NEWS FROM WALKING WITH DINOSAURS

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DINOSAUR LOOSE ON COLUMBUS AVENUE!

REGIS PHILBIN SURPRISES KELLY RIPA WITH NEW PET

“WALKING WITH DINOSAURS: The Live Experience”

ON “LIVE WITH REGIS AND KELLY”

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Watch Dinosaur on Live with Regis & Kelly


Dinosaurs returned to earth on “Live with Regis and Kelly” for the first time following 68 million years of extinction! Regis Philbin surprised co-host Kelly Ripa and America by introducing his new “pet” - WALKING WITH DINOSAURS – The Live Experience star Baby T-Rex live in the ABC studio before walking him on Columbus Avenue during the morning rush hour.

Following ten sold-out weeks in five Australian cities, where it was seen by over 300,000 fans, WALKING WITH DINOSAURS – The Live Experience, based on the Emmy Award® winning BBC series, and starring 15 life-sized “live” dinosaurs, came to North America to begin a two-year arena tour on July 11th, 2007 at the Tacoma Dome in Tacoma, Washington - where it broke box office and attendance records for the entire history of The Tacoma Dome.

WALKING WITH DINOSAURS will visit over 100 U.S. cities over the next two years, including the Continental Airlines Arena in the New York area from October 3rd – 7th and Atlanta, Washington D.C., Norfolk, Nashville, Dallas and Detroit in the coming months.

WALKING WITH DINOSAURS completes an engagement at Columbus, Ohio’s Schottenstein Center this Saturday, August 25th and next visits Atlanta Georgia’s Philips Arena from September 5th – September 9th.

Following years of planning, WALKING WITH DINOSAURS came to life at Sydney’s Acer Arena on January 10, 2007. The show has already proven itself such a sensation, that the North American tour was fast-tracked and began a mere three months after completing its Australian engagements.

The creative team is lead by director Scott Faris, a Broadway veteran who has directed Michael Crawford in EFX at MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, the London production of Chicago, and the current national tour of Sweet Charity starring Molly Ringwald. The creatures are designed and built by Sonny Tilders, who worked with Jim Henson's Creature Workshop on the films The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. The set design and projected image design is by Peter England. The lighting is by John Rayment. The score is composed by James Brett.

Tim Haines, creator and producer of the original BBC series, which was seen by a worldwide audience of 700 million, serves as Project Consultant to the production. The series won six Emmy and three BAFTA Awards.

Ten species are represented from the entire 200 million year reign of the dinosaurs. The show includes the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the terror of the ancient terrain, as well as the Plesiosaurus and Liliensternus from the Triassic period, the Stegosaurus and Allosaurus from the Jurassic period and the awesome Cretaceous. The largest of them, the Brachiosaurus is 45 feet tall, and 75 feet from nose to tail. It took a team of 50 – including engineers, fabricators, skin makers, artists and painters, and animatronic experts – a year to build the original production.

Variety said, “The dinosaurs are stunning, life-size and faultlessly nimble. In act one, the beasts parade into the arena gnashing and cavorting as a safari-suited paleontologist describes their attributes … in the second half, the action cranks up, culminating in a spectacular clash as a T-Rex mom defends her baby from predators. Sonny Tilders' triumphant creature design ensures ‘Walking With Dinosaurs’ is a truly spectacular spectacular. It is everything a dino-phile could want.”

The 15 dinosaurs of the original Australian production were “hatched” by Tilders, the head of creature design, in a Melbourne Docklands workshop big enough to park a 747. The show took one year to build. The team of 50 artists and technicians are now building a new set of ‘stars’ to tour North America and later internationally. In the United States, the show is so big that the only building large enough to the Tacoma Dome to house rehearsals for North America is the Greater Tacoma Convention and Trade Center!

The show depicts the dinosaurs’ evolution, complete with the climatic and tectonic changes that took place allowing them to survive for so long. With almost cinematic realism, WALKING WITH DINOSAURS has scenes of the interactions between dinosaurs, and the audience sees how carnivorous dinosaurs evolved to walk on two legs, and how the herbivores fended off their more agile predators.

WALKING WITH DINOSAURS – The Live Experience is brought to North America by Immersion Edutainment, led by Executive Director Bruce Mactaggart.

CONTACTS:
Tim Choy, David Barber, Davidson & Choy Publicity 323-954-7510 ext. 13, t.choy@dcpublicity.com, d.barber@dcpublicity.com

Adrian Bryan-Brown, Joe Perrotta Boneau/Bryan-Brown 212-575-3030, abrown@bbbway.com, jperrotta@bbbway.com

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