The Last Dinosaur (1977)

Interesting facts

The Last Dinosaur is a 1977 tokusatsu film co-directed by Alexander Grasshoff and Tsugunobu Kotani. A Japanese-American co-production between Tsuburaya Productions and Rankin/Bass Productions, it was filmed at Tsuburaya Studios in Tokyo and on location in the Japanese Alps.

Production

The film was intended for a US theatrical release, but failed to find a distributor and ended up as a television film. Screenwriter William Overgard pitched to ABC a TV movie about a hunter who travels back in time to kill a dinosaur. ABC rejected the idea in favor of a rock musical remake of King Kong. When that fell though, they came back to Overgard to develop his idea.

While the film featured mostly an English-speaking cast, a Japanese dub was created for the television release in Japan. The Japanese theatrical release, as well as the Japanese laserdisc release, used the English voice cast with Japanese subtitles.

Unlike other bigger-budgeted movies that have used state-of-the-art effects (i.e., stop motion, puppets, etc.) for the dinosaurs, this movie uses the "man in a suit" method, much like the Godzilla movies of the 1960s and 1970s (the sound department even borrowed Godzilla's trademark roar and occasionally mixed it into the T. rex's roar).

The Tyrannosaurus suit was created by Tsuburaya Production, portrayed by Toru Kawai, who played Godzilla in Zone Fighter and Terror of Mechagodzilla. The T. rex suit was later used for Ururu of the tokusatsu/anime combination TV series Dinosaur War Izenborg.

The front end of the Triceratops suit was portrayed by Tatsumi Nikamoto, who acted opposite Kawai as Zone Fighter and Titanosaurus in the two works, respectively.

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