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Cinema’s Best and Worst Dinosaurs

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Cinema’s Best and Worst Dinosaurs

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Cinema’s Best and Worst Dinosaurs

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Published on November 28, 2014

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For as long as there have been movies, dinosaurs have been roaring and stomping across the screen. Gertie the dinosaur was one of the first popular animated characters, and stop-motion pioneer Willis O’Brien had an unabashed love for prehistoric life that he brought to life in silent shorts as well as classics like 1925’s The Lost World and the original King Kong. Jurassic Park later picked up the spirit of these early forays, presenting audiences with what are still some of the most spectacular movie dinosaurs ever. Since the 1993 blockbuster is briefly back in theaters starting today, it’s fitting to look back at a short list of cinema’s best and worst Mesozoic monsters.

I’m following standard schoolyard procedure for this list, so the first part is the worst, the second is the best (and third is the one with the Cryolophosaurus crest).

Worst. Dinosaurs. EVER.

Worst Dinosaurs Ever

1: King Kong’s “Brontosaurus

The amphibious, carnivorous “Brontosaurus” of 1933’s King Kong was an undeniably scary dinosaur, and that’s exactly why it belongs on the “worst” list. The dinosaur acts as if the predatory mind of a tyrannosaur was planted inside the brain of a comically sharp-toothed sauropod that has an insatiable appetite for sailors. Indeed, as every up-to-date dinofan knows, the sauropod’s proper name is Apatosaurus and this 80-foot-long herbivore had a small set of peg-like teeth that the dinosaur used to crop ferns and leaves before swallowing them without chewing. While King Kong’s “Brontosaurus” gets points for style, the Hollywood dinosaur is the complete opposite of what the real animal was like.  

 

Worst Dinosaurs Ever

2: Carnosaur’s Tyrannosaurus

Carnosaur—1993’s other adaptation of a novel about genetically engineered dinosaurs—was a dismal attempt to depict dinosaurs in their flesh-ripping, bloody glory. But seeing a trio of teenagers get eviscerated by a Deinonychus hand-puppet, among other movie misfires, is more humorous than horrifying. At least that scrappy little gut-spiller had some personality. The movie’s biggest star is a life-sized mechanical Tyrannosaurus that drags its tail and lurches across the screen as if it has a severe hangover. Despite its awful performance, though, the Carnosaur’s T. rex became something of a minor celebrity, appearing in two Carnosaur sequels, the derivative Raptor, and the misogynistic bit of cinema trash called Dinosaur Island. For such an atrocious puppet, Carnosaur’s tyrannosaur sure has logged a lot of screen time.

 

Worst Dinosaurs Ever

3: The Land Before Time gang

Hear me out. I adored the first Land Before Time. I cried at the end and was mercilessly teased by my sister. And the little dinosaurs get bonus points for looking so different from the adults—as recent research has highlighted, dinosaurs changed drastically as they grew up. But by childhood nostalgia for the animated dinosaur tale was subsequently splintered into irreparable pieces by the parade of twelve (!!!) direct-to-video sequels. (Cuba Gooding, Jr. voiced a dinosaur named “Loofah” in the last one. I’m not kidding.) The low-quality animation gave life to schmaltzy life lessons plucked from the after school special bargain bin, including songs. Flying Spaghetti Monster help me, the songs. I saw the first sequel just once, when I was eleven years old, and almost 20 years later the chorus of one wretched earworm still pops uninvited into my head now and then. For taking the teeth out of dinosaurs through a dozen films, The Land Before Time characters are among the worst film dinosaurs of all.

 

Worst Dinosaurs Ever4: Metamorphosis’ Dino Dude

Unless you’re a major devotee of creature features, you probably haven’t seen 1990’s Metamorphosis. Count yourself lucky. This rancid, bottom-of-the-barrel chunk of schlock wants to be The Fly so very bad, and apparently the filmmakers behind it thought that having the loathsome protagonist—egotistical geneticist Peter Houseman—turn into a dinosaur would somehow save the movie. Maybe it would have worked had the dinosaurified Houseman not looked like a gnarly dollar store dinosaur model. A squad of cops immediately guns down the stiff monstrosity as soon as it appears—not because the mutated scientist posed a real threat, it would seem, but because the awkward monster is an embarrassment to movie dinosaurs everywhere.

 

Worst Dinosaurs Ever

5: Dishonorable Mention: Faux dinosaurs

From 1955’s King Dinosaur to 1970’s When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, a spate of old dinosaur films used lizards, alligators, and other reptiles as dinosaur stand-ins. Special effects crews often stuck horns and sails on the poor reptiles to make them seem more prehistoric, and, in a cruel method of filming dinosaur battles on the cheap, made the harried reptiles fight each other. In terms of both filmmaking ethics and scientific accuracy, lizards and other unfortunate herps forced to be Mesozoic monsters are truly the worst of movie “dinosaurs.”

 

The Best Dinostars Ever

Best Dinosaurs Ever

1: King Kong’s “Ferructus”

If you saw Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of King Kong in theaters, you only caught a fleeting glimpse of the imaginary horned dinosaur Ferructus in an establishing shot. But in the extended DVD release, the ornery ceratopsid gives the film’s rescue party a savage welcome to Skull Island’s jungle before being gunned down. A speculative take on what relatives of Styracosaurus would look like had they survived to the modern day, the terribly pointy dinosaur combines a rough nose boss—as in Pachyrhinosaurus—with an array of paired hooks, horns, and hornlets seen among dinosaurs such as Centrosaurus. No one has found a real dinosaur quite like Ferructus yet, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility. But the beautifully-imagined Ferructus makes the best list for one very important reason often overlooked in dinosaur cinema—even herbivores can be dangerous dinosaurs.

 

Best Dinosaurs Ever

2: Gwangi

By modern standards, The Valley of Gwangi’s titular Allosaurus is a misbegotten beast. The carnivore’s limp tail trails on the ground, he’s covered in lumpy alligator scales, and the allosaur wants nothing more out of life than to eat every single thing he comes across. And that’s why I adore Gwangi. Lovingly animated by stop-motion master Ray Harryhausen, the Allosaurus is less an individual animal than a prehistoric force of nature that cannot be reigned in or contained. The trope is old—King Kong explored what happens when prehistoric wildnerness and the modern world collide years before—but Gwangi does it with great style among western locales reminiscent of where dinosaur bones are often found. Gwangi represented the voracious dinosaurs I grew up with, and such single-minded dinosaurian predators still have a place in my heart.

 

Best Dinosaurs Ever

3: Jurassic Park’s Tyrannosaurus rex

There’s no contest. Even twenty years after the first film debuted, Jurassic Park’s Tyrannosaurus rex remains the best cinema dinosaur of them all. Brought to life through computer-generated imagery and exquisitely-designed puppets, the film’s T. rex looks just as awesome and terrifying as anything I could imagine (even if we now know that the movie’s dinosaur is naked, lacking a coat of dinofuzz). And despite some silly inaccuracies—such as the “only in the movies” nonsense that T. rex couldn’t see you if you stood still—Jurassic Park’s carnivorous star remains a realistic tribute to the “prize fighter of antiquity.” The raptors were clever, sure, but since T. rex quickly dispatches two of the smaller sickle-clawed predators at the end of the film, roaring its dominance as a “WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH” banner falls to the floor, I wouldn’t argue with the king of the tyrant dinosaurs.   

 

Best Dinosaurs Ever

Honorable Mention: Godzilla

Depending on the film, Godzilla may or may not be a mutated, radioactive dinosaur. (The less said about 1998’s American remake, the better.) But whatever his origin, the kaiju looks like the shuffling atomic lovechild of a theropod and a stegosaur. Although, as paleontologist Kenneth Carpenter once speculated, Godzilla might actually fit the bill for a distant relative of Ceratosaurus. Not only did the Jurassic’s Ceratosaurus possess formidable teeth and claws, but it also had an array of bony knobs along its back that could at least speculatively form the basis for Godzilla’s trademark fins. Given that he has cinematically saved the world multiple times, and stars in more movies than James Bond, no list of top movie dinosaurs would be complete without at least a hat-tip to Gojira.


Brian Switek is the author of My Beloved Brontosaurus and Written in Stone. He also writes the National Geographic blog Laelaps

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Brian Switek

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Brian Switek is the author of My Beloved Brontosaurus and Written in Stone. He also writes the National Geographic blog Laelaps
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mutantalbinocrocodile
10 years ago

I vote for The Land Before Time dinosaurs as worst even NOT counting the sequels. You just don’t try to remake “The Rite of Spring” but replace the radically black and apocalyptic ending with a misearned happy ending (complete with a CLIP REEL, for goodness sake). Even little kids know that they are all going extinct, honestly.

For that matter, where is “The Rite of Spring” on Best Dinosaurs? It may no longer be scientifically accurate, but we can forgive the dragging tails given that it was 1940.

JKC27
10 years ago

Jurassic Park by far set the standard for scientifically accurate portrayals of dinosaurs, and I loved the first movie. 2nd one I did not enjoy at all, other than the dinos.

I do remember growing up (I was born in 1973) and anxiously waiting for the creature feature movies (Saturday afternoons???) so I could get my fix on Godzilla, and similar monsters in the movies. The stop animation was cool back then.

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Russell H.
10 years ago

@1 Re “Rite of Spring” according to one paleontologist of my acquaintance, it’s a valuable snapshot of paleontological theories as of 1940, and it’s as accurate a depiction as it could be given what was known and believed at the time.

He also noted that it’s fascinating look at the pre-“plate tectonics” geological theories of the time.

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10 years ago

Honestly, I give a pass to King Kong‘s “brontosaurus,” because it was 1933. It wouldn’t be until 30 years later that the dinosaur renaissance began to teach us what we now know about them. Brontosaurus was the common term in 1933 – hell, I grew up with it decades later – and at the time, it was believed they lived in the water, which is why the film’s dinosaur is amphibious. And while there’s no scientific or historical reason for it to chomp on sailors…it’s 1933. They were making a monster movie. Scientific accuracy was not on their minds so much as a good storyline.

So in historical context – both in terms of contemporary scientific knowledge, and filmmaking of the 1930s – I can’t really call King Kong‘s dinosaur the worst ever. It’s goofy, sure, but what do you expect given the time?

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10 years ago

Count me as another who thinks you were a bit too harsh on the brontosaurus from King Kong. Sure, it’s not an accuarte depiction of a dinosaur (nor a giant gorilla, for that matter), but for the period when it was filmed, it was teriffic.

But I’m not going to be critical of your comments. Afterall, anyone that loves The Valley of Gwangi is a friend of mine.

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10 years ago

Brian… oh, Brian.

Putting Godzilla in the list of best… instead of where it belongs, the worst… shows how you’ve let sentimentality get the better of you. It doesn’t matter how popular that critter is, it is the worst dinosaur (wherever it was made). The American version, while more dino-looking, was simply too big to actually work. And the Toho Godzilla is just a plain stupid monster with special effect fire-breath.

Mutantalbinocrocodile is right: The dinos of Disney’s “Rite of Spring” should be on your list of best. And if you want bad dinos, you have to include those in “Land of the Lost.”

Best dinosaur honorable mention: Lady Vastra of “Doctor Who.”

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Raskos
10 years ago

@@@@@ # 3 – The Disney people got Juian Huxley – a grandson of Thomas Huxley, and himself a prominent biologist, one of the founders of the Darwinian New Synthesis – as a scientific advisor for Fantasia. At the time, I don’t think that you could have had someone better backstopping your palaeontological reconstructions.

With regard to Faux dinosaurs – that picture isn’t a lizard in a costume, or if it is, it’s no species I’ve ever heard of. The Lost World (1960), though, relied almost exclusively on dressed-up rhinoceros iguanas, tegus, montors etc. as their dinosaurs. Given the way that they were forced to fight etc., I wonder how many of them survived the shooting of the movie. Also kind of discouraging, how unconcerned with verisimiltude the movie makers were, when you consider how careful Doyle was in his novel to ground his accounts of dinosaurs in the most up-to-date (at the time) scientific evidence available.

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DRickard
10 years ago

Surprised no-one’s giving grief to Dr. Who’s Dinosaur Invasion, which gives Land of the Lost a serious challenge for cheesiest TV dino puppets…

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10 years ago

It seems scientific accuracy is still losing out in favor of a good, pretty story:
A Smithsonian paleontologist fact-checked the ‘Jurassic World’ trailer. His take? ‘Meh.’

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10 years ago

Jurassic Park has always been a monster franchise, coupled with technobabble to give it a sense of plausability. And the great thing for monster fans is the genetic engineering meets commercialism angle it takes. Any and all discrepancies with actual paleontological studies can be explained with this: it’s a corporate run park.

Why don’t the dinosaurs have feathers? Easy. Have one of the suits explain their patrons expect the classic dinosaurs of old. They want reptilian monsters, not plummage. And the JP dinosaurs have been engineered for the audience. Just like a movie.

That is, if the JP franchise would dare venture into satire.

Tessuna
10 years ago

@8 I was about to, but you were quicker! I must say though, apart from the terrible terrible dinosaurs it is still one of my favorite episodes of Doctor Who. I’d love to see that one remastered – I’m sure it would be possible to somehow switch the old dinosaurs for something more… realistic.

I should mention the old czech movie “A Journey to the Beginning of Time” (1955). There are the first dinosaurs I’ve seen! And they are… well, slightly better than the “Invasion of the dinosaurs” ones, but if you consider the year of their creation they’re magic and extraordinary!
Also I’ve just discovered there is very different U.S. version of this movie, and by the look of it… I recommend the original version. :)

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10 years ago

I’d have to also throw a shout to the 1925 silent version of The Lost World.

And Winsor McKay’s Gertie.