Jurassic Fight Club: The Complete Season One (review)

There’s 12 episodes here on four discs, and everyone one of them starts out with the narrator “warning” us that “the following is a graphic depiction of a violent prehistoric battle,” and then he lets that sink in for a moment before adding, “Viewer discretion is advised.” I think I can hear him snickering after that. The only “viewer discretion” I can imagine he’s talking about is the kind that makes you go get the egghead five-year-old from the other room who knows all the names of the dinosaurs and can pronounce them correctly, so you can watch it together.

Oh, man, is this hilarious stuff. It’s a parody of our obsession with TV violence. Volcanoes! Tectonic forces! Darwinism! Ultimate predators! Scientists on a “routine” dig make a shocking discovery -- could they have found a “70-million-year-old crime scene”? Then comes the parade of professional dinosaur geeks with the CT scans and their paleontological forensics, all in the name of explaining exactly how we know how disgusting and violent and bloody and like totally awesome the CGI-animated dino fight we’re about to see actually was.

(There’s a bit of cheating. Just as Jurassic Park would have been correctly called Cretaceous Park, the monsters on view here are from all over the place... and not just from the eras of the dinosaurs. One episode focuses on Ice Age critters. Who were cool nightmarish killers, too, of course.)

Plant-eaters attacked by carnivores! Horny males killing babies so they can mate with the mothers! Raptors versus T. rex! It’s like dino porn. The final episode in the collection is “Armageddon” -- or asteroid versus lizards! -- but the ultimate message of pretty much every episode is: It doesn’t matter with what ferocity these monsters fight to the death, because they’re all doomed to extinction -- ha ha! Evolution, bitches! We win!

Biological arrogance. You gotta love it.