Dinosaur! (1985 film)

Did You Know?

• Following its initial airing, Dinosaur! was shown on the Disney Channel throughout the 1990s.
• The documentary had a VHS release on May 5, 1993, by Family Home Entertainment.

Content

The documentary combines Reeve's narration with special effects reconstructions of dinosaurs and their era, along with interviews with paleontologists including Jack Horner, Robert Bakker, Phil Currie, and Dale Russell. After an introductory sequence and opening credits, the film depicts the mating of Hadrosaurus, identified as a hadrosaur, duck-billed dinosaur, or duck-bill. A female lays a clutch of eggs, which are eaten by a Struthiomimus except for one.

The Struthiomimus is then hunted and killed by a pair of Deinonychus. The remaining egg hatches, and the juvenile hadrosaur wanders off while grazing with its parents, nearly being killed by a Tyrannosaurus rex. The parents rescue it: one parent faces the theropod and knocks it over with its 2,000-pound tail, allowing the family to escape. A herd of Brontosaurus is shown eating leaves from tall trees using their long necks.

A herd of Monoclonius grazes; one member wanders off, finds the remains of a killed hadrosaur, and is ambushed by a Tyrannosaurus. The Monoclonius stabs the predator in the shin but is cornered and killed. An asteroid crashes into Earth, killing the dinosaurs. A small mouse-like mammal, portrayed by an opossum, climbs out of a hole among hadrosaur bones, signaling the rise of mammals.

The documentary also discusses the growing popularity of dinosaurs and the possibility of cryptids such as the Loch Ness Monster and Mokele-mbembe.

Origins of the project

Before working on Dinosaur!, Phil Tippett created a ten-minute experimental sequence titled Prehistoric Beast, with assistance from Industrial Light & Magic stop-motion animators Randy Dutra, who made the dinosaur molds and skins, and Tom St. Amand, who made the inner articulated metallic skeletons. The short depicted a Monoclonius being chased and killed by a Tyrannosaurus. Released only at specialized animation festivals in 1984, it convinced Robert Guenette and Steven Paul Mark to request Tippett's skills for a full-length documentary.

Tippett created new sequences featuring Hadrosaurus, Deinonychus, Struthiomimus, and Brontosaurus, while stock footage from the 1979 film Meteor was used for the asteroid. The go motion animation technique had first been used by Tippett in the Star Wars original trilogy, notably in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) for tauntauns and AT-ATs. After finishing work on the Star Wars trilogy in 1983, Tippett improved the technique with Prehistoric Beast (1984) and further refined it for Dinosaur! (1985).

His experimental work on these dinosaur films later aided the animatics and CGI dinosaur sequences for Jurassic Park (1993).

Production

The production of Dinosaur! took place in New York City, Los Angeles, and several U.S. fossil sites. Actor Reeve, a big dinosaur fan, flew his own plane to the American Museum of Natural History and personally asked for reshoots of certain scenes. Phil Tippett built most of the special effects in his garage, with help from Industrial Light & Magic animators Randy Dutra, who crafted the dinosaur molds and skins, and Tom St. Amand, who made the inner metal skeletons. Old movie clips, including a King Kong (1933) scene where a character says "prehistoric beast," were used to show dinosaurs' popularity on screen.

Legacy

Footage from Dinosaur! was re-dubbed with different sound effects and music for the original 3D Dinosaur Adventure for MS-DOS by Knowledge Adventure, and again in its 1995 and 1996 Windows remakes. The footage also appeared in the 1993 PC game Microsoft Dinosaurs, the 1998 ABC World Reference game Wide World of Dinosaurs for Windows and Macintosh by Creative Wonders, the Growing Up Wild/Madison's Adventures episode 'Leapin Lizards', and the Really Wild Animals episode 'Dinosaurs and Other Creature Features'.