Walking With Dinosaurs: The Drunk Edition

I don't know what possessed me to take a bottle of Pinot Grigio to the face before heading to the Key Arena to see Walking With Dinosaurs last night. But it seemed like a brilliant idea until:

1) I showed up late and missed the 56 foot-long Brachiosaurus' appearance.

2) I woke up this morning with a splitting headache next to a dude that prior to last night I hadn't seen since freshman year of college.

Despite those incidents, last night was pretty spectacular. As a diehard dino-phile, I'd been waiting for months for Walking With Dinosaurs to come to Seattle. The arena show based on the BBC documentary series of the same name features full-size animatronic dinosaurs doing well, awesome dinosaur things like soaring through skies and hunting for prey.

And they appear freakishly lifelike. (As they should, given that it cost a whopping $20 million to make the damn things.) You can actually see their muscles ripple as they move with surprising agility. And the smaller dinosaurs, which are operated by humans, are especially daunting to watch run full-speed across the stadium.

The 90-minute show is well-paced with the exception of one unnecessarily long scene in which audience members are expected to just stare at an Ornithocheirus (I'm such a nerd for knowing that without looking it up) flap its wings. I mean, it was cool for the first minute or two, but then I started to wonder if there'd been a technical difficulty and it'd gotten stuck.

The show's highlight is hands down the scene in which the baby Tyrannosaurus Rex gets bullied and his pissed off mom storms out. I was so excited I started cheering like a drunk idiot.

But what I kept thinking about during the show (other than wanting more wine) was that, as awesome of an experience as it was for me, it must have been even more so for the younger crowd. I would have killed to have a show like this around when I was little.

I saw at least 20 kids walking around wearing these adorable green dinosaur tails and roaring as they left KeyArena. (The production has gotta be making some serious dough off their dino merchandise.) Two of my friends even bought T-shirts that read "I love dinos." (I scoffed and said even I wasn't uncool enough to wear one, but secretly I was just jealous that I couldn't afford one because I'd just made a car payment.)

Walking with Dinosaurs is in town until Sunday and it's totally worth your time to go. I might even go back again--sober this time, so that I can actually see the Brachiosaurus.