About the monsters, and the effects

Oh boy!

A topic I know quite a bit about!

Let’s talk dinosaurs!

Hammer Films had one of their biggest successes with ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. and in the old show business tradition of...”If they liked it once, they’ll LOVE it twice!!!” decided to do the whole thing all over again with THE CAVE GIRL, which was a treatment written by science fiction writer J.G. Ballard, The treatment had more “Flintstones” about it than it did “stone age”...it was a high key comedy with a cave village not unlike the one in Planet of the Apes.

Several drafts later (probably due to Hammer’s paranoia) the script was written to reflect an almost slavish copycat structure to One Million Years B.C. and called WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH. The final shooting script was written by the film's director, Val Guest.

An antediluvian Romeo & Juliet.

Very few if any effects technicians in England could handle the type of animation effects that Harryhausen did for One Million Years (Ray Harryhausen himself was busy doing beginning work on THE VALLEY OF GWANGI) So they turned to America, and everybody they contacted said that...”Jim Danforth is the guy you want...he can do what Ray Harryhausen can do...”

So they got Jim and he agreed to do the picture.

Jim was a little disappointed that the powers that be had already designed the dinosaurs for the film but he WAS able to convince the producers to use a CHASMOSAURUS instead of the Styracosaurus they were intending to use...(They had a preliminary poster and the Styracosaur was on that) The Mother Dinosaur is NOT in any way supposed to be a Rhedosaurus (I know, I know, I thought it was a send-up when I first saw the film in the theater back in 1970).

Originally Jim suggested, for the mother dino, that they use a SCELIDOSAURUS and he showed them a painting by paleo-artist Neave Parker. The Hammer team wanted a more “komodo dragon” type of thing and what you see is the amalgamation of the two ideas.

So there ya go.

Jim designed all of the monsters and effects in the film but in order to facilitate them in a reasonable amount of time, he had, as his assistant, Roger Dicken, who did most (not all) of the dinosaur sculpting. Jim created the Mother Dino himself, though, from start to finish.

There was one very big problem with the special effects...

Producer, Aida Young.

Associate producer on One Million Years B.C., Ms. Young was bounced UP to line producer on When Dinosaurs, and she did not have the experience to handle this particular type of filming.

For one example, there was a scene in the movie where the Mother Dinosaur traps the hero, Tara (Robin Hawdon) behind a boulder....Young decided that a big fake boulder would be made and placed on a blue screen stage in London.

When on location, Jim Danforth discovered a big boulder that would be perfect and asked to shoot the live action there, that day, in the Canary Islands. Aida Young said no, because they had already begun making the fake rock in London.

“But I can set up the camera, split the screen. and drop the dinosaur in later!” begged Danforth, but nuthin’ doin’.

So the shot was a blue screen traveling matte set up with a fake boulder and a whole lot of optical work....much more time consuming and expensive than if Jim had shot it on location.

Another problem arose when some of the still standing sets from One Million Years were cannibalized and slightly redressed for use in When Dinosaurs. When Jim returned to London to begin effects work, he was shocked to find that the sets were too small to be used with dinosaurs dropped into them. To show a full dino image in those small sets, the creatures would have to have the image size on-screen of a Shetland Pony.

So...

For the wide shots, Jim painted glass art that expanded the sets. This took more time than was originally planned for, naturally, so they were now getting behind schedule.

A matte artist from Les Bowie’s effects company was brought in to do the three matte paintings originally designed for the film, but his work was far inferior to Danforth’s who took over the matte art too.

And he kept painting....and painting...

Three matte paintings became twenty seven matte paintings.

They were falling so far behind that Jim got permission to hire an animation assistant, David Allen, to come in and animate most of the Chasmosaurus sequence as well as several cuts of the dino baby and a cut or two of the giant crabs.

The pterosaur sequence almost didn’t make it to the final print. They were so far behind in production that the producers decided to start cutting things....there was a sequence involving giant ants and even though stop motion models were made, nothing was ever shot save for a couple of shots of stunt men with large plastic ants on their backs (one wound up in a Monty Python courtroom sketch)

Also edited was a giant carnivorous plant which was replaced by a six foot tall rubber jack-in-the-pulpit.

There was also scenes planned of battling sea monsters picked up by waterspouts and deposited on the shore during the tidal wave sequence and pterodactyls smashing into sand dunes and huts during the windy scenes at the end....things that would have been fun to see, but things that would be prohibitive to do because of time and money.

The pterosaur scenes (live action) were shot but since it was the “perfunctory” pterodactyl scene it was shelved until the producers discovered that they were woefully short on screen time and Jim was put to work on animating it.

Jim’s favorite creature in the movie was the baby dinosaur, and he talked about how that while most of these movies have the dinosaurs bellowing and fighting dirty, that it is always enjoyable to animate something that is pure character and non threatening.
“Of course it’s not even close to being a reality..” Jim said of the baby dino. “...and if people get disgusted and get up and walk out of the theater, well then we have failed.”

A funny story about the baby dino....Roger Dicken made the big plaster egg which it hatches out of....and he sealed the breakaway seams so well that when Jim started to animate the hatching scene, he couldn’t find the cracks!

Here are just three of the many reasons Jim Danforth was nominated for special effects.

1> Jim found out that when his animation camera got in really close, the texture of the rear screen behind the puppet dinosaur was visible. To eliminate this, he rigged a vibration device that canceled out the texture but kept the projected image in sharp focus.

2>For the scene where the curious Mother Dinosaur sees Sanna (Vickie Vetri) asleep in the egg, Jim suspended a miniature piece of egg shell in front of the projected image of the full scale egg so that the little piece looked like a piece of the big one. This gave the dinosaur something to bite on and jerk away...timed to the rotation of the real egg in the back projection. (ok, to be fair, Harryhausen did this first, in THE THREE WORLDS OF GULLIVER where the baby crocodile bites down on the “shield”.)

3> The pterosaur’s (Rhamphoryncus) wings are blurred....this gives a more smooth and realistic flapping effect. He blurred them by tapping the wings and taking the single frame of time exposure while the tips of the wings were wobbling slightly back and forth.

And I could go on...

Hell, I think I already have.

Akita!
http://www.woodywelch.com

Well, it has to be understood that I'm really a fan of the original Godzilla -- the rampaging, pitiless monster that was a symbol of the atomic bomb. Over the years, as he became a kid-friendly superhero of sorts, to me he lost all meaning...though in more recent years they've backtracked a bit toward something closer to the original concept.

Also, I liked it when G was in black and white, which was only twice. It really suited his mood better than color.

With this as background, the Godzilla movies I own constitute my favorites, a couple of which I notice you don't have, and which I can certainly recommend....

Gojira (1954). Still the best Godzilla movie, no other comes close in my opinion. The original Japanese is by far the best, though the Americanized version, Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956), isn't so bad.

Gojira no gyakushu/Godzilla Raids Again (1955). The first sequel. Actually only so-so, and obviously hurriedly made, but not bad and his only other b&w appearance. Definitely worth seeing, and I think, owning. The initial US version was idiotically called Gigantis, the Fire Monster (1959) because the genius producer thought not using the name Godzilla would make this more successful [!]. File under Huh?! The US title has long since been changed to GRA, which is closer to the Japanese title (which means Godzilla's Counterattack), but that aside it's otherwise the same film as Gigantis, right down to the fact that they still call the monster "Gigantis" throughout the movie even though the title now says "Godzilla"!

Mosura tai Gojira/Mothra Vs. Godzilla (1964). Terrific movie, probably the best after the original. Well-made and takes itself seriously. Very highly recommended. (The original US title was, in yet another mysteriously idiotic decision, Godzilla Vs. The Thing. The Thing? G could stomp James Arness. So stupid, since it served no prupose and everybody knew who Mothra was. Jerks.) The US version is sometimes called Godzilla Vs. Mothra. Guess it depends on who you think started it.

San daikaiju: Chikyu saidai no kessen/Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1965). Not strictly a Godzilla movie, but a great monster-mash uniting G, Mothra and Rodan to combat the titular alien creature. This was one of the last films that more or less took its subject seriously before G became too light, so it's worth it for that reason alone.

Kingu Kongu tai Gojira/King Kong Vs. Godzilla (1962). Amazing to think this was G's first screen appearance since ...Raids Again seven years earlier -- they even take care to dig him out of the same iceberg he'd been buried in at the end of the previous film. If you can get it, watch only the Japanese version. This isn't a great film but it is a key early one, but the dubbed version isn't as good, shifting the thrust of the movie from the original.

I think that's actually all the Godzilla movies I have. It's not that I don't like any of the others -- Destroy All Monsters, Son of Godzilla, Godzilla 2000 and a couple of others are good, and Godzilla is usually enjoyable under any circumstances (even in his poorer movies). But my hopeless prejudices keep me from adding them to the collection as I have the early ones. Just a fuddy-duddy zilla, I fear.

However, on a non-Godzilla level, allow me to recommend Sora no daikaiju Radon/Rodan, Mosura/Mothra, Bijo to ekitainingen/The H-Man, Uchu daisenso/Battle in Outer Space, Chikyu boeigun/The Mysterians, and especially Yosei Gorasu/Gorath, which to me was a real revelation, a terrific, fast-paced space invasion movie (with one token unnecessary monster), which is really well done and well-written for these things, an excellent and exciting movie, one of Toho's best, and somewhat inexplicably overlooked.

All these must be seen in their Japanese originals for best effect, though the Americanized Rodan is, I feel, in many ways better than the original -- recut and slightly altered to make it much more sensible and logical than the Japanese -- the only time I remember thinking a dubbed, recut version of any film may be better than an original.

Oh -- if Toho ever gets its courage back and releases its great 1955 abominable snowman movie, Jujin yuki otoko -- which will never happen -- try and see it. Apparently it's been sealed in the studio's vaults since the 70s because the Ainu of Hokkaido object to it as slandering them. I've never seen the original but it's supposed to be great. You can get some idea of it via the 1958 Americanized version called Half Human, which cut in scenes of John Carradine and Morris Ankrum discussing the snowman, interspersed with scenes from the original, not dubbed but with a voice-over narration by Carradine. I'd love to see the Japanese as it's supposed to be very good, and I'd really like to find out what it is the Ainu find so offensive.