Movies

A look at dinosaurs in movie hstory, as a new “Jurassic World” film opens.

Twenty-five years ago, “Jurassic Park” imagined a world where dinosaurs once more roam the Earth, thanks to advances in cloning. “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” is the latest chapter of that saga in which messing with Mother Nature continues to reap unexpected consequences, but it is also the latest in a long line of movies that date back to the silent era in which the dinosaur so often appears to be a pal, a pet or a predator. That the prehistoric creatures and man have only ever existed side by side through the dinosaur’s descendants, birds, scarcely matters.

The beasts first caught the public’s imagination during the Victoria era when the first dinosaur statues appeared at London’s Crystal Palace Park. That fascination has found some of its greatest expression on film. Among the hundreds of titles that exist to date, here are but a few that have captured our attention:

Gertie, the animation pioneer

Cartoonist Winsor McCay, best known for his strip Little Nemo, also was a vaudevillian and an animator. He combined his latter pursuits with 1914’s “Gertie the Dinosaur,” among the first films to feature one of the creatures. This early animated effort was also one of the first to mimic natural movement. In his act, McCay interacted with the screen as he put Gertie through her paces, treating her as if she is a large hound. She is hardly a fearsome

“Jurassic World: Fallen

Kingdom” (PG-13) opens Friday, June 22, at Bay Area theaters.

beast: When he scolds her, she cries. He later bookended the animation with a live-action story starring himself so that the short could be widely seen in theaters. “Gertie” was an influence on later animators, and McCay’s view of her as simply a bigger-thanaverage pet would echo decades later with that Stone Age family “The Flintstones” and their snorkasaurus Dino.

‘The Lost World’

Sherlock Holmes’ creator Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel that began life as an illustrated serial in Strand Magazine spins the tale of an expedition to South America to confirm a professor’s discovery of prehistoric creatures living in the Amazon basin. The saga, which includes not just dinosaurs, but also a race of ape men at war with a human tribe, has influenced scores of movies, including “Jurassic Park.” The story itself has been adapted for the big screen four times, including a 1960 version by Irwin Allen with such a low special-effects budget that live reptiles costumed with horns played the movie’s creatures. But it is the first, 1925 silent version that made the biggest impact with its dazzling stop-motion animated effects by Willis O’Brien, who would later go to work on “King Kong” (1933).

Lovely bones

In skeletal form, dinosaurs can be a source of laughs or an aid to romance. In Howard Hawks’ 1938 screwball comedy classic “Bringing Up Baby,” paleontologist Cary Grant lacks only a single bone to complete his museum’s brontosaurus. But when it arrives, it is stolen by madcap heiress Katharine Hepburn’s dog, the adventure to retrieve it (and Hepburn’s pet leop-

ard, Baby) pushing the couple ever closer together. For Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, directors of 1949’s “On the Town,” the brontosaurus in New York’s American Museum of Natural History is the basis for a gag, the backdrop for the instant attraction between sailor Jules Munshin and anthropologist Ann Miller, and a setting that unleashes Miller’s furious tapdancing during her “Prehistoric Man” number.

The real star of ‘One Million Years B.C.’

A Hammer Films remake of a 1940 Hal Roach movie, “One Million B.C.,” “One Million Years B.C.” (1966) imagines a prehistoric world in which humans exist side by side with the fearsome dinosaurs. Costumed in a fur bikini, Raquel Welch burnished her emerging image as a Hollywood sex symbol with her role as a woman of the Shell people. But the real star of the film is not Welch or any of her co-stars. It is Ray Harryhausen’s eye-popping special effects work, bringing allosauruses and other paleolithic beasts to life that shines the brightest.

A franchise roars to life

“Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” follows some tyrannosaurus-rexsize footprints when it opens on multiplex screens this week. It is the fifth movie in the series (a sixth is planned for a 2021 release) that began when Michael Crichton adapted his own 1990 novel “Jurassic Park” with screenwriter David Koepp and Steven Spielberg directing. Science has become a parlor trick when advances in cloning lead to the creation of a Costa Rican theme park with real living velociraptors, T. rexes, and other prehistoric animals. Experts descend on the place to determine its safety after a worker has a fatal encounter with one of the living exhibits. But even as mathematician Jeff Goldblum, whose specialty is chaos theory, warns of impending disaster, it is already happening with the animals on a rampage. Audiences responded to the family-friendly adventure with its exciting, Oscar-winning visual effects. “Jurassic Park” was the No. 1 box-office draw for 1993 and the No. 2 dinosaur movie of all time, until it was unseated by its own fourth sequel, “Jurassic World” (2015).

Pam Grady is a San Francisco freelance writer.

“Fallen Kingdom” follows some tyrannosaurusrex-size footprints when it opens on multiplex screens this week.

Universal Pictures Dinosaurs roar back to life in “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.”

Kino Lorber 1966 Special effects ace Ray Harryhausen made a giant tortoise battle cavemen in “One Million Years B.C.”

Wpclipart.com 1914 Winsor McCay with his trained Dino in a frame from “Gertie the Dinosaur” (1914).

Warner Home Video 1938 Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant atop a dinosaur in “Bringing Up Baby."

Wikimedia Commons 1925 Bessie Love comes under attack in 1925’s “The Lost World,” based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel.