Dinosaur!

Dinosaur! (1985)

An Amazing Look at the Prehistoric Giants

An entertaining documentary look at dinosaurs with Emmy Award-winning special effects, feature film clips and stills, commentary by leading paleontologists of the time, and an on camera as well as voice-over narrative by Christopher Reeve. Shot on location in Los Angeles and New York at the American Museum of Natural History

Date of release
1985-11-05
TMDB
7.5 / 10 (15)
Runtime
1h 0m
Genres
TV Movie, Documentary
Director
Robert Guenette

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Budget: $785K

Dinosaur! is a 1985 American television documentary film about dinosaurs. It was first broadcast in the United States on November 5, 1985, on CBS. Directed by Robert Guenette and written by Steven Paul Mark, Dinosaur! was hosted by American actor Christopher Reeve, who some years before had played the leading role in Superman.

Production

Dinosaur! was primarily shot in New York City and Los Angeles, and in some fossiliferous locations of the United States. Reeve was a "Dino fan" and demonstrated his enthusiasm by flying his own airplane to the American Museum of Natural History in New York and requesting himself reshoots of several scenes.

Special effects were mainly made in Phil Tippett's garage. Tippett received assistance from Industrial Light & Magic stop-motion animators Randy Dutra (who made the dinosaur molds and skins) and Tom St. Amand (who made the inner articulated metallic skeletons of the dinosaurs).

Some excerpts from old films are utilized in Dinosaur! in order to explain how popular dinosaurs were in cinema. One of those excerpts was a scene from King Kong (1933), in which a character pronounces the words "prehistoric beast", which is the title chosen by Tippett for his experimental short.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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