Top Ten Dinosaur Movies Never Made

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. 

Old vs New: Dinosaur vs Walking With Dinosaurs

A long time ago, artists, paleontologists, and filmmakers came up with a visionary idea: a movie based entirely on dinosaurs. Other movies have had dinosaurs in them, but were centered on humans and their interactions with the dinosaurs.  This project, as proposed, would be a natural drama, similar to wildlife projects like the Bear where the animal did not speak but would nonetheless have their story told. Set in the end of the age of Dinosaurs, they would focus a great clash between the protagonist and his theropod archenemy.  Alas, things went sour. Executives meddled. The project is delayed and sunk in development. The original team is told that it’s all over. Then, years later,  a trailer will capture the imagination of the audience. In lush, state of the art effects, it looks like the original epic will finally arise from development hell into its glory. And then a second trailer comes out, this one with conversations and sending hopes spiraling down. Then the final product is released to mixed reviews at best, a box office failure and a very bad product.

This happened twice in my lifetime.

Movie Review: Dinosaur 2000

Time for another review, and like last week’s, it’s connected to the upcoming dinosaur movie next week. This one played a big role in my youth. I remember being a 10 year old and finding out that Disney, my favorite studio, was making a movie about dinosaurs. I remember checking the website daily. I saw the trailer before Toy Story that was basically the opening 3 minutes of the film, and I was in love. The breathtaking visuals, the lush epic score-how could this go wrong? After all, I was about to see a great Disney movie after the trailer, and I remembered how much I loved the Star Wars trailer. I fully expected the best. Sure enough, I loved both Toy Story 2 and the first Star Wars prequel. Things were looking up

After I finally saw it in theaters the next summer, I left the theater feeling pretty hollow. I didn’t hate the film, but felt truly disappointed. I learned not to trust a trailer. I learned that you could take a great premise for a film and ruin it. I learned that the movies in my mind were far better than those on screen. That’s why this one is personal. This review is going to add criticism even as I go. Each reviewer has a movie they single out for betrayal. Indeed, the Phantom Menace is one for many of them. I could easily bring up Hunchback of Notre Dame, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, or the Jurassic Park sequels are examples of ultimate betrayal of potential and missed opportunity. This one was my first real nemesis. I won’t say it’s a terrible movie (although here’s a great review on why it is: http://unshavedmouse.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/disney-reviews-with-the-unshaved-mouse-39-dinosaur/)

Movie Review: Fantasia (1940)

It’s Friday, and time for another film review! This week is a return to good movies, and this one is one of my first, and one of my favorites. My dad introduced me to Classical Music at a young age, and decided to nourish it with the 1940 Walt Disney animated classic Fantasia. The dazzling colors and shapes set to Bach’s toccata and fugue in D minor, the antics of Mickey Mouse set to Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the classical majesty combined with colorful creatures of classical myth set to Beethoven’s 6^th symphony, satirical slapstick animal ballet of Ponchielli’s Dance of the hours and the nightmarish demonic revelry in Modest Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain all made impacts on me, but it was the prehistoric epic of the Rite of Spring that impressed me the most. It was at the time I loved dinosaurs thanks to this film, The Land Before Time, and trips to the Field Museum’s dinosaur hall. Thanks to Fantasia, my love of dinosaurs increased and my love of classical musical blossomed. It’s still one of my favorite movies and Stravinsky is one of my favorite composers.