As you’ve noticed, dinosaurs have been featured in a lot of
terrible movies. From Lost Continent to Jurassic World, from King Dinosaur to
Ice Age 3, not to mention any Asylum movie on the Sci Fi Channel, it’s easy to
put a dinosaur on screen, but it’s hard to make the experience worthwhile. Sometimes
the effects are terrible. Sometimes the dinosaurs are cliched. Sometimes the
film is just plain badly written and shot. So it’s a shame to find out about great movies
that were never made.
In Hollywood, it takes a lot of luck for a project to see
work, especially one with an ambitious
premise or one demanding expensive
special effects. Even filmmakers like Kubrick or Spielberg have had projects
die before seeing light. Fortunately, big ambitious projects are
remembered, especially if they’re by people who have made other hit films but
somehow were thwarted other times. In
this case, Mark Berry’s excellent Dinosaur Filmography came very much in handy.
These projects all sound like a lot of fun-it’s not often dinosaur
movies get made, simply because of the limitations in budget, writing ability,
and marketability inherent in the genre. Frankly, if we had these made, they
would have turned out far superior than most dinosaur films that actually saw
light. These were dream projects, vast in scope and ambition. Some of them were
salvaged and recreated into excellent films. Some of them turned out into
disasters. But it’s fascinating to learn about them, and dream about what could
have been. Who knows? We may see them someday even after their originators have
long been dead. Anything can happen in Hollywood, and they love to remake and
revisit. Maybe someday these will be made.
