How to Train Your Dragon: The Arena Spectacular

The Deadly Nadder gets its close up.

For all you people that loved Walking with Dinosaurs the Live Experience, Dreamworks has decided to team up with Global Creatures to bring a new amazing experience to people around the world. Based of the much loved movie that was loosely based off a much loved series of children's novels, How to Train Your Dragon the Arena Spectacular is basically retelling the story of Hiccup, Toothless, Astrid, Gobber, and all your favorite characters from the movie in a live action arena show. I personally am surprised that they were capable of even doing this, seeing the technical problems of trying to recreate Dragons, which are far more advanced than Dinosaurs. Everything has basically had to be ramped up from Walking with Dinosaurs.

The number of robots and puppets used in the show has increased fist of all, instead of 15 puppets from WWD, they have over 30 technologically advanced dragons. Since many of them were anthropomorphized in the movie, they made some of them capable of doing facial expressions, like grinning and frowning, but the overall look of the dragons has changed from the movie to make them more realistic and seem more like living, breathing animals. But probably one of the most impressive things is the huge jump on the animal's flying systems. In Walking with Dinosaurs the only flying creature was the Ornithocheirus, and could only be suspended in mid air in front of a projection screen. In The Arena Spectacular, the dragons are suspended on an upside down railway system flying right over the audience's heads!

Along with the technologically advanced leap from Walking with Dinosaurs, they also have human actors on the stage playing as all the main characters and a story to tell rather than a documentary. These people had to train a lot for these rolls, many of the scenes they are in require many months, if not years of training. Along with the actors and dragons, they also have teams of aerial acrobatics, 3 huge projection screens (Two on the ground and one on the wall), and the title of being called the most technologically advanced show ever made.

The first showing will be in Melbourne Australia at the Hisense Arena on March 2. Sadly I'm from California so I'll have to wait for it to come by my local arena. I saw both Walking with Dinosaurs The live Experience, saw the How to Train Your Dragon film, and have been a big fan of both. When it comes to town I'm definitely going, but for all of you in Australia right now, I envy you.

Until then, I'll just have to settle for the Sneak Peek: