Watched T-Rex: An Evolutionary Journey last night which was so apallingly bad I was embarrassed I was watching it, but just as I was about to switch it off it ended. If you like cheesy Japanese anime you’ll love it, as this was cheesy Japanese anime pretending to be a paleontology documentary. Not that the dinosaurs were actually anime, they were CGI. It’s just they acted like they were in an anime. A pair of very early proto-tyrannosauruses roam around China. They leap about like martial artists, leaping and kicking and biting. Sure they’re not much to look at, just little fellas, but they got gumption. They roar a lot. Tens of millions of years pass and things are getting rough at home. They decide to join the epic prototyrannosaur migration from China to North America. It gets Lord of the Ringsy pretty quick. Magically, a land bridge appears. I mean they explain how, but in the story it just appears. They show up in North America, run into some sort of allosaurus. They attack by leaping though the air like those anime martial arts fighters and kicking. The allosaurus smacks one away where it lies bleeding and twitching, losing a tooth which a paleontologist finds in the American west in our time. Millions more years pass and our little fellas have become the biggest dinosaurs ever with big brains and jaws like you wouldn’t believe. They work in hunting teams like dolphins or people and are way faster than the T. rex in Jurassic Park. The strongest—and this show is all about the strongest, this is paleontology for men—can run 50 mph. I suppose that is debatable. They also leap like martial artists onto the backs of remarkably fast moving plant eaters and kick and bite and kill them, roaring triumphantly. They survey all they rule from the peaks of mountains, roaring. They find a descendant of that punk allosaurus and dispatch him with a leap and a kick and a bite, and then roar triumphantly. You’ve never heard such a noisy reptile. If there are any female tyrannosauruses we never see them. We never see the juveniles either. Not even eggs. This is a man tyrannosaur’s world. Then the asteroid comes.

There’s a lot of interviews with paleontologists who probably regretted it immediately, a lot of cool looking fossils and sciencey bits, and the CGI dinosaurs are pretty good, if decidedly warm blooded in their behavior. Very warm blooded. No lumbering elephants these guys. Actually, a lot of the paleontology seems more or less accurate, like a science anime fairy tale. Incredibly, it’s an NHK—the Japanese television network—production, though it’s more like a Toho movie than a science documentary. Definitely was the most ludicrous dinosaur documentary I’ve seen since Destroy All Monsters. I still can’t decide if Godzilla could kick the T. rex brothers’ asses or not. He could breathe fire, sure, but these guys could leap and kick like an anime Bruce Lee.