For me, it was that cool Marx Toy Dino set.
Fair enough. This has been way more time than I intended to spend on wondering/discussing possible dinosaur play behavior when I woke up this morning 
(I also feel that “lizards do [this]” is even less compelling than birds but didn’t feel like engaging with it at the moment)
Although honestly I am now curious about the reasons that play behaviors develop evolutionarily?
Probably not the thread for that though. 
Created a thread asking about it here.
I wasn’t a huge dinosaur fan (was more into space as a child), but we did have The Land Before Time on video as kids, and watched it many times. Different from most of the movies mentioned in that the dinosaurs were protagonists rather than stomping monsters.
The original movie came out long after I was a kid, but just in time for our daughter to watch the almost infinite number of sequels.
The original movie was made by Don Bluth, who wanted to restore the glory of fully animated, hand-drawn animation, and that first film is glorious to watch. The sequels were made with a lot less money and inferior animation, but I’m impressed with how long they could keep the series going.
Other dinosaur films that were pre-1970, but which I wasn’t aware of, or couldn’t see
The Lost World (1925). I did catch brief clips of it, and saw still in Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland. But any version I could’ve sen as a kid would have been horribly butchered – The fine folks at First National, anticipating a sequel that didn’t come, essentially got rid of the film, except for a 16mm version for educational purposes that’s only about 70% of the full film. George Eastman House and film aficianados did a sectacular job of locating the missing pieces in film archives in the 1990s, and now the film is about 97% complete. I understand that there are three restored versions (I have two of them) – about as impressive as the restoration done on Metropolis.
There are other early Willis O’Brien films featuring dinosaurs, which I only saw stills from as a kid.
The Arctic Giant – a Fleischer studios Superman cartoon from 1942. I didn’t see these until I was in grad school, but it’s pretty impressive. A dinosaur (evident;ly a somewhat goofy-looking T. Rex) is found in Siberia and brought back frozen in ice to a special facility built next to a recognizable American Museum of Natural History in New York (Fleischer studios started out in NYC). The freezer breaks down, the T. rex thaws with amazing rapidity, and wakes up to start wrecking the city, until stopped by Superman. I’ve seen stills from the TV series Superman The Animated Series that show him fighting a robot T Rex made by Lex Luthor, which might be a callback to this old cartoon.
OT (?) questions prompted by the new trailer: How big is Jurassic Park island supposed to be? Herds of gigantic dinosaurs require a large amount of pasture land, I would think. And the aquatic monster that threatens the ship- is he stupid big, or what?
I’ve been pondering why I never took dinosaurs seriously and I realize that my daily exposure to them was from comic strips (Alley Oop, B.C., etc) and cartoons (Flintstones) where they were generally depicted as big, dumb, domesticated animals. When I saw Jurassic Park when I was 30, I laughed my ass off while others in the audience shrieked in terror.
I got my dinosaur fix from books. I have a very hard time watching any pre-'93 dinosaur movies or TV for anything but amusement value. They certainly don’t scratch any palaeontology itch.
As mentioned, there were the “funny” cartoons – The Flintstones and, before them, the Fleischer studio “Stone Age” cartoons from 1940, which is where The Flintstones stole a lot of their ideas:
https://www.bcdb.com/cartoons/Paramount_Pictures/Fleischer_Studios/Stone_Age/
There were Warner Brothers dinosaur/caveman cartoons, like Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur
I knew about Winsor McKay’s Gertie the Dinosaur, but hadn’t seen it.
In the 60s, Mom & Dad took me to the Field Museum.
Hooked on Dino for life.
The aquatic monster is a mosasaur, and while big enough in real life, apparently is over-scale in the movie.
One question that prompts is how their DNA was preserved - there were probably no underwater palaeomosquitoes to suck their blood and die, preserved in resin for aeons?
Ecosystem size: that’s a plot hole going back to King Kong or The Lost World: you don’t support a breeding population (hundreds or thousands of individuals) of huge megafauna on a hundred-square mile island or “lost valley”. My favorite fanwank is that these dinosaur reserves somehow exist in bubbles of space that are much larger on the inside than the outside.
Stupid big: isn’t it part of the franchise now that they are now breeding genetic creations for how popular they will be, and aren’t even attempting to faithfully recreate animals as they existed in the Mesozoic?
Arthur Conan Doyle deserves a lot of credit for his setting for The Lost World. It’s based on the Roraima plateau in South America, which is elevated above the surrounding jungle by over 8500 feet. Sir Arthur figured that this plateau would be ecologically isolated from the surrounding jungle, and might be a place where otherwise extinct animals might survive. He was right – the ecology of Roraima does differ markedly from the surrounding area. It just doesn’t contain large prehistoric beasts.
The idea was a very good one, and has been ripped off plenty of times (including the Johnny Weismuller Tarzan movies, with their “Mutia Escarpment” where Tarzan lives. The Pixar movie Up! not only uses the idea, they pretty clearly copied the look of the plateau from the 1925 version of The Lost World.
Of course, your criticism of the size is entirely correct. The real Roraima plateau is less than twenty square miles in area (much smaller than the hundred square miles you already say is too small). And Doyle manages to cram an inland sea on the plateau, with plesiosaurs.
I could have written the OP. I was a Dinosaur Kid. Couldn’t get enough of them. For me Thanksgiving was all about King Kong because WWOR would air it that day every year (a long with Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young, and Godzilla the next day!). And I never grew out of it. I have gotten suckered into seeing every crappy Jurassic World movie in a theater just for the Dinosaur fix (finally saying, “No” on this new one).
One special I don’t think I have seen mentioned that I loved as a kid I unfortunately don’t remember the name of. It was Claymation and was set up as a kid giving a report so there was a kid with a very distinctive voice narrating it. I think it might have been part of a larger special but I still remember it and loved it back then. Does anyone remember the one I mean?
Speaking of claymation dinosaurs, there’s the one who ruined Gumby: Prickle (with a little help from Goo)
I found it!
In the late 80s there was a tiny show on New Zealand TV, a series of stop motion animated dinosaur tales, made by a guy named Shaun Bolton. I met him once and he showed me all his dino models. Then he went on to work with Peter Jackson on LOTR and King Kong, and also The Water Horse.
If I’d come in earlier I could’ve told you this. It’s a early Will Vinton effort, and great, if dated (it was made before the theory that the meteor wiped out the dinosaurs came out). Will Vinton studios later revived the T. Rex and Styracosaur as move critics for things like the Festival of Will Vinton Studios compilation (with the Styracosaur as Roger Ebert and the T. Rex as “Rex”, evidently being Rex Reed, rather than Gene Siskel.
IMDb says the voices – all of them – were Michele Mariana. It was her second credit.