A brand-new, what we call ''key art'', promotional poster has just been released for Terra Nova.
The new upcoming Steven Spielberg adventure time-traveling drama will be starting next month in America and, as I broke the news in June, will start in early 2012 on M-Net after the pay broadcaster acquired the licensing rights for South Africa.
The new Terra Nova image shows the Shannon family with the dad Jim Shannon (Jason O'Mara) in front and pterodactyls flying overhead. The rest of the Shannon family who time-travels back 85 million years into Earth's prehistoric past is to the right in the back and Commander Nathan Taylor (Stephen Lang) who stands behind Jim with a weapon. One of the heavy terrain vehicles that feature prominently in the first Terra Nova episodes also made the poster.
Just over a week ago I spoke to a high ranking South African TV executive within our television industry, someone who I have a lot of respect for, in an off-the-record conversation, and who saw the 2 hour pilot episode in Los Angeles a few months ago, what the executive's thoughts were of Terra Nova.
I asked the executive about the 3 dinosaurs I've seen in the teaser promo trailer for Terra Nova and whether there's more. The executive told me there's more dinosaurs, but at the stage of Fox showing the episode they were ''not done yet'' [so you see stand-in animation in scenes where the dinosaurs haven't been fully CGI rendered yet].
Of course I asked the executive what the person thinks of Terra Nova. (Science fiction is not the person's most favourite genre.) The executive smiled and told me that after seeing Terra Nova ''it didn't make me think that it's bad and won't make it. It had legs. These days there's so much bad [shows], that if you pass the bar of not being in that category it's already an achievement.'' Translated: Terra Nova seems that it might be dino-mite.
