The Cinematic Ages of The Most Bestest Dinosaur Movies Ever

 "I have wrought my simple plan 

If I give one hour of joy

To the boy who's half a man

Or to the man who's half a boy"

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

author The Lost World, 1912

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 19^th 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 the Velociraptors in 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 Velociraptors had 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 11^th 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 Brachiosaurus wrong. 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.

Thanks guys.

It will not be forgotten...

No Having on of a Hat Today

Blogger was down all day yesterday. As a result, "He Had on a Hat" will not be appearing at its regularly scheduled time.

It will instead appear on Wednesday May 18, 2011.

In the meantime, why not chill like these guys?

Please feel free to complain to Blogger for this inconvenience...if you can ever find their contact info.

Until Monday!

Weekly Goofy Movie Clip "Leonard Nimoy Naked"

A rare moment to catch Lenard Nimoy without his Spock ears...



This clip is from the 1971 film, Catlow starring Yul Brynner. Nimoy plays the bad guy. It's one of his best performances and one of the few Westerns the guy was ever in.

In his autobiography, titled I Am Spock (or I Am Not Spock, depending on when you read it) Nimoy sites the period when he made this film as one of the happiest times in his life.

Interesting.

Check out my Weekly Goofy Movie Clip.

Same Bat Time....ish

Same Bat Blog

Reboots of Classic Old School Heroes

This week, somehow in midst of the killing of the world's most evil man and a ground breaking shift in  politics that this country has not seen in decades, the DVD and Blu-Ray release of The Green Hornet movie, starring Seth Rogan, was almost completely over-looked in the media.

It kinda fits, if you think about.

The fact that Seth Rogan's latest comedy action vehicle is based on a character that is now 75 years old has been down played to the max in the promotion and publicity surrounding the film. The Green Hornet's roots as a radio show, a TV show, two movie serials and an endless amount of comic books remains an arcane story known only by those in the elite Order of Fanboys.

I seriously doubt that the gang of 17 year old kids sitting behind me in the cinema on opening weekend last January had any notion of any such thing. They were all too busy laughing and cheering while texting and tweeting Rogan's best one-liners to their friends.

And that's all cool.

I'm just intrigued by the idea that, for some reason, this particular obscure old school hero found his way to be played by Seth Rogan  in a movie that clearly appeals to an audience that has no knowledge of or previous connection to the character.

Similarly, over the years, we have seen a number of reboots of many of the classic old time heroes of the 30's. Each of these reboots were made many decades after the heyday of their respective character's popularity. Sure, in most cases these heroes have endured and still exist, in one form or another, but only really for a niche audience of cult fans.

Yet some producer somewhere always seems to be interested in resurrecting and updating a Green Hornet or a Doc Savage or a Dick Tracy for a mass audience. Sometimes it may be a case of an old time fanboy who has gone on to become a successful writer, actor, director or producer and just plain has a passion for bringing a beloved childhood icon to the screen. Sometimes it may be investors or studios who believe that Flash Gordon or The Shadow, say, can recapture the "franchise"'s  multi media success and profits of the past. Sometimes it's just that freakish timing and coming together of random elements that actually gets a movie financed and made.

One thing is certain, attempting to capture decades old lightening in a bottle is a feat that sometimes even these almost 80 year old larger than life heroes can barely pull off...



Doc Savage: Man of Bronze (1975)

This 1975 film version of the classic pulp adventure hero is perhaps the most curious reboot of all.

The Doc Savage movie was made at time when superheroes and adventurers of Doc Savage's ilk were extremely rare in feature films, even in those aimed at children. Such characters were historically relegated to movie serials and, later on, Saturday morning TV. Before Richard Donner broke the comic hero box office barrier with Superman in 1978, you had only a handful of such feature  films. Two examples, Superman and The Mole Men (1951) and Batman (1966), for instance, were both based on hit TV show versions of the classic comic book characters.  That and Sindbad's occasional golden seventh voyages was just about the only game in town on that front.

The pulp publication known as Doc Savage Magazine first appeared in 1933. All of the Savage stories were credited to Kenneth Robeson, a name that actually served as a front for no less than nine different writers over the years. The basic premise of the character is actually a little scary when seen though today's  sensitivities.

Clark Savage was raised from birth by an elite team of scientists so as to maximize his strength and intellect to almost super human levels. Looking back at it now, the whole premise kind stings a little too much of master race eugenics. Add to that Savage's blond hair, blue eyes, massive muscles and bronze skin and, well, it's all a bit much for a character that was created in a decade that saw the rise of Nazism and similar fascist movements around the globe.

In the naivete of his time, though, Doc Savage was the all around perfect hero adventure guy. He was a physician, surgeon, scientist, adventurer, inventor, explorer, researcher and musician who, according to the copy on the back of one of his books, "...is dedicated to the destruction of all evil-doers". He also had  a team of "the five greatest brains ever assembled in one group" working for him, a headquarters on the 86th floor of the The Empire State Building, a special flying wing aircraft, a wide array of cool gadgets and an arctic retreat known as, get this, the Fortress of Solitude. You can easily see how Doc Savage went on to influence Superman, Jonny Quest, James Bond, Indiana Jones, Mission: Impossible! and Buckaroo Bonzai.

Interestingly, despite magazines, novels, a comic strip, numerous comic books and a radio series, the good Doc never saw an  on screen incarnation of any kind for the first 40 years or so of his existence. The one and only on-screen version of Doc Savage was brought to life in 1975 by the guy who "said to his bride, 'I'm gonna give you some terrible chills'", George Pal.

Pal, a legendary Hollywood producer, gave those terrible chills to his bride and the world in the 50's and the 60's in the form of films like War of the Worlds,When Worlds Collide, The Time Machine, and The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao (featuring Tony Randall at his most scary...seriously).

For some reason, Pal felt that a film treatment of Doc Savage should not take itself as seriously as most of his other SF/fantasy/horror movies or even, for that matter, as most of the Doc's hard knuckled pulp adventures. Perhaps Pal was persuaded by the massive success of the high camp 60's TV version of Batman. Or maybe he just felt that Clark Savage was just way too square a character to be taken seriously in the hip and groovy 70's. Whatever the reason, the movie did not work, artistically or financially.

The campy style of Doc Savage: Man of Bronze does not go far enough to be anywhere near as entertaining as the 60's Batman camp. The film is just plain not interesting either as camp, adventure, comedy or whatever else it is the movie's uneven tone is trying to achieve. The narrative structure is a very simple A to B story with no surprises along the way, if it can even command that much of your attention.  The former TV Tarzan, Ron Ely, plays Doc Savage. Smiling and posing seems to be his only approach to the role. The fact that we never really see the guy playing Doc Savage with his shirt off speaks to Ely's being a tad long in the tooth for the role at that stage in his career.

Doc Savage: Man of Bronze was directed by Michael Anderson. Among Anderson's other films are Around The World in 80 Days (which one the Oscar for Best Picture in 1956), The Dam Busters (the final sequence of which inspired George Lucas' attack on the Death Star sequence in Star Wars) and Logan's Run (a seminal fave film of my prepubescent years).  You'd think Anderson could have done better.

I remembering reading an interview with Anderson in the early 80's. He cited Doc Savage as attempt at a Raiders of the Lost Ark type film. It was just before its time,that's all. Um...yeah...one small tip on that: watch Raiders of the Lost Ark again and note the lack of fight scenes scored with music by John Phillip Sousa.

Flash Gordon (1980)

"Flash! Ah-ah! Savior of the universe!". When I think of this film, I can never get that Queen song out of my head. Funny that, it's like they scored the movie or something.

Flash Gordon first appeared as newspaper comic strip on January 7, 1934. It quickly became the first popular mainstream space opera.  Flash Gordon followed the adventures of a Yale polo player and generally good looking, confident guy. Oddly, the 30's was an era where the well-to-do elite were actually seen as heroic and desirable.

Anyway, long story short: through a series of seemingly random circumstances Flash ends up on a rocket ship bound for the stars (in the 1930's, no less). He is accompanied by the attractive all American girl Dale Arden and the brilliant yet still slightly foreign Dr. Zarkof.

Flash lands on the planet Mongo and instantly takes up the good fight against the Ming The Merciless, the evil leader of the planet. Ming is a guy who's got a definite Mongol horde thing going on in his personal grooming and fashion sense.

Flash Gordon has seen reincarnations in a varied amount of mediums: comic books, comic strips, books, radio shows, TV series', Saturday morning cartoons and, of course, "Flash Gordon was there in silver underwear" in three different movie serials (to the best of my knowledge, the only movie serial trilogy ever). The serials starred the man forever linked to the role of Flash (at least to my Dad, anyway), Buster Crabbe. 

In 1980, Flash Gordon saw a cinematic rebirth at the hands of latter-day movie mogul Dino De Laurentis. The timing of this reboot is fairly obvious, coming after massive late 70's SF box office hits like Alien, Star Trek:The Motion Picture, Close Encounters of the The Third Kind and a little movie-that-could written and directed by a guy named George Lucas.

Flash Gordon is also unique on the list in that it is the only reboot that ditched the original setting of its source material. The action is moved from the 30's to the early 80's (it looks more like the late 70's, really) setting. The movie has the look of an old 1930's Sunday comic strip synthesized with 1970's Disco Glam.

Much of the look, design and visual effects in Flash Gordon owe more to movies like Barbarella and Danger Diabolik (also produced by Dino De Laurentis) than they do any of the old Buster Crabbe serials or even the  popular sci-fi blockbusters of the day.  The characters and narrative are much more conventional than any of those aforementioned trippy European SF films, however.

The movie is one I caught up while working at one of the city's first video stores in the early 80's. I got to watch a lot of movies back then.Flash Gordon was among the first.

In the 1980 version, Yale polo playing Flash Gordon is replaced with the the more down to earth star quarterback of the NY Jets Flash Gordon. Watching it back in '81, the film lost me early on. There is one majorly silly scene that crosses over the line from camp to absurdity. It is a scene where Flash, newly arrived on the planet Mongo, suddenly encounters these guards in Ming The Merciless' palace.Coincidentally, the guards look kinda just like football players. Naturally, Flash immediately begins playing offense against the evil alien linebackers. Dale Arden suddenly joins in by taking to the sidelines and acting like a cheerleader, dancing and chanting "Go, Flash Go!" .

I turned it off right there.

That approach to the material seems to have lost a lot of other audiences too. The movie did not do so well at the box office. It was an era when SF box office meant blockbuster genre movies that took themselves just a tad more seriously. Campy self-parody written by the same guy that wrote the 60's Adam West Batman series was, like, so ten years ago. 

I gave Flash Gordon another chance about 30 years later. The Blu-ray format is the great redeemer.

If Logan's Run pioneered the Disco Sci-Fi look in 1976, Flash Gordon took that look to its ultimate logical glitter ball conclusion. Throw in a nice heaping helping of 70's glam rock and that Queen score starts to make a lot more sense.

Flash Gordon is fun on its own terms.

I've never understood producer Dino de Laurentis  obsession with good looking empty male model vessels in leading roles. That being said, Sam Jones as Flash does what he needs to do: look good while throwing not-too-violent punches. Timothy Dalton, as one of Mongo's resistance fighters, is great as always (the best James Bond until Daniel Craig...just had to throw that in there). And Max Von Sydow turns in a great performance as Ming The Merciless. The role continued the great Scandinavian actor's Hollywood streak of Weird Roles For Max Von Sydow To Play.

I must say, though, it would be nice if someone could do a Flash Gordon reboot that's updated  but still true in spirit to its comic strip, movie serials and space opera source material.

Oh...actually...yeah...wait a sec....somebody already did just that...I think it was called Star Wars.



Dick Tracy (1990)

Warren Beatty has, to me, always been intrinsically linked to that New Hollywood movement where movies started to be seen as art in the mainstream for the first time. He starred in the ground breaking anti-hero tone Bonnie and Clyde, the classically 70's political thriller The Parallax View, Robert Altman's master stroke western McCabe and Mrs. Miller and the sexual revolution satire Shampoo (which he also wrote).  Beatty also wrote, directed and starred in the box office smash Heaven Can Wait as well as being a triple threat in one of the most underrated films of all time, Reds. As a writer director and actor, Beatty is known both for his gorgeous mug and his commitment to emotionally real and socially relevant cinema.

So how exactly did this guy end up directing and starring in a movie about a larger-than-life Depression era comic strip super cop?

Dick Tracy was one of the most popular newspaper comic strips ever. Created by Chester Gould, the squared-jawed, hooked-nose tough yet honest comic cop first turned up in 1931.  Tracy was largely a product of the then just ended era of prohibition. Prohibition, of course, had given rise to a great deal of infamous bootlegging gangsters, like Al, the original "Scarface", Capone. Tracy became mainstream America's fictional Eliot Ness (the real life cop that famously brought down Capone). In the daily newspaper comic strip, Tracy routinely went up against any number literally nick-named hoods like Prunface, Flattop Jones, The Mole and Al "Big Boy" Caprice. Dick Tracy was part police procedural, part film noire and all black-and-white bad guys vs. good guys.

Dick Tracy and his trademark yellow trench coat and fedora saw many different incarnations between 1931 and 1990. There was a radio series, comic books, five movie serials (a record for one character, I'm pretty sure), four low budget B-list feature films, one short lived TV series, two animated series and one unsold TV pilot (produced by William Dozier, the guy who gave us the 60's camp version of Batman).

Among Dick Tracy's legions of young fans was a kid named Warren Beatty. Beatty had been wanting to make a Dick Track film as far back as 1975. However, he never owned the rights and back in the 70's Beatty in comic strip movie probably felt like too weird a fit for any studio to back.

In the meantime, a Dick Tracy feature film had been living in what the industry terms "development hell" for decades. The Dick Tracy movie was at one time of another going to be in the hands of directors like Stephen Spielberg, John Landis and, believe it or not, Martin Scorsese. Actors considered for the lead role included Clint Eastwood (a darker gritty take on the character was considered at one point), Harrison Ford (Disney expressed interest in an urban thriller version of Indiana Jones), Tom Selleck (there was screenplay out there that one writer referred to as "uncomfortably campy") and, yes, even Warren Beatty.

By the time Beatty was considered, Disney had their hands on the project. Beatty stipulated that he direct the film as well before accepting the role . The studio wanted nothing to with a guy whose last writer/director/actor project, Reds, went over budget, over schedule  and bombed horribly at the box office too boot. Not to mention that the films' celebration of communism would no doubt have Uncle Walt spinning in his cryogenic chamber. So, to keep the project alive, Beatty bought the rights to the character himself and agreed to absorb any and all financial losses against his directing and acting fees. The movie moved ahead but Disney refused to make any kind of a big financial commitment to the project. In fact, the entire film was shot in 60 days.

After the massive success of Tim Burton's Batman in 1989, Disney decided to commit to a humongous ad campaign for the release of Dick Tracy in the summer of 1990. The campaign paid off. Dick Tracy was a massive hit in its initial release and remains Warren Beatty's highest grossing movie ever.

The end result was worth it too.

Dick Tracy maintains the spirit of the comic strip without heading into that "uncomfortably campy" territory previously explored by the Doc Savage and Flash Gordon movies. The film's story arc is a wonderfully simplistic yet effective morality play. It stands as a valid take on many of Beatty's classic character-based and socially relevant themes.

The great cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (Last Tango in Paris, Apocalypse Now, 1900 and Beatty's Reds) does an incredible job of capturing the brightly coloured comic strip visuals. The film was shot using, in the true tradition of the coloured Sunday comics (keep up with me here, kids), just seven colours. Those colours seriously pop big time on the screen. There are bright red cars, lush green walls and Tracy's hat and trench coat have never looked quite so yellow.  Dick Tracy is a perfect movie for the Blu-ray format...hint...hint....

Dick Tracy also boasts great editing, great make-up (to pull off the likes of villains like Flatop Jones, say), a Danny Elfman score that predates the composer collapsing in upon himself and, thanks to Beatty's extensive Hollywood connections, a great cast including Dustin Hoffman, James Caan and Mandy Patinikin.

Beatty himself was 53 at the time he took on the title role. His age was not a problem for the role as Beatty was still in that "perpetually youthful" stage of his life and Tracy is one of those rare heroic comic characters who seemed to be always drawn to look perpetually middle-aged. I remember most of the comments amongst my friends at the time went something like this: "Warren Beatty as Dick Tracy? Well, at least that's a step up form Michael Keaton as Batman."

Al Pacino as the main villain, Al "Big Boy" Caprice, shows just how well his emotionally raw loudness can be adapted into the realm of comic caricature.

The only real downside of the casting is, well, Madonna as Breathless Mahoney. She really is not in the same league as the other actors in the cast. She was famously cast on account of her relationship to Beatty at the time (and paid only scale just so it all looked good). And, yes, yes, I know what this sounds like: here we go with the straight male fanboy irked by the presence of Madonna in a comic movie. Well, the cardboard stand-up of Madonna from Dick Tracy that I had in my office for years would beg to disagree with you on that point.

I suspect Madonna may have had perhaps a bit too much pull with Beatty during production (kinda like how Guy Ritchie suddenly started making bad movies when he was married to her then started making good ones again after the divorce).

For instance, there is one sequence that is a classic cop-battles-gangsters montage right out of any 1930's gangster film. Beatty nails the look and feel perfectly. It's got all those great shots of tommy guns firing, old style cars careening around corners and spinning newspaper headlines. However, instead of a classic Hollywood Alfed Newman or Max Steiner style score, the montage is set to Madonna singing a slow torch song. It does not fit in the least. The pace of the editing isn't even right for the music. I understand that if you've got Stephen Sondheim writing new songs for you movie (he wrote two for Dick Tracy), you're going to want to showcase them well. That montage was just not the place. The song should have been cross-faded out as a classic score took over. Instead the song plays for its entirety throughout the montage. Either that creative choice was a Madonna Yoko moment or it was one of Beatty's few misguided ideas on the project.

I remember attempting to convince a friend of mine to go see Dick Tracy when it first came out. Her main objections were to Madonna. "No, no.", she said, "I really don't want to have to see Madonna's naked breasts again". I assured her that Madonna (or anybody Else's) naked breast were never going to turn up in a Disney produced movie based on a 1930's comic strip. About a quarter of the way into the movie, as my friend glared at me in the darkened theatre, I was very much proven wrong.

Yep. Probably a a bit too much influence there.


The Shadow (1994)

I find that I have to keep reminding myself that the pudgy middle-aged funny Alec Baldwin I know and love on 30 Rock was once a much, younger thinner, more sparkly eyed, generally hotter and dramatically more intense Alec Baldwin that starred in major Hollywood motion pictures in the 80's and 90's.

The Shadow makes that reminder really nicely. Baldwin plays the title character of the 1994 film adaptation of the classic pulp and radio hero.

The Shadow debuted, in fact, as one of many characters on a popular anthology radio detective series in July of 1930. The character quickly became a favourite and The Shadow Magazine, (published by the same people that published Doc Savage Magazine)  followed soon after. Like Doc Savage, several different writers wrote for The Shadow but were credited under one pseudonym: Maxwell Grant, in this case.

The Shadow was to the 30's what Batman was to the 60's and Spider-Man was to the 00's: a hugely successful superhero franchise (though they did not exactly use that terminology in the 30's).

The Shadow even had his own catch phrase: "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" (catch phrases have gotten snappier over the years).

As far on-screen incarnations go, The Shadow had two short lived obscure TV series in the 50's and was treated to a very typical movie serial adaptation in 1940. The Shadow was also seen in series of lower budget b-pictures throughout the 30's and 40's. I've seen one of these, The Shadow Strikes from 1937. If your idea of a good time is sitting through a long dull murder mystery story in which the title character appears twice in the whole movie (for about a total screen time of about three minutes), then I highly recommend The Shadow Strikes.

In the mid-90's, Universal Pictures was banking on The Shadow franchise to live again. The 1994 Shadow movie was meant to be the first in a series of summer blockbusters. The Shadow, though, is a bit of an odd choice for a character to drive mass market event movies.

In his original pulp and radio incarnations, The Shadow can only very loosely be termed a superhero (a term that did not even exist until at least 1938 at that). In many of the early pulp stories, The Shadow only appeared briefly as a mysterious and often unseen deus ex machina whenever the protagonists of the story needed help. His psychic powers were vaguely defined. The Shadow's alter ego, Lamont Cranston, was sometimes even more mysterious a figure than The Shadow himself. Indeed, The Shadow often had more than just one "secret identity".  Even his origin story was never really fleshed out until years later.

The movie draws on many of the better defined characteristics of The Shadow (all of which were established later in the long running radio series). Now living in Big Budget Land, The Shadow is cast in a much more traditional superhero mold. He maintains the dual identities of Lamont Cranston and The Shadow in much the same way that Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne might. The Shadow has his own requisite superhero headquarters, The Inner Sanctum. The Shadow even has a consistent iconic costume. The plot too is your very traditional "bad guy trying to blow up the world before superhero can stop him" story.

That's the main problem with the film: the screenplay, written by David Koep. Koep has written many Hollywood blockbusters over the years including Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Koep's main weakness as a screenwriter, I have found, is that all his screenplays tend to fall apart in the third act. No big, when you think about it, really. The third act is only the conclusion of the entire movie.

The Shadow sadly meets the same fate.

The film also suffer a little from director Russell Mulcahy's tendency for big dramatic action that has no real anchor in anything else in the film. The only film where Mulcahy really pulls off that kind of action is in his classic movie, Highlander.

Alec Baldwin is almost everything that is interesting to watch in The Shadow. Those eyes, that voice, that incredible delivery and that consistently grounded acting are quite the combo. Baldwin's timing is impeccable not just in comedy but also in drama (though he does get out a few bon mots in the dialogue of this film). Baldwin's earlier work with the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright David Mamet served him well on that front. I can tell you from experience that Mamet is all about timing (along with some of the most intricately constructed sentences to ever contain the word "motherfucker".).

When The Shadow allows himself to be seen by others, Baldwin's face is magically and digitally altered to the angular-nosed Shadow of the comic strips and pulp magazine covers. The character's mouth is covered by his iconic red scarf. In those moments Baldwin delivers every line as if were appearing in a classic old school radio play. Keeping that kinda stuff consistent with the character is a feat that would have seen many actors falling flat on their lovely faces. Baldwin pulls it off. He also always has this wonderful relationship with the text, giving every line a life and bounce of its own.

Alas, The Shadow did not do nearly well enough at the box office in '94 to create a big time box office franchise.

Even if it did, we all know that Alec Baldwin would have walked away after first film anyway.



The Phantom (1996)

The colour of The Phantom's costume was apparently altered to fit the Blu-ray format.

The Phantom, created by Lee Falk,  first appeared as a daily newspaper strip in February of 1936. The Phantom was a similarly themed hero to The Shadow. The mysteriously named hero with slight suggestions of the occult was a popular notion in the 30's, it seems. The Phantom, however, had no psychic or mystical powers. Nor did he have any super human powers of any kind.  The Phantom did have such an enigmatic presence, though, that his physic and mystical powers existed only in the minds of his enemies. The Phantom was thought to be immortal. In reality, the mantle of The Phantom was passed down from generation to generation creating the impression that there has always been just one Phantom (unless, of course, someone  hit upon the idea that more than one person can wear a costume). Also like The Shadow, The Phantom packed a two gun holster. Unlike The Shadow, it kinda made a bit more sense that a guy without special powers might need the aid of a gun or two every once in a while.

Also like The Shadow (I'll get off this Phantom/Shadow comparison thing soon, I promise) the film version The Phantom was made in the 90's. The movie was intended to launch a big blockbuster franchise but never quite got there. With The Phantom and The Shadow (last time, seriously), the success of the film versions of the characters are largely in the hands of the lead actor.

In the early 90's, Billy Zane made a mark for himself by playing the psychotic bad guy (is there any other kind?) in an early Nicole Kidman thriller titled Dead Calm. The part helped land him the title of role in the 1996 film version of The Phantom. Zane was able to make the transition from psychotic bad guy to comic strip hero with aplomb. He put quite a lot of effort into the role too.

The Phantom was one of the first heroes to have that traditional superhero look: tights, a mask and underwear worn on the outside. The entire outfit was purple and skit tight too boot. If you have ever been to any kind of a comic con anywhere, you are well aware of the fact that it is not every guy that can pull off a skin tight outfit. Pretty much any man who is not currently named Prince has a hard time with purple as well. Well aware of this fact of life, the producers of The Phantom pulled a Michael Keaton and had a foam rubber muscled suit made for Zane. Turns out, though, that Zane had a lot of discipline and a really good personal trainer. He slimmed down and bulked up to rise to the challenge of the all purple skin tight costume. The foam rubber muscles were ditched. Watch the movie: that's all Zane, baby.

However, there is more to Zane's Phantom than just the bod. The actor is able to make The Phantom just that right combination of charming, friendly and heroic yet also tough, brooding and mysterious when he needs to be. He carries the film through some of its weaker moments. While The Phantom never took off as a big movie phenomenon it did impress James Cameron enough to cast Zane in one of the highest grossing movies of all time, Titanic.

The Phantom is, on the whole, a fun and entertaining movie. The action walks that fine line between grit and fun. The film even limits the use of The Phanom's guns to only being used to shoot weapons out of his enemies hands. Such upstanding 1930's-style heroic role model behaviour was extremely rare in the post-Schwarzenegger/Rambo era, even in family friendly adventure movies.

The sequence where The Phantom jumps out of a plane to his land on his galloping horse Hero (while his trained Wolf,  Devil runs alongside) is the highlight of the film. It's great stunt: well shot and very nicely executed. It was still  the pre-CGI stunt era back in the mid 90's. The only real problem with the scene is that happens about half way through the movie. The climax of the film, sadly, offers nothing quite as spectacular or dramatic.

The Phantom has a similar problem to The Shadow (whoops, sorry, slipped back there): screenwriter David Koepp. Once again, Koepp's screenplay collapses in the third act. Kind of a problem for an comic strip action movie. Director Simon Wincer's engaging direction is not able to save the day.

The Phantom is primarily a jungle based costumed hero (he is the defender of the fictional African nation of Bengalla). Situated as the film was in the mid-90's, the whole thing kinda plays like Indiana Jones Meets Batman.

That's reason enough for a revival of the classic old school Depression era hero right there.



The Green Hornet (2011)

Despite the impression that one may get from this blog, my Facebook page and my most recent Halloween costume, I am not the single greatest Green Hornet fan that ever lived. If I were, I doubt I would be able to bring myself to write anything good about the Green Hornet's big screen incarnation in 2011.

All 1930's action heroes began as either radio shows, comic strips of pulp magazines. In The Green Hornet's case, it was a radio show. The Green Hornet debuted on radio in January of 1936.  It followed the story of Britt Reid, publisher and owner of The Daily Sentinel newspaper by day and the masked vigilante known as The Green Hornet by night. The Hornet's angle was kinda cool and different. He pretended to be a criminal while really being a good guy.

'Natch, The Green Hornet had a really cool car with lots of weapons and gadgets. The car, known as The Black Beauty, was always driven by the Hornet's sidekick, Kato. This being the 1930's, Kato was your classic subservient benevolent racial stereotype. Kato was a character that took some time to turn around.

The Green Hornet was also made into movie serials, comic books and, perhaps most famously as a prime time TV series in the 1960's.  The TV show cast up-and-coming martial arts star Bruce Lee in the role of Kato. Lee and his Kung Fu mastery went a long way towards turning around the role of Kato. Though, his lines in the series were still a bit on the scarce side.

Rumors of a Green Hornet movie have been flying around since the 90's.  At one time or another the Hornet was supposedly going to be played by George Clooney, Greg Kinnear and Mark Wahlberg. It was not until the sudden "make a movie about every superhero ever" craze kicked in to high gear that The Green Hornet movie kicked into high gear as well. The reception to the news of the casting of Judd Apatow's favorite goofy guy, Seth Rogan, in the title role was received with grace and poise by fans on the Internet.

Uh-huh. Yeah. Right.

Not since the rumours of Nicolas Cage playing Superman, have I seen such fanboy vehemence. The immediate question on the lips of the more reasonable commentators was "Will it be serious or funny?". Serious, we were told. Although when it was announced that the director of Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind and Be Kind Rewind, Michel Gondry, was involved, I knew that we might be in for something a little bit more off the beaten path.

Turns out, no.

Aside from one or two odd little scenes here and there, The Green Hornet is the most mainstream Hollywood movie that Gondry has ever made. And, oh, yeah. They went with the funny angle too.

While I would have loved to see a slimmed down and bulked up Seth Rogan take on a dramatic role, I did not have a big issue with turning The Green Hornet into a comedy. I also didn't have a big issue with the casting of Rogan. Nor do I really care about the way the movie significantly changed certain characters and situations. In the movie, for instance, D.A. Scanlon, the Hornet's traditional lone ally in law enforcement, is turned into a majorly dickish character. It doesn't even bug me (that much) they went with the oldest superhero satire gag in the book: make the hero into a dumb doofus and the sidekick into the real brains of the operation. If nothing else that did finally help turn around Kato's 75 years of tereotyping.

No, my biggest problem with the movie was the portrayal of The Green Hornet and Kato (as played by Asian pop star Jay Chou) as a couple of big time partying bros who loved taking their cool car out on the highway and blowing shit up. Fighting bad guys seemed to be more of an after thought.

The comedy, the one-liners and the uber-cool slacker nature of the characters isn't necessarily a bad thing. My problem is that I never got the sense that these guys had any sense of a higher purpose. Even Inspector Closeau had a sense of higher purpose. Neither of the two leads seemed to really care about stopping the bad guys or any of the injustices they were perpetrating.  It seemed like they were just having fun and that's it. In fact, The Hornet and Kato seemed more concerned with competing amongst themselves. There is one scene where Britt Reid and Kato get into a ludicrous brawl in their Green Hornet club house that, frankly, I did not buy for a second.

That didn't matter to most of the audience at the opening weekend screening that I attended. For them, It was just a  fun movie.

True dat.

The Green Hornet is well directed. Gondry proves that he can direct fast-paced over-the-top action with the best of them. Oscar winning actor Christophe Minz, of Glorious Basterds fame, is great playing a villain once again. It's amazing how well Minz understands the fine line between comedy satire,camp and serious action the movie is precariously walking most of the time.

The whole exercise perplexes me. Just like all the rest of the heroes in this blog,  what I don't get is: why that character? Why at that point in time?

Clearly, they are not banking on kids knowing and loving The Green Hornet. The advertising certainly does not play on the tradition of the character in the way other superhero movies have. Even the DVD and Blu-ray special features do not seem to be about the rich background of The Green Hornet.

The film itself makes little or no reference to the character's history save a couple of references to the movie serials that were so obscure they even had to be pointed out to me. And, yeah, there is one bit towards the end of the film where the screen fills with the Green Hornet logo from the 60's TV series while theme from the old show plays (Al Hirt playing Flight of the Bumble Bee -it's awesome). However, for the uninitiated, that's just one more piece of odd random humour that the movie seems to love.

Sure, they got me in theatre but how much money are they really gonna make off the likes of me?

The whole enterprise comes of as sorta nostalgia in vacuum...fun nostalgia, actually....and, as vacuums go, well, it is a pretty entertaining one..

This week's Goofy Movie Clip: THE ORIGINAL THOR MOVIE

Forget Kenneth Branaugh and Chris Hemsworth, here is the first on-screen Thor...





This is a clip from the 1988 TV movie, The Return of the Incredible Hulk. The movie was as much a revival of the classic Hulk TV show as it was an unsold pilot for a Thor TV series.
Here in this scene we see one of the classic Marvel comics grudge matches of all time: Thor vs The Hulk.
We shall see how this on screen incarnation of the God of Thunder measures up against the new Thor movie opening in theaters everywhere on May 6, 2011.*

Check for my Weekly Goofy Movie Clip.

Same Bat Time.

Same Bag Blog.

*See Marvel Studios? I plugged your movie so  don't shut me down, K?