Orrex]

5. In fact, that's sort of how they approached it

Where it went wrong IMO (aside from being on the so-called Science Channel, is that it started from a stance of "Dragons may even exist today, and here's how they could have gotten here." It spoke a little bit of the pervasive cultural myths, but mostly it was a fictitious of the dragons' evolutionary history, specifically addressing how they could have survived the famous anti-dinosaur asteroid.

I only watched about ten minutes of it overall, and I have to admit that the production values were reasonably good--on par with the Walking with Dinosaurs shows I mentioned. It's more akin to those speculative "future evolution" shows that Animal Planet runs every so often, wherein they show us what a rhesus monkey will look like in 400 million years. :eyes:

As a piece of entertainment, I certainly have no problem with it. But I think that it was ill-placed on the ill-named Discovery Science Channel, especially when that same franchise offers numerous other outlets for pure fluff fiction. It would be nice if we had an outlet truly dedicated to actual science.

[TZ]

6. I've seen this show

And enjoyed it..it was well done and an interesting way to illustrate the mechanisms of evolution, if in a fictional way..I found the "science" behind it reasonabley believable..But on the Science Channel? Yeah, although Discovery Channel may be where I originally found it. Discovery Channel's motto is "entertain your brain".....not necessarily strict educate your brain...

[Orrex]

7. "Entertain your brain"

Their slogan says it all.

Didn't it used to be Explore Your World before that?

At least they're honest about it--we can tune in without fearing that we might learn something.

Well, other than how to blow shit up...