I am a Montreal-based actor, writer and comedian.
When U.S. President John F. Kennedy was shot, I was three days old. I cried all day.
My favourite books of all time are Moby Dick by Herman Melville, The Last Temptation by Nikos Kazantzakis and The Ewoks Fun Time Activity Book by Chirpa and Pamploo.
I am a member of The Vestibules, On The Spot Improv and The Best Buy Battery Club.
Except for the Battery Club, I've been at all this stuff for over 20 years.
Enjoy my blog.
Montalban's reactions are from the interrogation scene in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.
The musical number is, yes, from the 70's TV series, Fantasy Island.
I can only imagine how the idea for a musical number with Mr. Roarke and Tatoo ever came about.
Possibly it went something like this:
(The Producer of Fantasy Island stands outside of Herve Villechaize's trailer. Herve has locked the door and won't come out.)
Producer: Herve, you have to come out of your trailer now. We've been ready to shoot for the last two hours.
Herve: No!
Procucer: Look, we've been through this before. We're trying to give you more lines in every episode.
Herve: That's not good enough.
Producer: (sighs) What do you want now?
Herve: I want to be in a musical number.
Producer: What?
Herve: You heard me. A big musical number. With Ricardo. And it has to be part of an episode. I want it to be just like those musicals from the 30's and 40's that Ricardo was in.
Producer: Huh-uh. Do have any experience with that kind of thing?
Herve: Hmmm....I think I might stay in here another two hours...
Producer: (exasperated) Okay. Fine.
Given Ricardo Montalban's experience in those old MGM musicals, pacing the number for Mr.
Villechaize's talents must of been kinda like asking Lance Armstrong to ride a tricycle with training wheels.
You know, I gotta admit that the 80's was not exactly my favourite decade. I know saying that goes against the current ironclad Pop Culture 80's Retro Mandate but I'll take my chances.
As a kid who was weaned on Mad Magazine jokes about Watergate and Vietnam, the sudden political shift towards the likes of Canada's very own Brian Mulroney, the U.K's Margaret Thatcher and The Greatest Single American That Ever Lived, Ronald Reagan, came as something of a shock to my system.
It wasn't just the politics either. The trickle-down cultural repercussions of the Reagan Era had a definite impact on the pop culture zeitgeist of the decade.
Being an even bigger Leftist Commie Pinko Canuck back then than I am now, I went and wrote a paper for my propaganda course at Concordia on propaganda in current popular culture. It focused on many pop culture phenomena that today are remembered as beloved icons of many people's childhoods. I'm not going to get all curmudgeonly and name names but the paper focused on what I, at the time felt, was a disturbing trend toward increasingly violent, simplistic and militaristic TV shows and movies, often aimed at kids.
One of the greatest examples of this trend, the Rambo movies, however, did not figure in my paper. The reason for that omission was simple. People who discuss and comment on movies that they have not seen were then, and are still, one of the banes of my existence. And I simply could not bring myself to watch any of those movies.
I have not seen a single one of the Rambo movies in all the years that have passed since.
However, not too long ago, I saw an interesting little independent British movie called Son of Rambow (2007).
Son of Rambow is the story of Will, a kid growing up in the UK circa 1982. Will is being brought up in an environment so religiously conservative that he is forbidden to watch TV or movies. Nonetheless, the young boy of about 8 manages to see a bootleg copy of the First Blood (1982), the first film of the Rambo series. He instantly idolizes the character of John Rambo.
As is the case with many kids experiences with TV and movies, he personalizes the character in order to face the challenges and struggles in his own life, particularly the death of his father.
The ideology of the movie is not on the boy's radar, nor does it really make an impact in his life.
Will decides to write, direct and star in his own sequel to First Blood that mirrors, from a very juvenile perspective, issues he is dealing with during a particularly rough part of his childhood.
My Concordia propaganda paper aside, the film nicely makes the case that kids personalities and behavior are not changed by TV and movies . Like everyone else, they react to movies based on their personal experiences and feelings.
Son of Rambow was such an interesting little film that it made me reconsider the Rambo movies. I thought that maybe it's time I experienced what they were all about. Thanks to a marathon on the movie channel, Mpix, and a weekend to myself, I was able to do just that.
So in the spirit of the young hero of Son of Rambow, here then are my own personal thoughts and feelings on those quintessentially 80's pop culture zeitgeist action movies...
This poster kept me company while working in a video store in the 80's
First Blood is by far the most subtle movie of the series...and that's not really saying that much. Itis a very basic story told on a relatively small scale. Decorated Vietnam War vet John Rambo is harassed by small town cops. He fights back, escapes to the woods and then proceeds to re-enact his own version of the Vietnam War. In this conflict, however, the Vietnam vet, ironically, is cast as his former enemy, the Viet Cong. The hapless cops are the Americans forces, attempting to fight an elusive, incredibly resourceful and determined enemy in an unfamiliar and inhospitable natural environment.
Even from the first film, it is clear that the story of John Rambo is an American story told from a very American perspective.
Or is it?
The novel was first published in 1972.
I was amazed to learn that First Blood is based on a novel written by a Canadian, David Morell, and that the director of the movie, Ted Kotchef, is also Canadian. Kotchef was, among other things, responsible for bringing two of Mordecai Richler's novels to the screen: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Joshua: Then and Now (both shot in Montreal).
First Blood, in its initial stages of development, was a very different movie than the one that was realeased in 1982.
Stallone was far from the first choice for the role of Rambo. Al Pacino, Robert Deniro, Clint Eastwood and even Dustin Hoffman had all been approached for the role. They all turned it down.
The movie that inspired the original casting and choice of director
After that, the movie was to star country musician turned actor Kris Kristofferson as Rambo. That's not as weird a casting choice at it may sound. Kristofferson was a United States Army Ranger captain before getting into show biz. The rest of the cast was going to be Gene Hackman as the corrupt small town sheriff and Lee Marvin as Rambo's former commanding officer. The movie in that incarnation was reportedly going to be directed by Sam Peckinpah, director of such incredible Hollywood tomes on the nature of violence and masculine aggression as The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs. Also, the original script followed the novel more closely in which (SPOILER ALERT) Rambo commits suicide at the end of the story.
I only dwell on these "mighta been" scenarios to make a point. First Blood represents a point of transition in the blockbuster Hollywood action movie.
As I began watching the film and taking in its low key deliberately paced opening scenes, I was expecting one of those smaller scale 70's style action movies. Something like the original Walking Tall, for instance (not the silly Rock remake), which also follows the story of one man fighting corruption in a small town. Even 70's action movies like Death Wish and Dirty Harry, by today's standards, come off as subtle and thoughtful films that examine the issue of the use of violence to maintain law and order.
So as I watched the opening scenes following Stallone's quiet and reserved John Rambo and Brian Dennehy's unassuming yet stern small town sheriff, I started thinking that the film would go on to show how the conflict between the two characters intricately evolves, step by step, in an increasingly brutal and violent confrontation.
Silly me.
No more than 10 minutes into the movie, Stallone starts skillfully kicking the shit of out the one dimensionally corrupt and evil cops. Seemingly seconds after that, he has ran out of the police station and into the woods. Suddenly, we are into fast paced editing and action. The quiet Jerry Goldsmith score has quickly shifted to become one of Mr. Goldsmith's standard "Tunn-Tun-Ta-Ta-Tun-Tun-Tunnnn" action movie scores. The movie proceeds to follow an A to B plot line from there on in. It's watchable and engagingly paced but certainly not a low key or subtle film.
That, in essence, is what First Blood represents: a shift from the mainstream Hollywood movies of the 70's to the mainstream Hollywood movies of the 80's. One is quiet, deliberately paced and more nuanced with its themes while the other is faced paced, loud and generally pretty simplistic in its themes.
It is not all surprising, then, that the script was rewritten so that at end of the movie, Rambo does not commit suicide. And, of course, I'm not just talking about the commercial considerations of sequels here. One version of the story is a portrayal of the Vietnam Vet as a tragic symbol of all of the lives of young Americans that were both literally and figuratively destroyed by the war. The other version turns the Vietnam vet into the heroic underdog persecuted by an unjust society (in real life, BTW, there are equally valid arguments for both sides, IMO).
Rambo certainly does not come off as a tragic figure, in true sense of the word. Instead, Rambo, the undisputed hero of the movie, runs around taking out cops (though never once killing anyone), driving trucks over blockades and blowing tons of stuff up, leaving a trail of unwarranted destruction in his path.
No wonder that little British kid loved him so much.
Rambo's survival in the end of First Blood, for better or worse, opened some big time blockbuster floodgates...
“Boy, I saw RAMBO last night.I know what to do the next time this happens.” Former US President Ronald Reagan, on US hostages in Lebanon
To borrow a phrase from Monty Python, Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) is where things "started getting a bit silly".
Once again, we get a classic archetype of an American movie that is actually written and directed by Canadians. The director of the the second Rambo film, George P. Cosmatos was born in Italy and emigrated to Canada later in life. The screenplay was co-written by some Canuck named or other named James Cameron.
The original Rambo First Blood Part II
The film was an even bigger hit than First Blood.
So much so, that I remember comedians doing bits about what Rambo II and Rambo III might be like (none of it funny, trust me). I remember thinking "Um...wouldn't that be Rambo III and IV? Does anyone even realize this movie is a sequel?". Nor did it seem to matter that the movie's plot of a Vietnam veteran returning to the 'Nam to rescue POW's allegedly still held captive in the country, had already been done. Two years earlier there was a film called Uncommon Valor (directed, interestingly, by First Blood director, Ted Kotcheff) that told pretty much the same story.
All of that is fitting, actually. Rambo First Blood Part II is movie does not hold up to much scrutiny.
Nonetheless, here goes.
John Rambo is pulled off of the chain gang he was sentenced to after the events of First Blood. He is sent on a mission to rescue POW's reportedly still being held in Vietnam. In reality, whether or not this was ever actually true remains the subject of great debate and controversy in the US.
The ill advised Rambo Saturday morning cartoon
Whatever.
Doesn't matter in Rambo's world.
Not only are the POW's still there but a weak US government, despite enlisting the help of Rambo, doesn't really want to rescue them. To top it off, the POW's are being held by Vietnamese soldiers who still wear the exact same uniforms they wore during the conflict 20 years earlier. More importantly, good ol' Charlie, it turns out, is in league with those darn Russkies just like everyone always knew they were.
I remember seeing these posters in the Sporting Goods section of Canadian Tire
In this movie, Rambo has been upgraded from a highly skilled yet down-beaten underdog to a one man army superhero. The action is quick and violent. Rambo kills in this movie. A lot. He kills every which way he can. At one point, he blows an evil Vietnamese soldier literally to pieces with an exploding arrow.
Watching this film gave me a flashback to the Westerns I used to watch on TV as a very young kid. I don't remember much about the titles or actors or even plots of those Westerns. All I remember is that the cowboys were continually shooting and escaping from a bunch of Indians (that's what they called Native Americans in movies in those days). Whatever the odds may have been against them, the cowboys always got them injuns, no matter what.
Both those old Westerns and Rambo First Blood Part II are pretty much the same movie. Both take complex gray historical incidents and gloss them over into an overly simplistic shoot 'em up.
Freudian much?
The action in Rambo First Blood Part II is so big and over the top, that at times, it might almost come off as a comedy, or at the very least, tongue in cheek escapism. However, Stallone is determined to not let anything like that happen. The movie is very clearly a fantasy reboot of the Vietnam War, where in Rambo's words, "...we get to win this time". There is a great deal of heavy handed dialogue like "I just want this country to love us and much as we love it." . Stallone plays those lines with every bit of maudlin pathos he can muster.
Then there's the ludicrous closing credits ballad by Frank Stallone (Sly's bro) featuring lyrics about a "time for healing".
I'm not sure why the song never charted.
Rambo First Blood Part II is a juxtaposition of escapist action and obvious messages that ultimately does the movie no favours.
This time around the All American Rambo III (1988) is directed by a Brit, Peter MacDonald.
In this movie, Rambo helps freedom fighters in their struggle against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Man, that is so 23 years ago, isn't it?
This installment of the Rambo saga reminded a great deal of films like Mission To Moscow and Action in the North Atlantic. Both were Hollywood movies made during World War II that were, in order to promote war time alliances, very pro-Russian. They were also movies that got the people who made them into a lot of trouble during the Cold War.
Rambo III's granddad
The approach in Rambo III is quite similar. Rambo arrives in Afghanistan (ostensibly to rescue his former commanding officer but, really, we all know it's just so that he can kill a bunch of Russians). He is greeted by Afghan freedom fighters. These guys are portrayed in the classic Hollywood tradition of benevolent racial stereotyping.
There is plenty of clunky expository dialogue explaining how the Afghans are a simple people who are not that different from Americans. They just want their freedom and they are willing to fight for it.
Just like in the WWII propaganda movies promoting "our Russian friends", the Afghans even get a classically American colloquial endorsement from the hero of the movie. Rambo's Afghan guide tells Rambo that the Russians will never conquer his country. He says that many armies, going as far back as Alexander The Great and as recently as the British in the 1919, have tried but have never been successful. The guide asks Rambo if he knows what that means. Rambo replies, "It means you don't take any shit".
"Hello. Historical Irony Department. Can I help you?"
The movies were also known as Sylvester Stallone's Muscle Ego Project.
Rambo III is even more violent than Rambo First Blood Part 2. However, watching the Rambo formula unfold for the third time, all the details of whose head got shot off by what kind of automatic weapon when kinda just blend into each other.
The film ends with a title reading "Dedicated to all the people of Afghanistan". There is a similar message about the Russians at the end Mission to Moscow.
James Bond also fought the Russians in Afghanistan
The Afghan freedom fighters, historically know as the Mujaheddin, but never refereed to as such in the film, later evolved into Al Quaeda and the Taliban. I'm sure there's a conspiracy theory out there somewhere that blames 9-11 on Rambo. Thankfully, there are no scenes featuring Rambo fighting side by side with a young and up-and-coming Mujaheddin named Osama bin Laden. That woulda been kinda hard to live down.
Ultimately, the Russians did finally manage to exact their revenge on Rambo. Shortly before the film's release, the Soviet Union announced that it would be withdrawing all of its forces from Afghanistan. The news was enough to cost Rambo III the number one spot in the box office grosses on opening weekend.
Darn Russkies...
Flash forward 20 years....
I remember seeing this poster next to the poster for the 2008 Indiana Jones movie and checking my calendar.
Sylvester Stallone, now 62 years old, feels a sudden need to reboot his career. He had done well two years earlier resurrecting Rocky after a sixteen year hiatus. So he decides to revisit the other big franchise of his career, Rambo.
Titled simply Rambo (known in some areas as John Rambo or Rambo IV or, my personal fave variation on the title, Rambo First Blood Part IV), this is the only movie in the franchise actually directed by Stallone himself. No Canucks or Brits pretending to understand Yanks this time around.
This is by far the grittiest and most violent film of the bunch. The film has a very grainy look. The violence is much more plentiful and graphic. Stallone seems intent on steering away from the exaggerated hyper reality silliness of the first three movies. For instance, flashback scenes from the previous films are quickly edited and shown in washed out sepia tones.
Julie Benz, Stallone's co-star in Rambo, was 10 when the first movie came out
Much to my surprise, Rambo's one man army does not in any way get involved in the War on Terror. I mean, really, what a great opportunity for John Rambo to return to Afghanistan and redeem himself for his inadvertent role in the founding of Al Quaeda. He could have single-handedly taken out the Taliban, Al Quaeda and Bin Laden himself (and beat Obama to it to boot).
However, Stallone wisely avoids such too close to home issues. He uses the opportunity of a Rambo revival, instead, to bring attention to the on going human rights violations in Burma. These violations have gotten little or no press ever. The situation is quite graphically depicted in the film. When Rambo literally blows the Burmese bad guys away with a great big machine gun, it was the only time in the series where I found myself actually sort of on board with Rambo's actions.
Political activists have, believe it or not, praised Rambo for bringing awareness to the situation in Burma. I can't help but wonder how the activists really feel about such awareness being raised by such an incredibly violent film. Especially one that ends with a life long avowed pacifist pounding a dying Burmese soldier repeatedly in the head with a rock.
Reportedly owning a copy of a DVD of Rambo in Burma is a crime for which you can be immediately imprisoned. Get caught selling a copy and you could be put to death.
You know, I'm not the biggest fan of these movies either, but, dude, c'mon...
Until the next sequel....or next blog post, whichever comes first....
his is a short scene from The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), It comes early on in the film. Jeff Goldblum gets recognized on the subway as "that dinosaur guy". The rest speaks for itself.
It seems that Steven Spielberg's attorneys will not allow me to embed into my blog the video that they just allowed me to upload to Youtube.
Anyway, you can watch the scene by clicking here. Mr.Spielberg's lawyers apologize for the inconvenience.
I have no idea who the other actor in the scene is but, in about 50 seconds of screen time, the guy manages to nail almost every acting cliche in the book.
Actors are often trained to "find the moments" in a scene. It seems like this actor is trying to find one about once every ten seconds. One of the lines that is commonly heard in acting classes is, "Chewing gum is not a character". This actor has not been to any of those classes. Oh, and did you catch that little subtle display of his mime training in that little dinosaur bit he does?
And on top of everything else, I really could not tell what his intention in the scene is supposed to be.
The IMDB entry for this film does not even list the role. Sadly, this brief appearance in a Steven Spielberg blockbuster was not quite the big career break this actor seems to have thought it might be.
On the other, sir, if you are reading this: here we are discussing 49 seconds of your screen time some 14 years later so I guess that's something.
Watch for The Weekly Goofy Movie Clip post of "He Had on a Hat".
The first dinosaur was scientifically designated in 1824. The term "dinosaur" (Greek for "terrible lizards"-more or less) was coined in 1841. The first novel featuring dinosaurs that avoided extinction, Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne, came out in 1864.
I'm surprised it took that long.
The public's fascination with these previously unknown prehistoric creatures was almost immediate. As early as the 1850's, museums that displayed the first complete dinosaurs skeletons were experiencing record attendance.
Monsters of one kind or another have always been part of our culture. Mythology is full of creatures like sea servants and dragons (the inspiration for the dragon myths may well have been based on different discoveries of mysterious as-of-yet-unexplained giant bones going back as far as 2000 BC). With dinosaurs, the monsters no longer had to be exclusively mythological.
Speaking for myself, the most intriguing thing about these great big extraordinarily unique prehistoric creatures is the fact they were once real live animals that lived on the same planet I live on now. This half a man/half a boy is a big fan of dinosaurs movies in general. In particular, I am a fan of movies that I sometimes like to refer to as the Most Besest Dinosaur Movies Ever.
Like the dinosaurs themselves, dinosaur cinema has seen, in my opinion, three different cinematic versions of the geological ages that marked the dinosaurs' time on Earth: Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous.Each of these ages marks the cinematic evolution of the dinosaur genre. Through the Cinematic Ages of the Most Bestest Dinosaur Movies Ever, the dinosaurs achieved the one thing that evolution had denied them: survival.
The emergence of the Cinematic Dinosaur Ages is rooted firmly in literature. In 1912, Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote The Lost World. His novel sealed the deal on the popularity of speculative fiction concerning dinosaurs. Conan Doyle was reportedly inspired by the discovery of prehistoric plants, thought to be extinct, still living on a plateau in South America. He took that premise and ran with it. The book was quite possibly Conan Doyle's best selling non-Sherlock Holmes novel.
The earliest cinematic depictions of dinosaurs dates back to 1913. That year marked the dawn of the Cinematic Triassic Age of the Most Bestest Dinosaur Movies Ever. Twelve years later, the age reached its first major evolutionary step with the silent film adaptation of Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1925).
The Lost World, in both novel and film form, is the story of an expedition that discovers living dinosaurs on -you guessed it- an isolated plateau in South America.
The screen adaptation of Conan Doyle's "stupendous story" was directed by Harry O. Hoyt. However, the success of the film is really in the hands of its director of visual effects, Willis O'Brien.
O'Brien, a former newspaper cartoonist, had been making short films featuring dinosaurs since 1915. He was the pioneer of stop motion model animation, a method that remained the predominant means of bringing live action dinosaurs (and other monsters) to the screen for the next 78 years.
Stop motion animation is a long and tedious process that involves gradually manipulating the movements of miniature models then photographing them one frame at a time. A dinosaur walking across the screen, for instance, can take up to a week to shoot. The method is still employed in current kids TV shows like Lunar Jim and Poko and feature films like the Wallace and Gromit movie and The Nightmare Before Christmas.
The dinosaurs in the The Lost World look are as good or better than many of the movie dinosaurs that would appear in films in the years to follow. O'Brien's painstaking attention to detail really paid off. For instance, he inserted small balloons under the skin of the model dinosaurs. With each frame, the balloons would be gradually inflated and deflated along with all of the other movements necessary for the shot. In the final film, the effect creates the impression that the creatures are breathing. It's the kind of detail that usually only registers with viewers on subconscious level. The animated dinosaurs seem somehow "real" to an audience.
Willis O'Brien and unknown acquaintance
O'Brien would go on to the even more challenging stop motion animation for the original King Kong, some eight years later in 1933. He would also do the effects for its sequel, Son of Kong (released, amazingly, in the same year as the original) and the similarly themed Mighty Joe Young (1949). O'Brien won his first and only Oscar for the latter film. Sadly, the visual effects Oscar category did not even exist at the time of O'Brien's earlier work.
The Lost World utilizes one of the most popular premises of the Most Bestest Dinosaur Movies Ever: an undiscovered isolated ecosystem which has somehow permitted the prehistoric creatures to survive for the last 65 million years or so. According to books and movies, there is a massive preponderance around the world of lost islands, valleys, plateaus and centers of the Earth.
The lost land premise also allows for an artistic license essential to making a Most Bestest Dinosaur Movies Ever. The vast majority of these stories do away with keeping the dinosaurs in their respective Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous ages. If you followed strict scientific rules, you could never, for instance, see a fight between a Tyrannosaurus Rex and a Stegosaurus. As any seven year old boy will tell you, those two species of dinosaur were, like, 64 million years apart, stupid.
It's a plot device that's basically the same as creating a dinosaur fantasy league.
I finally caught up with The Lost World thanks to an excellent DVD release a couple of years back. It is a DVD restoration that is well worth checking out. Visual effects aside, the movie is quite entertaining and watchable.
The Lost World delivers one of the earliest examples of one of the great cliches of the Most Bestest Dinosaur Movie Ever genre: a giant monster on the loose through a modern city. In this case, a Brontosaurus (not the correct term, I know, but it is the one they use in the movie) loose in 1920's London.
In the years to come, dinosaur movies would ramp that particular action set piece way the heck up.
After the work of the great Willis O'Brien in the 20's and 30's, next most significant Most Bestest Dinosaur Movie Ever appears a little later in the Cinematic Triassic Age: the dinosaur segment in Walt Disney's groundbreaking animated feature film Fantasia (1940).
The dinosaurs have about twelve minutes of screen time in this classic animated film. Those dozen minutes feature some amazing cell animation. The Disney reputation for perfectionism really paid off here.
In an incredible economy of visual storytelling, all 170 million years of the great Terrible Lizards time on Earth is conveyed in a very short period of time. For the sake of scientific accuracy, the segment was produced with consultation from The Museum of Natural History in New York.
It is common practice with animators to study the movements of animals they will be animating. However, in most cases, the animals in question usually exist. The Fantasia animators studied iguanas and baby alligators to create a sense of verisimilitude in the movements of the animated dinosaurs.
The extinction of the dinosaurs scene that ends the segment was based on then current theory that a massive drought was responsible for killing off all the dinosaurs. The now popular theory of a giant meteor hitting the Earth causing an enormous environmental disaster did not turn up until 1980.
Ultimately, though, has with all things dinosaur, nobody really knows nuthin' fer sure.
Uncle Walt originally wanted the extinction sequence to lead into the rise of mammals, the ice age and then the dawn of man. However, the studio was getting a lot of heat from religious groups (who were and continue to be not so big on the Theory of Evolution) . Disney finally decided to just leave the segment go at the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Contrary to popular belief, creationism did not begin with The Flintstones.
As the Cinematic Triassic Age enters its later stage in the 1950's, the history of the Most Bestest Dinosaur Movies Ever takes an interesting turn.
Japan's greatest contributions to popular culture since World War II have got to be manga, amine, samurai movies and giant monsters. The greatest giant monster of them all is Godzilla: King of Monsters(1954) (or Gojira, to follow the original pronunciation and title more closely and come off as a really super elitist monster geek.)
Godzilla is a dinosaur. Up to this point, however, no one has turned up any fossil records of any such creature. But, hey, the discovery of a new species of dinosaur in Argentina was just announced the past February so just run with that premise, K?
Godzilla is also a mutant. Just don't expect him to enroll in Professor's X School for the Gifted any time soon.
Godzilla is a mutation caused by the great 1950’s anxiety invoking plot device of atomic radiation. Godzilla was a "prehistoric creature" innocently frozen in ice as the onset of the Ice Age (oh, we're back on that theory again, are we?).
Godzilla was just, like, all frozen in ice and, like, minding his own business when -wham-O! -along come those darn Americans with their silly atomic tests in the 1950’s.
Suddenly, Godzilla is brought back to life in the most unpleasant way possible . The mighty dinosaur of the Nobodyknowsassic Age now possesses the extra bonus feature of wicked mutations. He has grown massively in size and has acquired the ability to breathe atomic fire. Godzilla’s atomic breath is so powerful, in fact, that he is able to melt an entire division of Japanese Defense Force tanks as if they were miniature plastic models.
Yes, the main visual effects approach to Godzilla was a stunt man in a rubber suit smashing lots of miniature cities and armies.
Atomic mayhem is very much a major theme of the original Godzilla. Turns out that, for the second time in less than a decade, Japan, in form of Godzilla, must endure atomic mayhem inflicted on their cities at the hands of the Americans.
The first film was made at a time when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still very fresh in the emotional and cultural memory of Japan (the atomic mutation premise is also based on an incident where a Japanese fishing boat was exposed and contaminated by US Atomic testing in the Bikini Islands in the early 50's). Images of crowed hospitals and radiation burns come across as very real in the film. It's easy to forget about the guy-in-a-rubber-suit monster that supposedly inflicted all of the damage.
After the original, my second fave film of the series is Godzilla: Final Wars. It was released in 2004 for the 50th Anniversary of the release of the original. In the movie, Godzilla faces off against all of the other monsters he’s fought in his long movie career. In a purist tradition, Godzilla is still played by a stunt man in a rubber suit, even if he is surrounded by other monsters that are clearly digital creations. Godzilla even fights and kills the American CGI version of himself from the 1999 flop American attempt to reboot the Big G.
Ah, bliss.
The original version of Godzilla as it played in Japanese theatres in 1954 was only officially released in North America for the fist time in 2007 (and is now available on DVD). Before that, we were always treated to the US version which clumsily cut in hastily added scenes of American Reporter Raymond Burr. His character's name was Steve Martin yet there was not a banjo or an arrow through the head anywhere in sight.
Do I need to point out that the original Japanese version is far superior?
SPOILER ALERT: the Japanese finally destroy Godzilla with a horrific secret invention. It is a device that utterly destroys the flesh off of any living being. The Japanese government uses the device once and only once when they take out Godzilla. After that, they destroy it. It is is too awful a weapon to ever be used on anyone or anything ever again.
Hint, Hint….United States of America….
As we enter the 1960's, The Cinematic Age of the Most Bestest Dinosaur Movies Ever enter its Cretaceous Period (I know. I know. I'm not following quite the right order of dinosaur ages but you will understand why later).
Creationism is one reason to believe that humans and dinosaurs co-existed. Complete ignorance fueled by inaccurate prehistoric depictions in the media is another. One Million Years BC (1967) falls into the latter category. The movie also created the widespread misconception that the fur bikini is up there with fire and the wheel as one of the greatest inventions of the stone age.
One Million Years BC represents another popular take on the genre of Most Bestest Dinosaur Movies Ever, the prehistoric period piece. In most cases, the prehistoric period films take the artistic license of completely doing away with all scientific evidence concerning prehistory. This movie is no exception. Dinosaurs of different ages, completely fictional creatures and cave dwellers with access to 1960's hairdressing technology all exist together in the seemingly randomly chosen year of One Million BC.
One Million Years BC's main attraction was was one of the most incredible creatures of any era: Raquel Welch in a fur bikini. The preceding line was brought to you courtesy of every dad from the 1960's.
As anyone who has seen The Shawshank Redemption can tell you, the best selling poster of Ms.Welch in the fur bikini from this movie was an iconic image of the 60's. Raquel was also responsible for getting the asses of 14 year old boys (who were previously too cool for such childhood obsessions as dinosaurs) into the cinema seats in record numbers. Fantastic Voyage made Raquel Welch a star. One Million Years BC made her a superstar and international sex symbol surpassed only by Bridget Bardot.
But enough about the clearly exploitative commercial tactics utilizing Ms.Welch and her groundbreaking state of undress in mainstream commercial cinema.
Let's talk dinosaurs.
One Million Years BC was produced by Hammer films. Hammer Films is the studio responsible for an endless amount of high grossing 1950's horror movies starring Christopher Lee and/or Peter Cushing in any of the following roles: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy or The Wolfman. Hammer was a very successful British studio with an incredible amount of box office savvy when it came to certain niche audiences. That savvy lead them to do incredibly smart things with One Million Years BC. One was to hire Ms. Welch. The other was to hire legendary stop motion animator Ray Harryhausen.
Ray Harryhausen and known accomplices
Harryhausen worked with the legendary Willis O'Brien on Mighty Joe Young. He picked up the stop motion animation torch after the death of O'Brien in 1960, inventing his own brand of the process known as "Dynamation".
Harryhausen worked on such B-movie classics as Jason and The Argonauts (which is not, contrary to my childhood belief, about Canadian football), The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, Earth vs. The Flying Saucer and all of the Sinbad The Sailor epics.
In One Million Years BC, Harryhausen brings to life all kinds of dinosaurs and other giant prehistoric animals (like, for some reason, a deadly giant tortoise). All of the prehistoric animals in the film follow a clearly laid out rule of the genre, they are immediately and instinctively hostile towards all humans at first sight.
Years before the much more accurate 1981 cave dweller epic Quest For Fire did it, One Million Years BC had no spoken intelligible dialogue. The cave dwellers communicated only in gibberish grunts and yells. Anthony Burgess could not be reached for comment.
One Million Years BC is , oddly, a rare mainstream 1960's film that is pure cinema from beginning to end. It also completely removes any and all foreign release dubbing or sub-titling expenses, thus making the movie an international distributor's wet dream.
One Million Years BC boasts one of the best tag lines I've ever seen for a movie of its kind: "This is the way it was.".
Harryhausen would continue to dominate the Cinematic Cretaceous Age of the Most Bestest Dinosaur Movie Ever in the 1960's.
His next great contribution was The Valley of Gwangi (1969).
The premise of the movie is super simple: cowboys meet dinosaurs.
If you were a seven year old boy circa 1969, this seemingly once-in-a-lifetime combo of shoot-em-ups and "Rrrarahhh!" was a cinematic experience that, by the end of the movie, would have you uttering the words, "I can die now".
The premise gives us some unique action set pieces. Particularly impressive are the scenes where the cowboys attempt to lasso the titular Allosaurus as if it were stray cattle. The sequence where one of the cowboys attempts to hog tie a Pterodactyl is also a highlight.
The Valley of Gwangi stars James Franscicus. Franciscus also starred in Beneath the Planet of the Apes and Longstreet, the very cool TV show about a blind private investigator. The man was major star on my radar at the time, to be sure. The B-movie/TV actor (the the two mediums were one in the same in that era) pulls off one of those great " always talk in a deep modulated voice, grimace when dealing with physical challenges and smile when talking to women and children" performances that was considered de riguer in the 1960's action adventure movie.
As you may have guessed Gwangi is part of that lost valley/island,/center of the Earth plot device genre of the Most Bestest Dinosaur Movies Ever.
In late 19th Century Mexico, a bunch of cowboys discover a lost "Forbidden Valley" where dinosaurs still live. The dinos survival in that area is rather an incredible feat when consider that Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula is the spot largely believed to be ground zero for the impact of the meteor that theoretically destroyed all the dinosaurs on Earth some 65 million years ago. There are some very big rocks around the valley, though, so I guess that's what did the trick.
After the cowboys manage to lasso Gwangi, the Allosaurus, they bring him back to a small Mexican city (in a wooden cage no less!). Their plan is to make a ton of pesos by making the dinosaur the star attraction at the Wild West Show that Fransiscus works for.
As is often the case with movies that feature a prehistoric creature interacting with civilization, it is a perfect plan with which nothing can possibly go wrong.
What Most Bestest Dinosaur Movie Ever is complete without those super cool flying reptiles known as the Pterodactyl?
Technically there was never any such creature as a Pterodactyl. There were flying reptiles known as Pterodactylus and Pteranodon but never ones called Pterodactyls. That name is mostly a product of popular culture. Uh-huh, yeah....try telling that to the screen writers of any one of these movies.
In the Cinematic Cretaceous Age, one species of such a film was extinct before it even evolved. Hammer films, hot of the success of One Million Years BC and their follow-up films When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth and The Creatures The World Forgot, had a movie planned with the single most promising title ever: Zeppelins vs Pterodactyls.
Alas, the film was never made.
Aside from the Zeppelins vs Pterodactyls poster carbon dated at some time in the early 70's, the only fossil evidence of the project that exists is this oddball Youtube mash-up of a fictional 1930's movie serial:
And, yes, that's the pterodactyl from The Lost World.
As the end of the Cinematic Cretaceous Age looms, we begin to see stop motion model animation in the Most Bestest Dinosaur Movies Ever start to die out.
Though, the process was never the only way to go when bringing dinosaurs to the screen. Some lower budget films used actual lizards running around over miniature landscapes. The lizards were often filmed in slow motion so as to appear to move like much larger creatures. Sometimes the poor animals would have stuff like a lame looking plastic horn attached to their heads; a practice that organizations like PETA and the Humane Society would surely never allow today.
There was another approach typified by a one classic movie of the upper Cinematic Cretaceous Age of the Most Bestest Dinosaurs Ever.
I have strong memories of it.
I definitely don't remember the giant prehistoric laser shooting manta ray.
The Fairview Cinema. The suburban West Island of Montreal. A Saturday afternoon. 1975. 400 hundred kids hyped on Twizzlers and popcorn are packed into the only movie theatre for miles around. The movie was The Land That Time Forgot (1975) and it rocked the friggin' room!
I remember not being able to hear the dialogue for moments at a time on account of all the kids screaming or cheering or both at different cool and dramatic points in the movie. This was before the days of super loud movies with a 19.1 Digital Dolby Surround System that have speakers mounted in every square inch of the cinema and a sub woofer that sounds like it has been surgically implanted on top of your eardrum. Back then, a movie theatre had one, maybe two speakers in the whole place. A room of 400 kids could easily drown that out.
Back in the day, when there were no PVR's, DVD's, 3D Blu-ray's, Netflicks, Zip.ca's, cable, digital downloads or even VCR's, seeing a movie in the theatre was a big frakkin' deal. You missed it and you'd have to wait years till the movie came on TV. Then you'd have to watch it exactly at the time aired and watch the commercials ( and there was now way to fast forward through them either). That's my generation's version of walking to 10 miles to school without shoes in a blinding snowstorm every single day.
The Land That Time Forgot is based on the novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Famous as the creator of Tarzan, Burroughs wrote the book in 1918 inspired by the massive success of Conan Doyle's The Lost World. In arcane literary terms, this process is known as a "ripp-off".
The premise of the book and film is almost as cool as The Valley of Gwangi. Gwangi had dinosaurs and cowboys, The Land That Time Forgot had a submarine and dinosaurs.
The prehistoric creatures (or all eras and cavemen too, natch) live on lost island in the South Atlantic.
Its kind of a long story but the island is discovered by a German U-boat manned by a mixed crew of German, British and Americans. It's a bit of an uneasy alliance, needless to say, it being the middle of World War I and all.
The Land That Time Forgot features a somewhat more unique approach to dinosaur special effects. The creatures in the movie are all puppets or other non-animated models. Most are miniature and a couple are to scale. Pretty much all the effects in the movie are "in camera", a term meaning that they require little or no post production work and usually appear in the final film as they were originally shot.
In the words of a good friend of mine: "Pterodactyls are very hard to train."
In this movie, we get to see Allosaurus, Triceratops,Diplodocus, the seldom featured undersea dinosaur Plesiosaur and, in what is so obviously a scale model suspended from a crane, the highlight of any dinosaur movie, the improperly named Pterodactyl.
The Land That Time Forgot stars Doug McClure, an actor known for his work on such TV shows as the long running Western The Virginian, the underrated 70's spy show S.E.A.R.C.H. and particularly well know to me for co-starring with William Shatner in The Barbary Coast. McClure is that classic just slightly too old and too pudgy to still be playing an action adventure hero type. Unlike today, male leads in those kinds of movies could get away with that shit.
I remember the consensus about The Land That Time Forgot amongst my friends at time: "Wow! That was amazing! It's so much better than 'The Land of the Lost'!".
The Land That Time Forgot was a sleeper hit in 1975. It was followed a sequel, The People That Time Forgot (1977).
It is a much lesser movie (yikes!) but it does have a scene that's just about as close to Zeppelins vs Pterodactyls as we'll probably ever see.
Stop motion model animation would still see a couple more flourishes before dying out at the end of the Cinematic Cretaceous Age of The Most Bestest Dinosaur Movies Ever.
Well, the effects might have seen flourishes, anyway. It's hard to say the same for some of the movies they were used in.
Case in point is Planet of Dinosaurs (1978).
This uber B-movie features dinosaurs that live on another planet altogether. Planet of Dinosaurs has got the odd combination of a unique premise and a very very low budget.
And, no, Planet of Dinosaurs is not about Charlton Heston crash landing on a planet where dinosaurs are the civilized masters who run their cars with fuel made from fossilized remains of long extinct human beings.
Planet of Dinosaurs, however, is not above totally ripping off the spaceship crash landing scene from Planet of the Apes (and about a dozen other things from different movies).
a group of astronauts' spacceship crash lands on an alien planet. The ship sinks into what looks like a small shallow pond and so the space travelers are stranded (where they were going or what they were doing is never really made clear).
It's not long before they discover they are on a planet that has some kind of parallel evolution thing going on. They enounter dinosaurs that look very much like the ones from Earth's past. These dinosaurs are also somehow able to survive in a very barren looking desert. Clearly, the evolutionary process on this planet has some differences from that of Earth's.
Planet of Dinosaurs is the kind of movie that seems to have been tailor made for shows like Mystery Theater 3000 and its internet counterpart, Rifftrax. It looks like most of the casting director's research consisted of watching porno movies. The dialogue scenes are not unlike watching a 70's era adult movie with all the sex and nudity cut out. I'm pretty sure the costume designer got a great bulk deal on disco track suits too.
The dinosaurs are surprisingly well animated. I guess if you're gonna make a movie called Planet of Dinosaurs with a limited budget, you better spend most of that budget on the dinosaurs. The movie is very entertaining, though probably not for the reasons the people making it intended.
Planet of Dinosaurs has an interesting and unexpected conclusion.
And, once again, no, there's no discovering a half buried Statue of Liberty and a "My God, we've been on Earth the whole time!" kinda twist ending.
The Cinematic Cretaceous Age of the Most Bestest Dinosaur Movies Ever comes to crashing halt by the end of the 80's. In it's place, we see something much much greater evolve.
It is finally the dawn of the Cinematic Jurassic Age of The Most Bestest Dinosaur Movies Ever.
See why I switched up the order of the dinosaur ages now?
The Jurassic Park Trilogy (1993-2001) was seminal to redefining the entire genre.
The first film, Jurassic Park (1993) pulled off the genre re-invigoration feat particularly well. It should. The movie was directed by that great man who is half a boy/boy who is half man, Steven Spielberg.
Jurassic Park was based on the bestselling novel by Michael Crichton. Crichton basically recycled the plot of his great 1973 SF film, Westworld (which he both wrote and directed). Just substitute cloned dinosaurs running amok in a theme park for android cowboys running amok in a theme park and you’ve got the general idea.
Both book and the film present a the clever device of cloning to get dinosaurs into the modern world. No lost worlds, islands or planets here. Well, to be fair, there is an island but it’s not lost, it's intentionally hidden. The dinosaurs on said island are cloned from DNA taken from dinosaur blood found in mosquitoes that have been encased in amber for 65 million years. As any geneticist, biologist or even paleontologist will tell you, this is an extremely plausible, error free scientific hypothesis.
Crichton's was not the first dinosaur cloning story. One of my all time favourite SF writers, Robert Silverberg, wrote a short story back in 1980 entitled Our Lady of the Sauropods . It was about dinosaurs cloned from fossilized DNA. The dinosaurs in this story are on a space station instead of an island. The dinosaurs in Silverberg's story are also depicted as having a collective intelligence not unlike theVelociraptorsin Jurassic Park.
What Mr.Silverberg's attorney was thinking back in the early 90's, I have no idea.
I remember going into Jurassic Park with reservations and coming out pleasantly surprised. The Raptors in particular involved some of Spielberg’s best suspense work since Jaws. Not a perfect movie, though, by any means.
Jurassic Park has a great concept, excellent direction and visual effects that make the film worth watching just on their own merit. Its narrative, however, is unsatisfying. The main problem being that darn screenplay by one of Hollywood's favourite scribes David Koepp that, like all of the guys’ screenwriting, falls apart in the crucial final third act. Kinda a bad place for your stories to fall apart there, dude.
It is also very clear that Speilberg knows full well who the major audience for Jurassic Park is, namely kids: lots and lots of kids. He plays to that audience a great deal, often the at the expense of credibility and consistent tone.
Scale puppets stood in for CGI in closer shots
The dinosaurs of Jurassic Park (and most all of the dino films from the early 90's onwards) are the most “real” looking prehistoric animals yet. The visual effects that brought the Terrible Lizards of yester-paleontological era to life are truly groundbreaking. Jurassic Park is a milestone for the use of computer generated images (CGI) in movies. Almost of all of the dinosaurs in the movie are entirely digital creations.
It marked the virtual end of the era of stop motion animation that began in 1915. Once a generation got a load of Jurassic Park, movies like Valley of Gwangi and The Land That Time Forgot are, even for young kids, pretty laughable.
Chrichton’s novel ends with (SPOILER ALERT) all of the dinosaurs on the island of Ilsa Nublar dying horrific deaths at the hands of a napalm air strike. It’s the way the movie would have ended if Francis Ford Coppolla had been directing instead of Spielberg. Imagine Doors music playing while a T-Rex goes down in flames while we hear Marlon Brando repeating the words, "The horror. The horror.".
In the final chapter of the book, we learn that a few Velociraptorshad managed to stow away in a supply boat that left before the island before its destruction. The book ends with the world’s only surviving dinosaurs clandestinely escaping into the deep remote jungles of South America.
What a cool set up for a sequel!
Spielberg didn’t touch it.
Oddly, even Crichton did not take advantage of the potential sequel plot line he set up.
In 1995, Chrichtion realeased the sequel to the novel of Jurassic Park, The Lost World (for once, I will give Mr. Crichton the benefit of the doubt and say that the title is an homage to and not a ripp-off of Conan Doyle).
Presumably the book was written in the wake of the phenomenal success of the movie and Crichton was essentially writing a first draft of the potential sequel. In the book, he creates the notion of the previously unknown Jurassic Park Site B on Isla Nublar's sister island of Isla Sorna. On that island many more species of dinosaurs have been cloned along with those of Jurassic Park. The dinosaurs have essentially been roaming free since the end of the last novel.
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), also directed by Steven Spielberg, went with that premise.
Spielberg's version, oddly, incorporates the destruction of the original dinosaurs from Crichton's first novel has happening some time between the two movies. But it turns out that, unknown to anybody but wily ol's Sir Richard Attenborough, there is a whole other island of dinosaurs right next to the first.
It all kinda brings up a lot of questions. Like how exactly did this guy keep the cloning of dinosaurs and the subsequent existence of huge prehistoric creatures roaming around on two different islands a secret ? Isn't the theory that some of the bigger dinosaurs, like Brachiosaurus, say, could have taken up to 20 years to grow to their full size? Wouldn't that put the beginnings of this guy’s cloning project back in the early 70’s? Isn't that kinda a long time to successfully hide animals that are up to 95 feet long and 40 feet tall in the age aerial surveillance, radar, sonar, satellites and frequent air travel? And what about that air strike on the first island? How did they not notice an entire second island full of dinosaurs?
The Lost World story is simple: good environmentalists vs bad capitalists
Spielberg's got a really bad real case of “Cool. I get to do all the stuff I couldn’t do in the first one” in The Lost World. It’s one of the film's biggest problems.
The films third and final act features a contrived and really out of place action set piece: the tried and true prehistoric monster wreaking havoc on civilization. Through a series of highly convoluted circumstances, a T-Rex ends up rampaging through downtown San Diego.
"A Tyrannosaurus Rex rampaging through downtown San Diego": kinda sound like a punchline from a Johnny Carson monologue circa 1980, doesn't it?
On the DVD, Kathleen Kennedy, one of Spielberg’s long time producers, says that she warned Spielberg against the ending. The original ending had our heroes attempting to fly off of the island while under a pterodactyl attack (Yeah! Zeppelins vs. Pterodactyls at last!).
Spielberg, she says,wanted to change the third act of the film at the 11th hour. He was obsessed with getting the ol’ Godzilla movie shtick in there. Producer Kennedy, however, says that she told him that kind of a sequence really belonged in a different movie.
She was dead right on that one.
The T-Rex rampage scene has a very Speilbergian nod to many another monster on the rampage movie. There is a scene where the T-Rex chases a group of screaming Japanese businessmen down the streets of San Diego. The scene is reminiscent of Godzilla and, oh say, every Japanese monster movie ever made (not to mention the TV series Ultra Man).
I remember when The Lost World came out, I was doing a gig in some small town in upstate New York. A bunch of us from the show went to see the movie on opening day at a mall megaplex nearby. All of the local residents in attendance that day must have really appreciated that Godzilla reference. They couldn’t stop laughing at the running, screaming Japanese businessmen.
We finally got to see some full on Pterodactyl action in Jurassic Park III (2001).
Helicopters vs. Pterodactyls?
Pretty much the only thing I remember from Jurassic Park III are the great flying dinosaurs. They are amazingly well done. No doubt most of the effects ground work had been laid out for the sadly aborted Pterodactyl climax of the Lost World.
The only other thing I remember about Jurassic Park III is there’s something about a plane crashing on the now quarantined Isla Sorna where the dinosaurs run free...maybe... then there’s the army arriving to save the day or something...then it ends with the Pterodactyls flying off the island...or something like that....at some point...with Pterodactyls.
The Pterodactyls parts of the movie are really exciting and cool and good too and they also have Pterodactyls in them.
I think William H. Macy is in Jurassic Park III. He’s really good, as I recall.
He played a Pterodactyl, right?
The Cinematic Jurassic Age of The Most Bestest Dinosaur Movies ever hits unparalleled heights with Peter Jackson's sublime remake, King Kong (2005).
Naomi Watts in King Kong does an incredible job of playing off of animated monsters that weren't there.
Kong is not, strictly, speaking a dinosaur movie but, just like the immortal 1933 classic, there are plenty of dinosaurs in it.
Really good dinosaurs too.
Not only does Jackson's version have the most impressive CGI dinosaurs up to that time, his version utilizes the Terrible Lizards extremely well.
In King Kong, we get back to that good ol' fashioned lost ecosystem premise. Dinosaurs of all types exist on the wonderfully named Skull Island. These dinosaurs, however, have kept evolving over the last 65 million years. It's a wonderful bit of artistic license on Jackson's part that allows him a wide latitude of only having to follow only the scientific rules that suit the film.
I recently read an interview with a paleontologist on-line. He was asked to rate the scientific accuracy of the prehistoric creatures represented on screen in various movies. He praised movies like The Valley of Gwangi for following the paleontological behavioral theories of the day. However, he came down very hard on the 2005 Kong for getting a lot of the physical characteristics of dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus Rex and Brachiosauruswrong. Didn't the guy watch the extras on his DVD? Dude, what kind of scientific method is that?
Skull Island is also full of any number of fictional giant bugs, worms and penis-like creatures that suck people to death head first in the most Freudian manner possible.
King Kong himself , though, is perhaps the most curious inhabitant of the island.
Kong may have been based on species of a prehistoric gorilla known as Gigantopithecus. Gigantopithecus never would have co-existed with dinosaurs. The prehistoric ape was on Earth much later: from one million years ago to three hundred thousand years. The extinct primate stood approximately 10 feet tall (Kong is 25 feet tall in Jackson's version) and would have been around at the same time as early man. Some think that Gigantopithecus may have inspired legends like those of the the Yeti and Sasquatch (or, if you are really hardcore about it, the giant ape still lives and is the Yeti and Sasquatch).
Yeti, Sasquatch or King Kong?
A more likely scientific hypothesis is that the producers of the original movie thought that a big ape attacking stuff would be cool and that the studio ordered them to make use of all the expensive dinosaur models they made for an earlier movie that was never finished.
Take a look at one of my fave scenes in King Kong. It is a deleted scene that turns up on the extended cut available on DVD and Blu-ray.
I'm pretty sure those sub-titles are actually lyrics to a Bjork song.
Yep. Nothing phases these old school pulp jungle adventure men of the 1930's, does it?
I highly recommend the extended cut version of the Peter Jackson's King Kong. My first reaction to the prospect of a new, three hour version of Kong was "Uh-oh. It was already kinda long as it was".
The theatrical release of King Kong is a great yet flawed movie. The three hour version is a vast improvement. Without getting into any spoiler alerts, putting a lot of the cut scenes back in makes many parts of the film make more sense and helps the movie work better a whole.
At three hours, watching the extended Kong is more like watching Lawrence of Arabia, Ben Hur or any of Jackon's Lord of the Rings movies: a large commitment that is well worth it.
Plus, as you can see above, there are some just plain killer extra action stuff.
The extended cut changes a pretty good movie it into a thoroughly satisfying epic tour-de-force adventure epic.
The not-Brontosauruses
It is unlikely that the Cinematic Jurassic Age of the Most Bestest Dinosaur Movies Ever will see extinction. There may well be a couple of box office meteors that will impact the genre for a time. Ultimately, though, the pop culture fascination with the great extinct Terrible Lizards will always lead the creatures to resurrection.
Dinosaurs are still a popular staple in both big blockbuster movies and in the CGI (it is now a low budget effect) direct-to-DVD thrillers. A T-Rex even turned up in a 2008 movie version of one of the dinosaurs movie's remote ancestors, Journey to the Center of the Earth.
One question that comes up a surprising amount of the time in my circle of friends is "If you had a time machine and could only travel back in time to one time period, what would it be". My answer is always the same:
"Hands down, I would go back in time just to get a look at living dinosaurs. I wanna know if the movies got it right".
Finally, my personal thanks for this post goes out to all the good people at Blogger. They clearly saw that my first draft of the post needed work and so very considerately crashed their entire system just before my usual posting day. They didn't let the fact that I'd actually saved all my work before the crash get in the way either. They made extra certain that almost all of my writing was lost.
Ultimately, I finally had to rewrite 80% of the material all over again.
