Movie Mania: Dinosaur pop culture book of EVERYTHING!!!

 

It's the start of an off-week, and I decided it was time to cover something I've had backlogged a long time. It also happens to be one of the most unclassifiable artifacts in my book collections, and the nucleus of a great deal of my pop culture experience. I was finally driven to reference it in my review of The Crater Lake Monster, and I knew it was time to cover it for real. I present The Dinosaur Scrapbook, and to get things rolling, here's the original cover art, missing from my copy and every other I ever encountered.

For the background, this is something I feel like I've had with me my whole life, though any clear memories of it are from a much narrower window. I suspect I read or at least saw it in libraries when I was a kid, possibly in school libraries, which I now find moderately horrifying. I definitely read it a lot in college, where I found it along with Peter Nicholls' Fantastic Films. The actual copyright is 1980, so it is certainly possible I encountered it much earlier.

For the book itself, it's nothing less than a survey of dinosaurs in popular culture, going all the way back to the Victorian era. It's the kind of thing a proper scholarly treatment would need a whole shelf to cover. The author, otherwise best known for the novelization of The Empire Strikes Back (I'll think about it) and the 1996 film Dinosaur Valley Girls, keeps things very casual, telling the tale with a huge number of pictures. Incidentally, I had to use a little care what I took pics of, because there are a significant number of "adult" images, starting right inside the cover. Here's a sample of the first page I cared to picture here.

For the movie side of this, a large part of the book is dedicated to dinosaur movies, though not as much as one might expect. 4 of its 13 chapters cover the full range of dinosaur movie tech: stop-motion; "gagged up" live reptiles and other practical effects; Japanese suit monsters; and animation. More dinos in audiovisual media are covered in chapters on Edgar Rice Burroughs and dinosaur-related TV shows. Naturally, the quite comprehensive overview covers a number of movies I've reviewed: Planet of Dinosaurs, The People That Time Forgot, Robot Monster, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth, Godzilla Vs the Smog Monster and even Allegro Non Troppo. Many/ most of theses were ones that I had already seen or heard of, but there were some that I learned of or at least got interested in because of this book, particularly Allegro Non Troppo, which I didn't even remember from previous reading before I bought my copy of the book. Then there are many more movies that are now notorious, like Reptilicus and At The Earth's Core, but others that remain inaccessible or wholly obscure, like Unknown Island and Monster On Campus. One I have personally investigated is a 1923 silent short called "Monsters Of The Past", featured in the book under the title of a separate compilation. The book mentions the footage in connection with a rumor that it was animated by Willis O'Brien, which Glut dismissed. In fact, the only identified party is Virginia May, shown in the film as a sculptor, who by my guess is most likely the one who did the animation. Here's a sample of pics from the movie sections.

I cropped this to cut out my arm. You do not want to see that...

Meanwhile, the book has a lot more on dino pop culture, including pulp magazines, comics, tourist attractions and toy. Here's one of the most impressive, a comic reportedly published by Jack Chick (covered here) .

Here's more comics...

And models! I don't know how, but I'm sure I had the Dimetrodon.

And Marx dinos! Also... bigmouths???

Then there's this, apparently from a comedy album. This... this is just unsettling.

So that finishes another meandering trip down memory lane under the belt. This time around, I really have hit on something that had a tremendous influence on me, even beyond my own memories of it. The book remains a testament to diligent scholarship, and a time capsule of how we heard of and learned about older media before Youtube, Amazon and the internet itself. If it comes to that, it's still a worthwhile read that could still tell you about a few things you didn't know. And to wrap this up, here's the silliest pic in the book, apparently a gagged-up lizard that got cut from a film.

That's all for now, more to come!