Apple TV’s ‘Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age’: Mammoths & More!

Ever since Jurassic Park, it’s been all dinosaurs, dinosaurs, dinosaurs. But, on Nov. 26, prehistoric mammals finally get their due, when the acclaimed BBC series Prehistoric Planet returns to Apple TV, with a third season, called Ice Age.

What’s Included in Ice Age?

From Apple TV:

Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age is a sweeping new installment of the award-winning natural history series from executive producers Jon Favreau and Mike Gunton, produced by BBC Studios Natural History Unit (“Planet Earth”), and narrated by Golden Globe and Olivier Award winner Tom Hiddleston (“Earthsounds”), with an original score by Hans Zimmer, Anže Rozman and Kara Talve from Bleeding Fingers Music.

The five-part docuseries invites viewers into a dramatic new era of prehistoric life, millions of years after the extinction of the dinosaurs — an era shaped by ice, the intense fight to survive and the rise of a new cast of giants: the iconic megafauna.

Why Ice Age Makes Me Happy

We’ve been told many times that if we want to experience modern versions of extinct dinosaurs, we can look at birds, or maybe crocodiles.

After all, mammals back then were tiny and inconsequential. No so in the Ice Age.

Animals of this period are not all that different from many modern animals, if they were MUCH larger, covered in fur (rhinos included), and in the case of woolly mammoths and sabertooth cats, sporting some impressive dental accoutrements.

Watching elephantine giants and huge sloths frolicking in the snow appeals to me a lot more than giant lizards — but that’s just me. And it’s not just giant animals, there are also mice and squirrels, which I like just as much.

And since the world wasn’t entirely covered in ice, we also see animals in ancient forests, seas and deserts.

By the way, there were humans around at the time, but this show is all about the critters.

Of course, Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age also brings science into the episodes, like climate change. For example, the first episode explains how a warm, wet Earth — with a forested Antarctica — chilled dramatically several times (hint: it wasn’t humans).

But … You Knew It Was Our Fault Somehow

However, at the end of the last episode of the show, the producers did find a way to lay blame on humans, especially those in North America, for the decimation of vast populations of gigantic Ice Age animals.

Apparently, the humans set all kinds of fires and were just the best hunters ever.

Well, at least the show didn’t lead with it.

Bringing Fur and Fangs Back to Life

Although there is ongoing debate about whether dinosaurs actually had feathers or even hair, we know for sure that Ice Age creatures did.

The special-effects wizards of 1993’s Jurassic Park faced a daunting challenge in those early days of computer animation, marrying scaly dinos to real-world environments.

But now, technology has advanced to the point where rendering the complexity of a shaggy coat in motion is possible, even set against a real-world snowy landscape.

Talking to Mike Gunton

Not long ago, I had a video chat with Mike Gunton, a British TV producer and a senior executive at the BBC Natural History Unit, the world’s largest production unit dedicated to wildlife filmmaking.

He’s also an executive producer on Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age, and here’s a sample of what he had to say.

On meeting the challenge of fur:

I would say, five years ago, I think we would’ve been foolish to try to attempt this to this level of resolution, this level of realization. But things have accelerated technically in the last four or five years.

And you’ve already mentioned, one, you’ve got mammals in the Ice Age, and we are mammals, and we’ve got really acute sensitivity about what mammals should look like. So you can’t get it wrong without people going, that looks wrong. That’s hard.

Then they have fur, and fur interacts with wind and all sorts of things. That makes it very, very hard.

And then on top of that, these animals are frolicking in snow, and there’s rain and ice, and they’re jumping on each other. That makes it very, very, very hard.

So the poor VFX people, when we came to see them, they were saying, “You’re asking a lot from us here.”

But the prize was this opportunity to make a kind of so authentic natural history of what it would been really like if we’d all gotten into a time machine and flown back a hundred thousand million years and seen these animals for real, and I think that’s what we’ve delivered.

On making the animals’ behavior seem real:

And also their behavior is very complex. I love dinosaurs, but when you’re dealing with social mammals, which a lot of these creatures are, their social interactions are very nuanced. Lots of it is about expression and about micro movements.

And so all that had to be replicated as well. And the better you get that, one of the things we try to do is not just see them as real, but actually see their lives as real. And that’s quite an important difference.

It’s getting inside their heads and experiencing the life of an Ice Age animal in the Ice Age through their eyes. That’s just the next level of challenge.

On not getting carried away:

In fact, actually I would say we probably dialed [the drama] down a bit. There was one sequence that we were thinking of doing, which I don’t know if you’ve seen it yet, which is of these woolly rhinos being chased by sabertoothed cats.

And at one point in our kind of storyboard, we thought, well, you do get these examples because she’s blind, being forced off a cliff and falling to her death down an ice cliff. I thought, “Hold on, this is getting ridiculous. They wouldn’t do that.”

And the trouble is, in CG, you can do anything. So we just said, no, no, no. Hold on. What actually happens in the real life of animals?

And I’ve witnessed this myself. I’ve seen lions leaping on a Cape buffalo, drawing it to the ground, and then the whole family of its mates all coming in and scaring the lions off and sometimes throwing them in the air. That’s a sequence you see effectively in our Ice Age show.

So these are genuinely legitimate stories and dramatic stories that happen in nature.

Here’s the whole thing: