The "Long Neck" Dinosaurs: A Complete Cinematic History (Part 1)

Dinosaurs in Film: The Long Neck

 

When it comes to meat-eating dinosaurs, there’s a typical image that people can easily picture in their minds: jaws lined with sharp teeth, clawed hands and feet, and usually two-legged. With plant-eating dinosaurs, though, there is a greater variety, so these often get designated a nickname based on their most obvious feature. One group is known in the paleontological community as the sauropods (meaning lizard foot), but a common nickname is the “long neck” dinosaurs. These creatures put giraffes to shame, with necks that stretched so high into the air some could have poked their heads through the open window of the fourth floor on a building without even standing on their tiptoes. Actually, that’s a bad analogy; sauropods didn’t really have toes, their feet were more like elephants, but unlike elephants they had long tails to balance their weight. The long neck dinosaurs have always made for the largest and most impressive museum displays. They quickly captured the public’s eye, and made their debut in Hollywood.

Because I’m covering more than one species of dinosaur this time, I’m going to designate the eras as ages, based on the most current species at the time, which means we begin with the one that has caused more confusion between the scientific community and general populous than any other dinosaur.

 

The Age of Brontosaurus (1910’s-1950’s)

 

When I was a little kid—we’re talking five-year-old-dinosaur-obsessed-Clayton here—I heard the name Brontosaurus and knew exactly what it meant: a long neck sauropod with a small, rounded head (the name itself means “Thunder Lizard” because it would have sounded like thunder when they walked). When I got a bit older, I discovered through documentaries and books that Brontosaurus was, in fact, not a real dinosaur. I felt like I had learned a secret no other kid knew. It seemed early paleontologists had made a mistake: they put a Camarasaurus skull on the body of Apatosaurus (they later discovered Apatosaurus actually had a longer skull like Diplodocus, and Camarasaurus had a different body type), so the species was rightfully relabeled Apatosaurus and this mythical Brontosaurus had its name and likeness retired. In my youth and teen years, if I ever saw the name Brontosaurus in an outdated textbook or film, I turned my nose up, smirked, snorted, and guffawed at their inaccuracy. I’m going to come back to this Brontosaurus issue later because it’s a whole thing, but for now, let’s get into the early Hollywood representations of what was back then accepted as a valid species of long neck.  

The first dinosaur to appear in a motion picture was a Brontosaurus. Before T. rex or Triceratops or Stegosaurus, the Thunder Lizard had the honour of being the true first of its kind, the original cinematic dinosaur, in Gertie the Dinosaur (1914): a silent, black-and-white piece of animation that plays for twelve minutes. The animation—and, by extension, Gertie’s design—is simple but charming. Gertie’s antics include throwing an elephant in a lake and uprooting an entire stump then eating it, roots and all. Animator Winsor McCay would pretend to interact with Gertie when it was played in theaters as part of his act, and while it wasn’t the first short animated film of its kind, it is one of the earliest examples, and a unique debut for the first Hollywood dino. Brontosaurus wouldn’t return in animated form until Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur (1939), which was a Merrie Melodies theatrical short about a caveman hunting down Daffy. The caveman’s hunting dog (dinosaur) is Fido, a long neck with a particularly twisty neck, reminiscent of another animated pet we’ll get to soon. A less cartoony cartoon version was featured in Fantasia (1940), in the segment The Rite of Spring. A whole herd of them would raise their long, serpentine necks to spot the oncoming Tyrannosaurus long before the other herbivores, but they were as doomed to reach extinction by the end as all the other species.

As for its live-action debut, The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1918) showed a Bronto foraging in the jungle, but it isn’t a very memorable role. The title card indicates the creature “must have been at least one hundred feet long” but fossil evidence indicated it would’ve been closer to seventy feet when full-grown, although may have been able to grow larger. Ghost of Slumber Mountain was like a test film for Willis O’Brien, who made Brontosaurus into a dynamic and even vicious creature for its next role.

The Lost World (1925) was the movie that really made the long neck a star. This creature is bigger than any other on the plateau, and gives a wicked snarl when it sees a hungry Allosaurus sneaking up to attack. The Bronto puts up a good fight, too, biting the carnivore on its throat, and even though the creature falls off a cliff, it survives the fall, and is incapacitated in a mud pit. The explorers take it back with them to London to prove they really did find a prehistoric world in the heart of the Amazon, but to no one’s surprise, the Brontosaurus escapes and rampages through London before breaking Tower Bridge and plunging into the Thames River. It’s an impressive effects display for 1925, with the full-size Bronto created using stop motion and portions of the London streets recreated in miniature. There are multiple stand-out moments, like when the Bronto sweeps its long tail across the street, knocking several people over, and when it destroys part of a large building. Who would have guessed a creature that seemed to clearly be understood as a lumbering herbivore right from the first fossils being described would also turn out to be one of the first main dinosaur antagonists in a movie?

Willis O’Brien wasn’t done with making Brontosaurus a brutal beast. The influence of The Lost World is very evident in the story of King Kong (1933), with a mysterious isolated place inhabited by prehistoric creatures, a team of explorers bringing back one of the creatures to civilization (this time a giant ape instead of a dino), and the displaced creature going on a rampage. The stop motion effects, though, are even better; O’Brien had refined and improved his techniques, which made the Brontosaurus that emerged from the swamp on Skull Island even scarier than the one that attacked London. It feels like a classic horror movie moment the first time it rears its head out of the water amid the fog and gloom. Seconds later, the beast flips over the raft the explorers are crossing the swamp with, throws several men around like rag dolls, and then chases the rest of them out of the swamp! One guy has the not-so-bright idea to climb a tree to escape. The Brontosaurus easily reaches up into the high branches and snatches him in its jaws, and the man’s screams make the conclusion to this scene as hilarious as it is horrific.

In previous dinosaur cinematic histories, we’ve established Hollywood producers really didn’t care that much about scientific accuracy when it came to early dinos in movies. I can understand how someone might forget which big meat-eater had two fingers and which one had three, T. rex or Allosaurus, but a Brontosaurus that eats people? It’s pure movie monster fiction. O’Brien took what he started in Lost World making the Bronto out to be more of a villain than it really was and pushed it even further. This man-eater sunk to a watery grave in the sequel, Son of Kong (1933), and so disappeared the most bloodthirsty long neck that would ever star in a film. By the time the next Bronto appeared in a movie (Unknown Island (1948)) it had been made clear to viewers that this massive creature most often lived in swamps or lakes eating marsh plants, because its enormous weight was more easily supported in the water. That was just a theory, and not a bad one for the time. After all, how could something so big move around on land for very long? Well, it seems life, uh, found a way, because paleontologists would later discover they were more than capable of traversing the Mesozoic landscape.

Though its early depictions would later be seen as inaccurate and a bit lamentable, Brontosaurus was a movie star and nothing could change that. It appeared again in Lost Continent (1951), but this stop motion model lacked the expression and detail of the earlier Willis O’Brien models. The last entry in this age of Brontosaurus was Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955), which took a different approach than previous films. The long neck here wasn’t a monster, it was shown as if it were a real animal, peacefully eating from a tree, watching the humans go by in their boat, then taking a dip in the river. Brontosaurus didn’t quite come back around full circle by the end of this age (since the first time we saw it, it was a literal cartoon character) but it did go back to being a peaceful creature, instead of maintaining that monstrous persona upheld by O’Brien.

In the next part, we’ll look at how the long neck dinosaurs diversified as Hollywood moved out of the black-and-white era, out soon!