Circa 11 – 0 BJP, if you will…

Growing up as a Dinosaur enthusiast did not always contain within it the enriched wealth of resources to draw upon. Much of Dinosaur enjoyment had to be born of a vivid and vibrant imagination, due in most part to the severe lack of sources previously mentioned. Books were a proverbial well to tap into – I recall utterly decimating my children’s encyclopedia books as a kid. Well, I remember decimating the book from De – Dy. In fact, if you had looked at my encyclopedias on the shelf, you’d see that nothing but the “D” section was even touched, but man was that D section borderline unreadable.

As a kid, I would say that I wanted to be a scientist – and, more specifically, a paleontologist. This was a lie; what I really wanted to be when I grew up was a Dinosaur. My mother had made me a Dinosaur costume for Halloween when I was around five and I promptly wore that sucker every single day until I was well beyond the point where I should be wearing it. I even attempted to wear it in my teens as a joke, but that didn’t encompass the seriousness of how much I wanted to be one as a child. Each post-lunch recess was filled with the roars and grunts of a Diplodocus or Monoclonius (Fun Fact – It turns out the Monoclonius was nothing more than a baby Triceratops), and other children either joining in on the fun are casting eyes of “look at this weirdo”.

But, like any kid, the imagination can only take you so far. And like any imagination: it needed bolstering. This fortification could only be met with movies, television, and the aforementioned books. But books were to-be-read and largely boring for a five year old kid with undiagnosed ADD. This naturally lent itself to the need for movies and TV shows. Since TV shows existed in a quagmire of mediocrity throughout most of the 80s (thankfully saved by Television elite Twin Peaks), it fell to movies and, more importantly, documentaries to fill the ever present void of this dinosaur draught.

There is an unfortunate thing, however. As a kid growing up from 83 to 94 (when I was 12), Jurassic Park hadn’t proverbially popped the lid of the dinosaur can of worms that was ripe for explosion! For many, Jurassic Park was the starting point of their dinosaur obsession, but that wasn’t me. Jurassic Park only managed to facilitate my already intense obsession with the prehistoric beasts. So what did one like me do in this world pre-Jurassic Park?

Without further adieu, I give you a list of top 7 “movies” that satiated the Dino-hunger many had before the advent of Jurassic Park.

7. The Land Before Time (1988)

And an aside on Jim Henson’s Dinosaurs

This seems fairly obvious for one who’s ven-diagram was a circle for “Likes Dinosaurs” and “Is a kid”, but this definitely wasn’t my all-time favorite. Don’t get me wrong, I loved this movie. The animation is stellar, the characters are engaging, and the Tyrannosaurus – in particular – is mesmerizing as a villain.

The problem I had stemmed more from its depiction as a bog-standard children’s story, with its need to intercut humor and a rudimentary plotline that is great but does not give credence to my need for the focal point to be these are DINOSAURS!!! As far as wanting to learn more about dinosaurs, this one just isn’t it. It’s cute, it’s fun, it has Don Bluth, one of the greatest animators of all time, going for it; but it’s not a crazed Dino-fan’s need.

I would put it in the same vein as the show Dinosaurs, which was a sitcom featuring Jim Henson puppets. Like The Land Before Time, Jim Henson’s Dinosaurs had a lot going for it. It had the greatest puppeteer of all time working on it, it had great scripts that pilfer from all the best sitcom tropes, and it had an incredibly loveable cast. But for someone who wanted to see Dinosaurs being Dinosaurs, it just didn’t have it.

6. The Great Dinosaur Hunt (1991)

Now this is what I’m talking about. A deep dive into what dinosaurs are and what they do. This was a documentary.

From the moment this starts, there is an ominous hum marking the impending announcement of what this show would be. I don’t even know if it was actually present but when I was watching this as a kid I thought I could hear dinosaurs in the background urging to get onto the screen. And just before the show finally announces its title: he shows up. The big cheese. T-Rex, his face a looming terror.

The only reason this story isn’t farther down the list is that while this is great for an adult, it was far too dry for a kid. While its beginnings saw some Hollywood depictions and incredibly dynamic shots of displayed bones from museums, the bulk of the documentary was just that: a documentary. Incredibly interesting but not nearly as titillating as future entries on this list.

For those who want to indulge in this largely nostalgic rad-fest and attempt to live vicariously through an eight-year-old child’s eyes, it can be found here!

5. Godzilla Vs. The Sea Monster (1966)

I hear the wagons circling, and it’s coming from many different camps! I have made egregious errors on multiple fronts that I must address before continuing forward. Here is what I suspect the anger will be stemming from:

1. The title is wrong
2. If this is a list about Dinosaurs then why the fuck is GODZILLA here?

Yes, I know the title of this movie is Ebirah, Horror of the Deep. I also know that this movie wasn’t supposed to be a Godzilla film at all. It was initially going to be one of the Japanese-lead King Kong films. The question I pose to you, dear naysayer, is this: how is a SIX year old supposed to know what the Japanese translated movie was called!? I didn’t know it then and I sure don’t care that much now, so miss me with that nonsense!

As for why Godzilla is on this list: I just like Godzilla, alright!? I could go into a cope-fest and explain that in Godzilla Vs. King Ghidorah, it was explained that Godzilla was derived from what they called a “Godzillasaurus” when Japan and America went into a time machine to examine what really took place during Godzilla’s true formation, but I’m not going to do that; I won’t be so pedantic. Look, pickings were slim in the mid-80s when it came to Dinosaurs so I took what I could get.

At 6 years old when you see a giant lizard-looking thing that goes around stomping shit and being an overall shithead, it’s a dinosaur, okay!?

This movie is pure rad. It encapsulated me in a way almost no other movie did. The only reason this sucker isn’t near the top of the list is because of the fact that Godzilla has nearly nothing to do with Dinosaurs. It has the Big G himself, a giant crab called Ebirah, and Mothra! There is fighting, there is dumb bank robbery, an island full of natives, a weird rippled baby blue building that will forever be etched in my mind for some dumb reason, everything.

4. The Valley of Gwangi (1969)

There will come a day when I make an entire entry on Ray Harryhausen due to my intense love for his films. I almost wanted to pull the above Godzilla card and include 7th Voyage of Sinbad on this list but, luckily, I didn’t need to. Harryhausen did make a full blown dinosaur movie and it rocked my socks off!

The plot goes like a lot of Dinosaur and BC-styled movies tend to go: a small pocket of the world was left untouched by the great dinosaur extinction, and a group of people happened upon it one day. It has a T-Rex named Gwangi (really it’s an Allosaurus but whatever) fighting a Styracosaurus, a Pteranodon nabbing people, and Gwangi rampaging through the streets of Mexico culminating in a one v one between Gwangi and a large Elephant.

I also need to give a special shout out to Harryhausen’s other dinosaur works because technically I would argue that One Million Years BC (1966) is the superior film to Gwangi due in large part to how utterly ambitious it was. A film with almost no dialogue and a crud ton of dinosaurs? Sign me up! I just happened to watch Gwangi first as a kid so it supersedes BC as far as listicles go.

3. Dinosaurs! (Hosted by Christopher Reeve)

When Christopher Reeve is harkened one typically thinks of the most iconic depiction of Superman in existence. He definitely paved the way for generations upon generations of inspiration to draw from even in the comics, where the character was originated. Others might think of the benevolence his foundation laid toward fight for paralysis victims and stem cell research.

For me? He was that dude from my second favorite dinosaur documentary.

My dad recorded a ton of shit for my sister and I (and him) as kids. He recorded multiple movies that were related on one of the VHS tapes and I dubbed that “the dinosaur tape”. It had this and The Great Dinosaur Hunt as well as another doc that will be mentioned further down.

This documentary was quintessential for me. Christopher Reeve was a great host, and – most of all – you can see the precursor to Jurassic Park here!

That’s right, Phil Tippit worked on this documentary, lending his post-Star Wars stop motion expertise to this thing. It would be his work on this documentary that caught him a job with Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. You can even find some scenes from Jurassic Park that were made in Stop Motion, looking quite similar to this documentary, specifically the kitchen scene. Anyway, the result of Tippit’s inclusion in this is incredibly detailed scenes in a jaw-dropping prehistoric backdrop that lit this boy’s dino-craving like almost no other!

We get to indulge in the above Deinonychus’ feasting on a Struthiomimus that had just burgled a hadrosaur’s freshly laid eggs, a T-Rex getting bodied by that same Hadrosaur, and him turning around and annihilating a poor Monoclonius!

What I just said might ring a bell from earlier in this article: The Monoclonius. Part of the charm of some of the older documentaries are the use of deprecated facts. It gives a windowed insight into what people thought at the time. The monoclonius is not a distinct dinosaur, it is merely a child Triceratops whose shielded horns had not developed yet. We also get some rather disturbing thoughts on where Dinosaur evolution would have gone had they not died out.

Anachronisms aside, this documentary is a must-watch for anyone that loves dinosaurs! It’s well worth your time for the animatics alone.

2. King Kong (1933)

Obviously.

I don’t think I really need to go into much detail on this one. King Kong is among the most famous movies of all time for good reason. It has contained in it some of the greatest scenes, stellar acting in a 30’s style, and the immortal King Kong himself who, while not a dinosaur, gave wonder to every child’s (and probably adult’s) mind from the 30’s to even now.

1. Gary Owens and Eric Boardman Documentaries

This is a weird one. And by weird I mean utterly endearing and unequivocally nostalgic. It’s also cheating, because these two guys have made way more than just one dinosaur documentary.

These may not be for everyone, but they hit my needs more than any other. They have heart, humor, the right kinds of anachronisms to decimate my nostalgia boner, and incredibly likeable hosts.

In particular there are two docs that hit the hardest for me. There are more documentaries but two of them are the ones I watched by far the most. The first one is Dinosaurs Dinosaurs Dinosaurs, which is technically their third in a series of dinosaur documentaries, however it’s their second in meaningful ones (the first one was incredibly short and I’m not sure it was ever actually pushed into syndication officially). The second was Son of Dinosaurs.

This was a documentary that, like all others, celebrated dinosaurs. The unique thing about this one, however, is that there was an ongoing sub-plot where Gary Owens (previous to this famous for being a radio personality) was slowly turning into a Dinosaur! Eric Boardman is tasked with going to a crystalline stream in England to obtain some kind of special water meant to halt the transformation.

It also gave within me a burning desire to visit Vernal, Utah. I also, to this day, STILL want that polo of the dude that has the little dinosaur over the left breast spot.

Son of Dinosaurs

Son of Dinosaurs was another documentary much like the previous, however it involved the duo attempting to conceal a live dinosaur egg while hosting the documentary from a strange German dude hell bent on discovering it!

Looking back on this one, it isn’t nearly as good. It’s funny, though, because as a kid I liked it way more, which is probably due to the fact that it was newer for me. I had already nearly worn out my VHS copy of Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs before my dad had recorded this off of The Disney Channel (back when you had to pay for the Disney Channel).

While these may sound like textbook documentaries, what sets them apart is the use of the Chiodo Brothers, most famous for movies like Killer Klowns from Outer Space and Critters. They are incredible designers and have stellar use of stop motion animation and animatronics.

For any who want to indulge in these stellar documentaries as well as support the people who created them oh so long ago, ALL of them have been compiled in Blu-ray format here!

So there you have it. I’m sure I’ve missed some things. If so, feel free to comment and let me know how utterly wrong my list is!