Jurassic Fight Club Part One: A Fossilized Curate's Egg.

Remember the pencil version?

At the suggestion of Brian over at Laelaps (see my blogroll; I'm currently too ignorant to put links inside of posts, as has been pointed out to me) I'm going to give you a rundown on the TV show Jurassic Fight Club.

So before we get into that, let me introduce you to one of my favorite metaphors. It's from a Victorian-period Punch cartoon that shows a clergyman and a lord sitting at a breakfast table. The lord says, "Good Lord, Curate! It looks as if you've got a bad egg!" With a smile like a weasel eating butter the curate replies, "Not at all! Many parts are excellent!"

That's how I feel about things like comics, genre fiction, monster movies, rock and roll, and crappy animated dinosaur shows. You go into them knowing that you've got a bad egg -- but with luck you may scavenge a few excellent bites from the experience. Mmmmm... the Curate's egg. It's my favorite.

Of course I don't have good taste. But my bad taste is exquisitely developed.

So before we go into Jurassic Fight Club, let's take a look at my criteria for this kind of affair. Remember, I'm approaching this from a number of perspectives ranging from student to scriptwriter to artist to loaded dude on the couch killing time before bed.

First off, how much dinosaur do we get?

Next, how often does the show make me want to/actually scream? This divides into some subcategories. Is the science bad? Is the voiceover work irritating? What about the writing? The pacing? The visual quality? Just how badly screwed up is this thing, anyway?

Do I get any new information?

Do we have any good visual moments?

At any point to we receive a frisson of the alien -- a sense of conviction that convinces us that we're seeing something real and strange?

And, finally, how's the violence?

More in part two.

(By the way, I was just beating the shelves for that damned cartoon. If I find it, I'm posting it -- it's public domain for sure and like I said, it's an excellent metaphor.)