The Third Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith return from a trip to the Medieval period to modern London to find it completely deserted, except for UNIT (they’re a task force the Doctor worked with for a while who investigate alien phenomenon and threats.) and giant toy dinosaurs. A society of snobby scientists is bringing back dinosaurs and letting them roam loose on the city as an experiment and have teamed up with a bunch of hippies inside a fake spaceship. Their ultimate goal is to use dinosaurs to conquer the world, destroy humanity, revert Earth back to its ‘wild state’ free from pollution and so they and the hippies will be able to frolic freely until a T-rex decides their its afternoon snack. Oh and there’s a traitor in the UNIT ranks. You can probably guess who it is from the videos I’ve linked.

And yes that is the basic story….and yes its 6 separate episodes long….and yes they treat it dead serious.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs. Mm, what to say about it? After all its famous for only one thing really, the dinosaur special effects. But we’ll get to that later.

Right first things first; story. This is basically the bluntest, barest and most blaring of the big three environmental stories of the Third Doctor’s run. The 70s were a time when the effects humanity was inflicting on the planet were only now just coming into light and there was a massive wave of environmentalism, as can be seen in other media like The Lorax. Doctor Who jumped on this also with three stories; aside from Invasion of the Dinosaurs, they are Inferno and The Green Death, both of which are far stronger in every way. What makes Invasion of the Dinosaurs so weak is just how simple it is; lets go beat up the bad corrupted guys and end on a lesson of saving the planet.
Compare with Green Death, the second strongest of the trio, where the polluting company is more blinded and naive than evil, just wanting to make profit, be efficient and provide for others. Inferno goes even further, never addressing the environment issues head on and in fact just using its visuals instead and its message is more, don’t meddle in things you don’t understand.
All the characters in Dinosaurs meanwhile are kind of standard and the whole episode has a cheesy feel overall. Its too one sided and it makes me think whoever wrote this really hates environmentalists and hippies. The only big twist is another member of UNIT, this time a long running member, betrays them all, but even then its brushed under the rug.

But, erf, lets get to what everyone remembers. The dinosaurs themselves.





...oh boy.
Ok so of course the special effects are rubbish. But then again this was 1974 and on a shoestring budget. But even still, if you do not have the effects to pull off a script, then just change the script. Of course one positive about the dinosaurs is that they provide the most entertainment in this story. That and there are good directing bits here and there, especially the rather sombre and sinister empty streets of London in episode 1. But aside from those few glimmers of creativity or hilarity, there’s little else. Its not laugh out bad like Horns of Nimon or spectacularly bad like The Time Monster.

The biggest weakness of Invasion of the Dinosaurs ultimately is that its just kind of boring. A plodding mess that actually isn’t much of a mess.
So that’s Invasion of the Dinosaurs. I’m sorry it was quite short, I couldn’t think of much else to type.

But for the next review I’m going to take a more notable episode; Survival.
See you then!