The Complete Cinematic History of Tyrannosaurus Rex (Part 1)

 

Dinosaurs in Film: Tyrannosaurus Rex

 

There’s a new dinosaur movie coming out this year. You may have heard of it. Not that I need an excuse, but I’m using it as an excuse to talk more about two of my favourite things: dinosaurs and movies.

I don’t know if this will become a new ongoing series or if this will be a one-off dinosaur-movie-special, but for today I’m showcasing the most famous dinosaur of all-time, because how could I not? You say the name and have an instant picture in your mind. Kids, teens, and adults alike most often specify this one as their favourite. Every dinosaur is named using binomial nomenclature, which is a fancy scientific way of saying they are assigned two names that are combinations of Latin and Greek words. The first name is the genus and the second is the species. Only Tyrannosaurus rex is known to the public by both. If I said “hey, which one do you like more, Stegosaurus stenops or Triceratops horridus?” most people would just look at me funny (not that just using the names they’re more commonly called would stop them from looking at this weirdo who randomly asked them which dinosaur they liked more).

T. rex, the “Tyrant Lizard King” has been a superstar ever since it was first discovered in the early 1900s, and with the evolution of motion pictures it only made sense to bring one of the largest meat-eating dinosaurs to the big screen. The cinematic history of T. rex is almost as fascinating as the scientific history of the animal. This is by no means an official complete history of every movie T. rex has been in, but I did my best to research every major example and verify the history of this prehistoric Hollywood icon.

 

Black-and-white era (1920’s-1940’s)

T. rex made its big-screen debut in The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1918), brought to life with the only means of special effects possible at that time: stop motion animation. The film ran a total of forty minutes, but most of the footage has since been lost, so the restored version is less than half as long. This was the first time T. rex was shown battling a Triceratops, which was one of the largest plant eaters known to live at the same time in the late Cretaceous period. This idea of T. rex hunting and eating Triceratops would become a crucial facet in pop culture. The next film to use T. rex was Along the Moonbeam Trail (1920), but it’s not as well remembered as Slumber Mountain, which was animated by effects pioneer Willis O’Brien.

Slumber Mountain was considered a prototype for The Lost World (1925): the first adaptation of the novel of the same name by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (and far from the last), though T. rex doesn’t actually appear in the novel. The adventurers encounter many prehistoric creatures, but Willis O’Brien wanted a big, threatening meat-eater, and the novel only featured Allosaurus—a big meat-eater in its own right, not one to bat an eye at—but T. rex was bigger, so it was included too. What’s funny, though, is the T. rex in Lost World has three fingers, which was true of Allosaurus, but not of T. rex. It’s pretty common knowledge today that T. rex had two fingers and tiny little arms, but back in the mid-20’s the general populous weren’t as familiar with dinosaurs yet, so the filmmakers didn’t care how many fingers were on their carnivorous dinos. These were just movies, anyway! What did it matter? Well, inaccurate portrayals of dinosaurs on the big screen has been a point of contention for the scientific community since the beginning, and still is to this day.

Number of fingers aside, The Lost World T. rex doesn’t have a huge part, and is mainly remembered from a scene where he attacks an Agathaumus (basically just a spikier Triceratops) and kills it, then immediately kills a pterodactyl right after. That T. rex is a jerk, and so is this next one, which was also created by Willis O’Brien and remains one of the most iconic in all of cinema. Like the Lost World Rex before it, this one has three fingers, as well as a raspy roar and fighting moves that would put a pro wrestler to shame. The biggest meat-eater on Skull Island only appears in one scene in the original King Kong (1933). This scene is considered the centerpiece of the film: Rex tries to eat Fay Wray, she screams, and Kong comes to her rescue. The giant ape and giant dinosaur duke it out, but Kong gets the upper hand and finishes the battle by breaking the T. rex’s jaws. It’s brutal, intense, and would inspire countless filmmakers to come. Willis O’Brien had tried to bring T. rex to life again once before this in his unfinished and unreleased film Creation, so he used some of the models from that production in King Kong.   

At the beginning of the 1940’s T. rex made two appearances…sort of. One of them was through animation, and the other was with a special effects technique utterly inferior (and infuriating) compared to stop motion. Walt Disney himself is allegedly responsible for Rexy having three fingers again in the segment of Fantasia (1940) called Rite of Spring, because he thought it looked better. Its depiction is comparable to previous ones: the plant-eating dinosaurs flee in terror from the big, upright, brutish beast rampaging across the land. It inaccurately takes down a Stegosaurus (a dino which died out millions of years before tyrannosaurs evolved) with its massive sharp teeth, and is actually quite frightening for an early animated example. One thing worth noting is Fantasia was presented in colour, and T. rex is shown here to have evil red eyes and greyish-black scales, adding to its nightmarish look.

The other cinematic T. rex from this era isn’t officially a T. rex, but the film One Million B.C. (1940) suggests a large meat-eating dinosaur by placing a real-life monitor lizard in a miniature environment with plastic horns glued to it. There are a few other reptiles used, too, like an alligator with a sail taped to its back, and these animals were very clearly abused. This kind of thing would never happen today, but back then animals were often mistreated in Hollywood. It’s unacceptable—and never mind the fact that it’s lazy and entirely unconvincing, especially compared to the stop motion effects that came before it. This lamentable technique would be used again in such films as King Dinosaur (1955), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), and another adaptation of The Lost World (1960). 

We're just getting started with the Tyrannosaurus cinematic history. Check out part two soon! 

 

PART TWO:

https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2022/02/part-two-of-complete-cinematic-history.html

PART THREE:

https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2022/02/part-three-of-complete-cinematic.html

Reviews:

The Lost World (1925): https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-lost-world-1925-review.html

King Kong (1933): https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2016/07/king-kong-1933-favourite-films-series.html