What's the first thought that pops into your head when you hear the name Steven Spielberg?...Okay, what's the second? No...All right, maybe the sixth--? You know what, never mind. It's dinosaurs. Dinosaurs with a capital D. He made two great Jurassic Park movies and made us believe dinosaurs were real, if only for the time we were in the cinema. So how come he couldn't repeat the same trick for television? Well, dinosaurs weren't even supposed to be in the damn show in the first place, for one. Original creator Kelly Marcel - who's since gone on to write screenplays for Saving Mr. Banks and 50 Shades Of Grey among other films - never included dinos in her original pilot script, but once the network got their hands on it they decided to have their wicked way with it. The resulting mess was a show that even its most ardent fans would admit is a mixed bag at best, and pretty convincing proof that dinosaurs don't belong on television, or at least not right now. Where they do belong, happily, is in comics, where a believable and terrifying velociraptor is no harder to render than motorbike - and publishers certainly have the budget to include many more than a stingy network. That said, if Marcel had been allowed to tell her story in comics then there likely wouldn't be any dinosaurs whatsoever, and Terra Nova might well have ended up being a better version for it. At the very least she probably would have gotten slightly better actors and more than one season for her trouble...
