Walking with Dinosaurs is Coming to St. Louis, Missouri

This ain't your children's traveling Barney the Purple Dinosaur show. The Walking With Dinosaurs Live Show will be at the Scottrade Center through August 5^th. The live show is based on the hugely successful BBC Television production from 1999 that was aired on the Discovery Channel here in the United States. The television production won 3 Emmy Awards and some 11 other awards. Narrated by Kenneth Branagh, the English actor best known for putting Shakespeare on TV, the program featured the latest technology as well as human interaction to take viewers on a journey through the Cretaceous, Triassic, and Jurassic period's of Earth's history. The six-hour series shows how these animals lived and survived for millions of years and how they suddenly disappeared. The ongoing theory is, of course, that they were wiped out by a giant rock. Viewers could take a Coelophysis-eye view of the first dinosaurs that learned how to hunt in packs, marvel at the ferocious T-Rex, and get high in the sky with Ornithocheirus who supposedly could travel some 300 miles on a single wing flap. Walking With Dinosaurs was such a success that Walking With Prehistoric Beasts, which took a look at the creatures of the world after the dinosaurs died off, followed it. A third in the series, the special Allosaurus: A Walking with Dinosaurs Special rounded out the series.

So, how to you take something as spectacular as Walking With Dinosaurs on the road? Former arena manager and now producer of the live show, Bruce Mactaggart conceived of the arena show. He cites the decline of live entertainment as the impetus behind his creation. And he wanted to create something that would be really big and fill the arena and also be educational, unlike some of the tractor pulls and other arena events. With one of the dinosaurs being 45 feet tall and 75 feet long, it was quite a challenge to put them on tour. It takes 27 tractor-trailers and a road crew of 65 to get the job done.