Getting your Dinosaur "Fix"

Cafe Society
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When I was a kid I loved dinosaurs, and for the longest time wanted to be a paleontologist.

There were lots of places where I learned about dinosaurs, starting with a kid’s book called From Then to Now and followed by The Little Golden Book of Dinosaurs and The Big Book of Dinosaurs, and plenty of other books and comics.

But it was the movies that really brought them “to life”. When I was growing up in the 1960s there weren’t as many movies as today. I recall when I first saw Son of Kong on the TV in my parents’ bedroom and realized that it had dinosaurs in it that I was onto something. Shortly after, I saw King Kong (which ran a LOT on WWOR channel 9 out of Secaucus NJ).

Anyway, here were my dinosaur flicks:

King Kong
Son of Kong (I owned an abbreviated version on 8 mm film)
Unknown Island (pretty poor – T. rexes played by guys in suits)
Lost Continent (1951) – poor quality stop-motion dinosaurs, but lots better than lizards)
The Beast of Hollow Mountain – Stop motion T. rex in the West/Mexico. Was supposed to be animated by Willis O’Brien, but someone else did it. It looked better in my memory than in real life
Dinosaurus – The guys who would go on to do The Outer Limits did some stop mottion of a Brontosauris and a T. rex, and eked it out with a lot of puppet work. I still think the fight between the T. rex and the steam shovel inspired the end of Aliens
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms – Ray Harryhausen’s first solo effort, and the original 1950s monster movie. It invented all the cliches. Ironically, Harryhausen’s Rhedosaurus really doesn’t have a dinosaur body plan. But still great.
The Land Unknown – crashed helicopter pilots discover an oasis of prehistoric life in the antarctic. There’s a T. Rex (a man in a suit again, but better than Unknown Island. Later on, his head was purportedly that of the fire-breathing “Spot” in the TV series The Munsters. There’s also a ludicrously oversized (and stealthy) plesiosaur.
One Million B.C. (1940) Victor Mature and Lon Chaney Jr. lay cave men. Lizards and a baby crocodile with fins glued on play dinosaurs and are involved in a Duel to the Death that was condemned for cruelty to animals (and most scenes seem to feature dead or stuffed animals). This footage was repurposed in a LOT of other movies, including Robot Monster. Not really very convincing. There’s also an armadillo posing as an ankylosaur or something and a baby pig dressed up as a triceratops.

King Dinosaur – No matter how many frulls and fins you put on a lizard, it still doesn’t look like a T. Rex

The Lost World (1960 – more lizards with fins glued on posing as dinosaurs, including what’s supposed to be a T. rex. There’s a new fight between a lizard and a baby croc, again, which got recycled in a lot of TV shows.

Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) – they’re not really dinosaurs, but lizards with fins on their backs are passed off as ludicrously oversized Dimetrodons. To their credit, they don’t look all that bad. There’s also a giant lizard of some kind thrown in at the very end that gets doused with lava.

The Giant Behemoth (1957) The same guy who directed Beast from 20,000 Fathoms made this one. It was evidently supposed to be a giant sea blob, but the investors wanted a monster, so we got a radioactive sauropod invading London in a replay of TBf20kF. Willis 'Brien animated, aided by an uncredited and underappreciated Pete Peterson

Gorgo (1961) Eugene Lourie comes back for a third go at Giant Monsters attacking a city, London again, this time. In color. With William Sylvester before he was in 2001. Gorgo (and his vengeful mom) were played by guys in monster suits.

One Million Years B.C. – Ray Harryhausen remakes the 1940 film, now with animated dinosaurs (and one lizard – Boo Hiss) and with Raquel Welch. Harryhausen’s pterodactyls, unlike Willis O’Brien’s, have bat wings.

Fantasia – Disney does dinosaurs, although they commit the usual sin of mixing Jurassic dinos with Cretaceous dinos.

I knew about other movies from reading Famous Monsters of Filmland, but didn’t get a chgance to see the 1925 Lost World and other early flicks until I was older. I somehow missed The Valley of Gwangi when it first came out. And I never did see The Animal World with its Harryhausen + Willis O’Brien dinosaurs. But I had the comic book, and the 3D ViewMaster slides.

Most other movies and TV shows (like Land of the Lost) were still in the future.

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When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970) has fetching cavewoman Victoria Vetri befriending members of a dinosaur family (animated by Jim Danforth and others) amid conflicts with lame-ass cavemen who want to sacrifice her and a few other less-friendly dinos. Entertaining if not educational and admittedly a bit light on dino action.

I recall amusing stop motion dinosaurs in Caveman (1981), another Danforth effort.

Justifiable absent from the list is Dinosaur from the Deep (1993), arguably the worst dinosaur movie ever made.

Imo, The Valley of Gwangi (1969) is still the most entertaining dinosaur movie ever made (along with the Greatest Western Ever), primarily owing to its scenes of sustained dinosaur action and the charisma of its leading Allosaurus.

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Kids’ fascination with dinosaurs is itself a fascinating thing. Though I know it doesn’t fit into your timeline, I think the best dinosaur movie ever made – and indeed, one of the best movies of all time in terms of sheer entertainment – was Jurassic Park. I remember seeing city buses going by with advertising for “Jurassic Park” years ago, which I thought was some new theme park that had opened. If only! But it was an ad for a movie, and once I saw it, I was smitten – even though it turns out that with new research in paleontology, some of the depictions were inaccurate.

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Don’t watch “Walking with Dinosaurs”
On PBS.
Unless you want a good belly laugh.

Someone called the dinosaurs CGI “dino-puppies”.
Like giant lizards are any different than the little ones under my porch.

The babies don’t “play”. They are trying not to get eaten…possibly by their mother.

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It was kind of cute. But OVERDRAMATIZED like heck. And they really should have figured out how to animate the walking of the beasts - that was terrible.
I was hoping the last one would have them all get wiped out, but we did see a flood.

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We are watching it and the paleontologists doing the digging and explaining are really good- the CGI is okay, but yeah the anthropomorphizing is terrible. Poor little triceratops baby! :roll_eyes:

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I never laughed so hard when the big giant whatever it was called(I swear they just made up those names) when his head blew up with two ball shaped balloon things 'cause he was feeling amorous.

:grin:

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You could try the one at Universal Islands of Adventure in Orlando…

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I don’t know much about paleontology, but I’m trying to figure out how they know how the dinos raised their young, hunted, etc just from examining their bones. Some examples:

  1. In the first episode an adolescent dino was driven away from his family and later hooked up with a bunch of other young males who roamed together until they reached adulthood.

2, In another episode we were treated to several examples of how a pack of predators worked together to lure prey so they could hang up on it.

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For some species of dinosaur there are sites with multiple individuals present that immediately gives you a sense of their possible demographic composition - whether they are found as an all-ages grouping or an age cohort that packs together.

Most palaeontological reconstruction of lifeways is contingent on it being only as solid as the evidence to hand, and usually also able to be demonstrated within the living world as a viable mode of behaviour. Each new discovery raises the possibility of getting a fresh perspective on the issue and what are generally accepted ideas (or more accurately, are not being actively argued about because they are plausible and reasonable) may not withstand new evidence.

For shows like WWD, there is a trade-off between telling a story about a formerly living thing that includes some level of conjecture so that it can be understood as a dinosaur and an animals doing what animals do, and strictly sticking to the facts. Sticking to the facts probably involves an hour-long documentary scanning over magnified pieces of fossil bone, pointing out the muscle attachments and knobbly bits, and possibly at some lumps of rock to juice it up a bit. Certainly accurate, but informative and edutaining?

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There’s actually a Trope of this:

Trivia fact: the brief clip of a dinosaur featured in “The Secret of Gilligan’s Island” cavemen dream sequence was from Dinosaurus.

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With the exception of Boo Bah and maybe a few Independent Lense programs, this was the worst shit I’ve ever seen on PBS.

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Did you catch “Journey to the Beginning of Time”? That had a couple of dinosaurs, although what everyone remembers from it was the Terror Bird chase.

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They also used clips from Dinosaurus in the comedy It’s About Time.

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I assume this is referring to the current reboot?

When I was a kid, BBC did the original Walking with Dinosaurs, and that was a great documentary. Certainly not “dino-puppies”.

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Dinosaurs aren’t giant lizards, so yes, they’re pretty different than the little ones under your porch.

Modern dinosaurs do indeed play, so I wouldn’t be so quick to conclude that ancient ones did not.

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As I said, I was a child of the 1960s, so I used 1970 as an arbitrary cut-off date. I saw When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth in the theater when it came out. Jim Danforth had been the low-rent Ray Harryhausem, animating things like The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao and Jack the Giant Killer (which was virtually a rip-off of The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad). His animation was clearly inferior, especially obvious in Jack the Giant Killer, where it can be compared almost directly to Harryhausen’s. But his work is infinitely better in WDRtE. The animation figures were much better quality, and the animation and incorporation much smoother and more professional.
Oddly, despite the title, most of the prehistoric creatures weren’t dinosaurs – there’s a Chasmosaur and a Megalosaur, but the Rhamphorynchus, Tylosaur, and plesiosaur aren’t technically dinosaurs.

Apparently there were two more in the “series” that included this film and One Million Years B.C. – Prehistoric Women and Creatures the World Forgot. Neither featured prehistotic animals, stop-motion or otherwise. Why would you want to see them? Evidently the Creatures that time forgot were scantily-clad cavewomen

A few more pre-1970 dinosaurs:

The Toho series featured lots of kaiju, but Gojira isn’t a recognized species. Nor Ghidrah. But at least three creatures from the series are somehow related to known dinosaurs. Anguirus, Gojira’s antagonist in the second movie, is supposed to be an Ankylosaurus, and “Anguirus” derives from that word. Similarly, Rodan, who was originally “Radon” in Japan (changed to avoid confusion with the radioactive gas) , which is derived from pteRAnoDON. And the T. rex-like Gorosaurus might be said to resemble the real-life Gorgosaurus.

Some of the original “Gumby” cartoons featured animated plasticine dinosaurs:

Karel Zeman animated Cesta do pravěku , literally “Journey into prehistory” in 1955 and in color. But it wasn’t released in the US until over a decade later, under the title Journey to the Beginning of Time, with a framing story involving American kids that had been filmed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York – a place I knew well. Zeman had previously made a film released in the US as THe FAbulous World of JUles Verne.

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Eh, the descendants of a select theropod branch with many millions of years of additional evolution play. Even if we want to suggest that their modern behavior is somehow indicative of how some smaller prehistoric theropods might have acted, it has nothing to to do with the Sauropods, Ceratopsia, Ankylosauria, the Hadrosaurids, etc.

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Growing up in the Sixties and Seventies, neither I nor anybody I knew had any kind of obsession with dinosaurs, Giant monsters like Japanese kaiju? Sure. We were crazy about that stuff. But their closest analogs in reality? Naw. Those were just what gasoline was made out of (according to Chevron). Godzilla was exciting. Dinosaurs were just kind of silly things that lived at a time when there weren’t any people to eat or buildings to knock down.

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Kids these days.

We loved dinosaurs, not only for themselves, but also because all those movies somehow arranged to dinosaurs to interact with modern things they could knock down. Dinosaurs automatically made any movie more interesting. Even if they were of the “slurpasurus”-type lizards-with-fins-glued-on-the-back.

A few more from the 60s:

Reptilicus 1961 Danish(!)-American film about a tail dug up out of the ground that regenerates into an acid-slime-spitting, amphibious and flying monster. Not any dinosaur breed that I’m aware of, but clearly intended to be some sort of dinosaur. After the movie came out, Charlton comics came out with a Reptilicus comic book, which changed its name vto Retisaurus by the third issue.

Sound of Horror (AKA The Prehistoric Sound) – 1966 Spanish film in which they avoid the complication of animating the dinosaur by having it be invisible. Yes – this movie is about an invisible dinosaur. It still manages to use the cheapest, fakest-looking invisibility special effects. High school kids would have made a more convincing film. The creature does become visible briefly at the very end. It’s a guy in a monster suit.