Book Review: Starring T.rex

As you’ve probably guessed by now, I’m fascinated by pop culture’s views on dinosaurs. Fortunately, I’m not alone. Allen Debus, Don Glut, and many others have documented our obsession with prehistoric creatures, and today I’m going to look at one of these documents.

Written by Jose Luis Sanz of the University of Madrid in 2002, the book is called Starring T. rex: Dinosaur Mythology and Popular Culture, a historical and thematic overview of dinosaurs in fiction. It covers a broad spectrum, but each topic is covered briefly. It’s an overview, not a more detailed account like the work of Debus and Glut. Of all these books, this is one of the easiest to reads and works the best as an introduction.

The first eight chapters cover a history of dinosaur discoveries and how science has influenced our views. The first chapter covers the first discoveries and Hawkins’ depictions, the second on the rise of the United States as a source of dinosaurs, and the third on the flourishing of fiction with Arthur Conan Doyle’s the Lost World, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, and how animation pioneers like Windsor McCay and Willis O’Brien turned to dinosaurs as subjects.

 The 1930s are the next period covered, with Brown and Andrews’ discoveries for the American Museum, the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair and its exhibits, and Charles Knight’s art for the American, the Field, and the Lost Angeles Museums, culminating in 1925’s the Lost World and 1933’s King Kong by Willis O’Brien. A chapter on Walt Disney’s dinosaurs in the 1940 film Fantasia is followed by a digression about depictions of dinosaur intelligence, but returns to finish the history by covering the Dinosaur Renaissance pioneered by Ostrom, Bakker and Ricqles and the 1990s dinosaur fad that occurred when these new scientific discoveries were finally recognized in 1993’s Jurassic Park.

The next seven chapters are dedicated to how fiction gets humans to meet with dinosaurs; period fiction with dinosaur protagonists is relatively uncommon as for many writers it is unthinkable to write from anything but a human perspective. He lists the plot devices as follows: The Lost World where dinosaurs have survived to the human era, Frozen Dinosaurs where the animals are preserved until awakening in the present, Time Travel bringing two of Earth’s eras together, Reevolution of dinosaurs in a postapocalyptic setting, Dinosaurs existing via parallel evolution on other planets, and the Resurrection of dinosaurs via biotechnology in Jurassic Park 

Another brief digression covers fiction about dinosaur extinction, scientific, supernatural, or otherwise. The Lost World is expounded on in a chapter on Cryptzoology and the myths of Nessie and Mokele Membe.  The previous chapter on the assumed stupidity of dinosaurs is counterpointed with recent speculation and depictions of intelligent dinosaurs.

The Next two chapters discuss how humans interact in these stories-while occasionally the contact is friendly, as in James Gurney’s Dinotopia, it usually is a conflict. Sanz then describes three categories of coexistence : First, Fantasy where humans and dinosaurs simply are contemporaries in the same environment, second, humans arrive in a dinosaur habitat via travel of some sort, and third dinosaurs appearing in human civilization.

 This last category he reduces to a six step storyline: 1) Dinosaur appears, 2) The Natural and social order is altered, 3) the dinosaur attacks humans, 4) human beings attack the dinosaur, 5) the dinosaur is destroyed, and 6) the natural and social order is restored.  This in turn is followed by why these stories are told the way they are, and how dinosaurs become horror villains by becoming symbols of larger themes.

The last few chapters are on disconnected themes-what dinosaurs looked like and how artists use imagination to reconstruct them, Japanese kaiju films as an outgrowth of the dinosaur genre, how dinosaurs inspired dragon myths and how in turn dragon myths inspire dinosaur fiction, and two chapters on dinosaur behavior and ecology in science and fiction.

It’s not a very coherent narrative, but more of a grab bag of overall themes as in Glut’s Dinosaur Scrapbook. It doesn’t go into depth about literature like Debus’ book, or films like Berry’s. Still, each topic is well-summarized and well explained. It’s difficult to simplify a topic covering over a century of fiction in all media forms, so I am quite satisfied by this one.  I give it a 75/100 overall.

I apologize for the short article this time. I’ll post again tomorrow, this time with a longer entry.