CMT Blog: Archive

The biggest tour in the world is coming to Nashville. The dinosaurs are on their way. And I don’t mean The Eagles. I mean Walking with Dinosaurs: the Live Experience. Just after Bob Dylan/Elvis Costello at the Ryman, this is the show I have most looked forward to.

This is truly an epic-size tour. Fifteen life-size walking and bellowing animatronic dinosaurs will stalk through Nashville’s Sommet Center. The biggest of them is the 50-foot-tall Brachiosaurus. The Tyrannosaurus Rex is 45 feet long. The tour uses 27 tractor-trailer trucks and employs a crew of 68 people. The tour began in January in Sydney, played Australian dates through March and then began in North America.

This came about from the 1999 BBC-TV series, Walking with Dinosaurs, which was itself groundbreaking and watched by millions of people. Those dinosaurs were computer-generated, a process which was enormously expensive and complicated.

An Australian company decided to try building realistic, life-size dinosaurs and taking them on the road for an arena tour. The life-size creatures were built and “dinosaur drivers” learned how to operate them. Consider the cost. The movie Jurassic Park had about nine minutes of dinosaurs in it. The tour production of Walking with Dinosaurs runs around three hours. It’ll be in Nashville Oct. 17-21. The big screen videos I’ve seen of it and the accounts I’ve heard from friends who have seen this show tell me it’s well worth seeing. The script traces dinosaur development throughout the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous Periods of the Mesozoic Era. And there’s one epic dinosaur battle.

I’ll tell you what. This is really about getting back to the roots.