YMMV / Walking with Beasts

• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Inaccuracies aside, it's safe to say that this show boosted the popularity of Andrewsarchus by a wide margin, in large part due to giving it the prestigious title of "the largest mammalian carnivore to walk on land" and its cool design, which made it an awesome fusion between wolf and Panthera Awesome. Quite the accomplishment, given that its actual role in "Whale Killer" essentially amounts to Scavengers Are Scum.
  • Same for the Gastornis. While it too hasn’t aged well (namely its diet), its portrayal in “New Dawn” left quite the impression on viewers, proving just how scary birds can really be (they are surviving dinosaurs after all, which the narrator emphasizes). The real animal might have been a vegetarian, but it still would have been a force to be reckoned with (given its size and bulk). It's even more notable given how the other big bird in the series is seen as The Scrappy.
  • The Deinotherium for some, for being an imposing behemoth that perfectly embodies just how terrifying and unstoppable elephants can be when they aren’t peacefully munching on greenery.
• Even Better Sequel: Got even more acclaim on release than its predecessor Walking with Dinosaurs, and many would argue that it's aged significantly better from a scientific standpoint.
• Genius Bonus:
  • The segments with Andrewsarchus and Embolotherium in "Whale Killer" take place in Pakistan (though both are only known from Central Asia), which is likely a nod to the country providing a wealth of basal cetacean fossils that gave us a detailed picture of their early evolution (including Ambulocetus).
  • The Eurotamandua is never referenced by the narration in "New Dawn", but its inclusion is not gratuitous. It is shown and directly addressed (though still unnamed) in the first making-of, "Triumph of the Beasts".
  • Though the narrator makes no mention of it, the Doedicurus has four young. This is a reference to how nine-banded armadillos always have four young per litter, who are always genetic clones of the other.
  • Neither does the narrator mention hyenas in the aftermath of the mammoth hunt (he does after the Megaloceros hunt), but their laughs can be heard as they undoubtly come to dispute the carcasses from the neanderthals.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: According to the creators, the show was more popular than its predecessor Walking with Dinosaurs in a handful of European territories, like Germany. The fact that the first and last episodes both centered around European fauna, with episode 1 focusing on the famous German Messel Pit fossil site, most likely helped. Prehistoric mammals have also historically garnered a lot of attention in continental Europe, since spectacular giant reptiles, such as those found in the Americas and featured prominently in the majority of WWD, were relatively rare in the continent's fossil sites.
• Inferred Holocaust:
  • The Dorudon pod has a hard future ahead, given that the Basilosaurus just slaughtered a whole generation of them, almost right after they were born, and in a time of global stress.
  • The Woolly Mammoth herd is going to suffer the early, violent death of the matriarch.
• One-Scene Wonder: The Titanomyrma have only one scene, but are one of the best remembered animals of the series.
• Realism-Induced Horror:
  • The Deinotherium attack on the Australopithecus clan has been cited by some as the scariest scene in the series because elephant attacks on humans, often committed by bulls in musth (many of them fatal), are a major problem across Africa and South Asia. The most common victims are locals, but naïve tourists who mistakenly believe that elephants are Gentle Giants also fall prey to them, and as human hunting has left more and more elephants traumatized and prone to irrational violence, serial man killers are on the rise. Many wildlife experts are also of the opinion that no land animal is scarier or deadlier than a bull elephant in musth. Now imagine if such an individual was twice the size of the largest living elephant?
  • Some of the events that befall human or near-human characters, such as the dead body of the Australopithecus matriarch, the cave lions fighting over a dead Cro-Magnon (mercifully most of the body can't be seen), and the Neanderthal being injured by a woolly rhino (though the latter scene can be unintentionally comedic for some, and the guy manages to survive), as in a series that mostly has bad things happening to unfamiliar creatures, it can be quite disturbing to see episodes suddenly switch to these things happening to species that look just like (or even are) us.
• The Scrappy:
  • You’ll be hard-pressed to find someone who has a nice thing to say about the cave lion, not just because it's essentially a glorified cameo, but because it's a very gratuitous example of a reused asset and bears little resemblance to its real-life counterpart, and is generally seen as little more than a half-hearted attempt to add in another animal to "Mammoth Journey".
  • The terror bird from "Sabre Tooth" is very unpopular, especially among phorusrhacid enthusiasts. Even looking past the fact that it’s a hodgepodge of every single outdated theory regarding terror birds, many did not appreciate the fact that it was given the Adaptational Wimp treatment and relegated to being nothing more than a Straw Loser to Smilodon. This sentiment increased considerably once future paleo-media such as Prehistoric Predators and Monsters Resurrected introduced more accurate depictions of phorusrhacids to general audiences, leading to greater awareness about what formidable apex predators they were.
• Signature Scene:
  • For better or worse, the part in "New Dawn" where the giant ants attack and eat the Gastornis chick has become one of the most remembered scenes not only from Walking with Beasts, but from the franchise in general, thanks to being pure Nightmare Fuel.
  • The confrontation of the Hyaenodon vs the entelodont trio in "Land of Giants", as it's basically the fight of the two main carnivores of the episode accompanied with the signature theme of the entelodont. It was memorable enough to be displayed as the main key visual of the DVD cover of the documentary (albeit portrayed as a one vs one fight rather than one vs three).
  • The Australopithecus banding together to save Blue from the Dinofelis at the end of the fourth episode.
• Stoic Woobie: The mother Gastornis from the first episode, after she discovers that her hatchling has been eaten by a swarm of ants. You can tell that she's not happy about it in the slightest, but her only response is to huff quietly and walk away, presumably to seek a new nesting site.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Regardless of its diet, Gastornis had feet similar to the modern running birds, and some of the latter can disembowel a dog with one kick. But we never get to see their kicks in action.
  • Despite being the two main large predators of the setting and the chance of having an interesting interaction with each other, the Gastornis and Ambulocetus in "New Dawn" never get to meet, having separated, independent plotlines.
  • Though unmentioned, dogs were (possibly) starting to be domesticated around the time of "Mammoth Journey". Maybe the lone wolf stalking the unfortunate mammoth in the beginning, alongside the humans, was a reference to this.
  • A seventh episode was planned originally, about fauna of Ice Age Australia, but it never materialized.
• Ugly Cute:
  • The Leptictidium. Long nose, strange teeth, human-like hands, but pretty colors and the perfect size for a petting zoo.
  • The Moeritherium. Puppy-Dog Eyes in a hippo-like swimmer not bigger than a pig.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The Bullet Time scenes immediately peg the series as having been produced soon after The Matrix hit theatres. The fact that this gimmick was copied in a Nature Documentary on prehistoric life produced by The BBC is the perfect example of how much impact this movie had at the time.
• The Woobie:
  • The Basilosaurus shares a lot of similarities with the Tyrannosaurus from Walking with Dinosaurs, being another case of "apex predator with children vs. mass extinction".
  • Blue the young Australopithecus from "Next of Kin". The episode starts with his mother dying leaving him an outcast in his group with all the attempts to connect with them failing until the very end of the episode where they save him from the Dinofelis
• Woolseyism: The Spaniard dub renamed "Land of Giants" to "Little Giant". This is both a clever oxymoron and a good description of the main character (a baby indricothere), and also a way to avoid confusion with the Walking with Dinosaurs special about Argentinosaurus, which was also named "Land of Giants".