housands of years after they first appeared among the mythologies of many different distant civilizations across the globe, dragons remain one of the most mysterious and exotic creatures in human history. They have shown up in different forms in virtually every culture known to man, and have yet to be explained as a realistic, scientific phenomenon. Until now.
Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real, Animal Planet's upcoming two-hour special, plans not only to explore the illustrious history of these larger-than-life beasts, but to place them within a legitimate historical and biological context. In addition to creating dragons via the magic of computer-generated imagery, show creator Charlie Foley and director Kevin Mohs provide extensive information detailing their prehistoric origins, and delineate logistical possibilities by which they could survive through the ages, fly among the clouds and even breathe fire.
Foley and Mohs recently spoke to Science Fiction Weekly to discuss the generation of this unprecedented historical reconstruction, and described how they assembled a biological basis for the creatures' seemingly impossible abilities.
How did you initially create a narrative to explore the history of dragons?
Charlie Foley: The way we tell the story of dragons is through the individual stories of four particular species of dragons throughout time and across the globe. The first dragon story we tell is the oldest dragon, which is the prehistoric dragon; that's the dragon that's found in the Cretaceous period and is a contemporary of Tyrannosaurus rex, and in fact does battle with the T-rex as you see in the clips there. That's the first major dragon we visit in the CGI and computer graphics. But then we move from that dragon in time to two other dragons, through three other species of dragons, to tell the story arc of the rise and fall of the predator, the dragon. The remaining two dragons that we then go to are the marine dragon, and that's sort of the transitional animal. That's how we imagined dragons survived the KT event, the Cretaceous Tertiary extinction that wipes out most life on Earth. And then the marine dragon gives rise to a species of forest dragon, that's in Europe and Asia. And then the last dragon story we tell is the dragon of Western myth and legend, which is a mountain dragon, and that brings us up until about the 15th century.
How did you design a historical lineage for them that corresponded with specific time periods?
Kevin Mohs: We kind of start off with a surprise to get you in an unexpected scenario here, where you see T-rex being a major predator, and lo and behold, there's something bigger and better out there: a dragon that comes and does battle with it. So we kind of wanted to start off with a bang, as a surprise factor, and then as you watch the show you find out that there's a theory as to why, when anything bigger than a cat was wiped out on Earth, the dragon survived. That was through having a marine dragon that coexisted at the same time as dragons, like crocodiles.
Foley: And this is something that the special definitely tries to honor rather than just being pure flight of fancy. Everything that we imagine in each of the dragons is inspired by something that is real biology or real behavior or real natural history. As you know what happens in the KT event, the big animals that actually made it out alive were the ones that were marine or aquatic or otherwise escaped through the sea, so we're telling the story of dragons who were contemporaries of the dinosaurs. That's really the only way that they would have made it out, and so nature kind of led us along the way all the way. Even though we're telling one of humankind's oldest stories here on Animal Planet with Dragons, the way that we are doing it differently is that we are imagining them as real animals, and what our guide was throughout the process of imagining these animals has been real natural history. Kevin and I have worked at Animal Planet for a while, and have worked on natural history documentaries before that, so we have a lot of interest into that area of the natural world, and we brought in scientific advisors as well, who helped us come to a vision of what these animals would be like, how they would have to have behaved, and then actually it gave a real identity to each of the animals, because we knew we had to honor that nature that we wanted to incorporate into it.
What kind of empirical evidence did you find to prove that dragons actually existed, and at what point did you have to extrapolate a throughline to explain the continuity of their existence?
Foley: We're not out to prove that dragons existed. We're just saying, "What if dragons existed? Wouldn't it be really cool if they did?" and just kind of have everybody go along on the ride with us. But, so you know, we are telling a story here, and I think it is a story that I think is an enduring story and a story that is so universal. Every single culture on the planet has a dragon myth or a variation on the dragon myth, and that's sort of anecdotal to the fact that all of these different people came up with the same basic idea of the same animal. That's what I found so compelling, and I think a lot of people find compelling, about the story. Here you have the Chinese and the Norse, the Scandinavians and the Aztecs, and all of them have dragon myths, and when you stop and think about that, they don't even have a reptile on which to base the idea of a dragon. They can't super-size some small green lizard and give it wings and imagine a dragon; you have to imagine that without any sort of base of reference of a small reptile, because they live in a place where no reptiles are found. That's how it could get kind of interesting, when you start thinking about that—"OK, well how on earth did they come up with the idea of that animal?"
How is the process by which dragons breathe fire explained in the show?
Foley: Well, the system we devised was with the help of one of our scientific advisors, Dr. Peter Hogarth, and originally we had come up with this notion that we knew they would need some kind of buoyancy aid, so we were kind of looking to a fish's swim bladders, which helps them to maintain buoyancy, and in the water [dragon], we sort of imagined the dragon had to have something kind of similar to help them move and generate lift. So we devised the idea that they would have had flight bladders, and the flight bladders would have been filled with hydrogen, which is itself combustible—it's 14 times less dense than air—and Dr. Hogarth was really helpful to us because the original system that we imagined was going to be evolving from electric eels. Electric eels have specialized muscles that can vibrate and oscillate and produce voltage, so we thought maybe if those flight bladders were surrounded by specialized musculature, the voltage they would generate could ignite the hydrogen, and the hydrogen would combust.
Dr. Hogarth explained to us that actually wouldn't work, and that's why it's so important to bring in these scientific advisors during the process, because Kevin and I imagined the animals and wanted to apply the natural history to this rendering of the animals, but as with all great stories, you want to believe the story; you want to immerse yourself in the story world, and here what makes the story world more compelling is that it's drawn so much from real science and real fact. We changed the hydrogen flight bladders, but now the dragon used a catalyst to ignite the hydrogen, and we used platinum, which would ignite the hydrogen in the reaction. That's an example again how we tried to—it is still a story, and we definitely want people to believe the story fundamentally and enjoy the story and identify with it, and I think what makes it a novel story is that these aren't just dragons that are bit players in small roles. This is a story from the dragon's perspective, and imagining how they would be if they had been real.
At what point did you choose consciously to take poetic license with your creation of the dragons to design some cool if not necessarily believable images?
Mohs: That was always a temptation to us, just to do something because it looks good, but what keeps us unique is that we said no, it's got to make biological sense. Every decision we make regarding the design of our dragons.
Foley: I'll give you a good example of that. In the sequence where the tyrannosaurus does battle with the young juvenile prehistoric dragon and his mom sweeps in, if you notice, the young prehistoric dragon flaps out his wings at the tyrannosaurus to try to scare him, and on the underside of his wings you see eye spots. A lot of animals will have eye spots, and it's basically to warn off or threaten predators; it's a scare tactic, how an animal will flash an eye spot and a would-be predator gets a little freaked out, and that's what we gave our prehistoric dragon. We imagined young prehistoric dragons could be vulnerable to cannibalism from their own kind, or could be vulnerable to other carnosaurs, then maybe they would have had eye spots. We never made mention of that in the program, but nevertheless we wanted that to be in the design of the animal. Nothing we used to illustrate the animal, literally or figuratively, was completely arbitrary or because we thought it would look cool.
Mohs: What's interesting about this is when we hired the scientists to help us with our science and create reference materials, because when we started this, there was no book that said, "Here's how different species existed, here's their breeding or mating cycles," and all of that kind of stuff, so we kind of created our own reference materials for the directors and writers to use, and we said, "Forget about myths. We're not retelling myths here, we're making new stories, and we're creating completely real animals."
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