I know, I know, strictly speaking, Godzilla is not a dinosaur. Don’t give me any guff. All I’m looking for is an hour’s worth of “fearfully great lizards” (from the Greek), and I don’t care how I get them.
This week on “Picture Perfect,” the focus will be on four films that convey the disastrous results of bringing dinosaurs into the world of men.
“One Million Years B.C.” (1966) features special effects by the legendary Ray Harryhausen and an equally legendary fur bikini, worn by Raquel Welch. Not to be confused with the more recent “10,000 B.C.,” this was actually a Hammer Studios remake of a 1940 Hollywood film, “One Million B.C.” – a fact as little known as the well-kept historical secret that man and dinosaurs did indeed co-exist. With its stop-motion dinosaurs, fur bikinis, and Peter Brady-style volcanoes, this cheese ball classic is a guilty pleasure indeed. The music was by Mario Nascimbene, who wrote one of my favorite scores for Kirk Douglas, “The Vikings.”
Harryhausen also provided the special effects for “The Valley of Gwangi” (1969). Gwangi, a cross between an Allosaurus and a Tyrannosaurus rex, is discovered by cowboys in a lost valley in Mexico. Lending an air of realism, there is also a clan of Gypsies. Of course, the first thing you want to do when you discover a 14-foot predator is to monetize it by putting it on display for the public employing questionable safety standards. Obviously, none of these cowboys have seen “King Kong.” Gwangi is promptly conscripted into a wild west show, with predictable results.
The music is by Jerome Moross, composer of one of the all-time classic western scores, that for “The Big Country,” and there are musical moments in this film that almost seem as if they’re left over from the earlier classic. Which is fine by me.
Purists, no doubt, will object to my inclusion of Godzilla on a dinosaur program. Godzilla is not, strictly speaking, a dinosaur, but rather a monster unleashed by a nuclear blast. Still, according to the Smithsonian, he has the head and lower body of a Tyrannosaurus, a triple row of dorsal plates like those of a Stegosaurus, the neck and forearms of an Iguanodon, and the tail and skin texture of a crocodile.* No Ray Harryhausen stop-motion effects here. Just some guy in a suit. (Actor and stunt performer Haruo Nakajima played Godzilla 12 consecutive times, beginning with the original film.)
We’ll hear the “Godzilla” theme (1954), composed by Akira Ifukube. And we’ll preface that with a little conversation between Godzilla and Orga, from the 23rd Godzilla movie, “Godzilla 2000: Millennium.”
As he did with the Indiana Jones films, director Steven Spielberg turned to B-movie source material for his visual inspiration for “Jurassic Park” (1993), based on the novel by Michael Crichton. The herky-jerky dinosaur effects of yore are replaced by state-of-the-art computer-generated imagery, in the story of a safari park on a remote island gone wrong. Sure, we’ve come a long way from Raquel Welch getting carried off by a Pteranodon, but admit it, we all still want to see people fighting dinosaurs. Instead of fudging history, now we can feel superior by fudging science. “Jurassic Park” plays on the most recent scientific thinking, with DNA extracted from mosquitoes trapped in amber, cloning, and the theory that dinosaurs were not lizards, after all, but rather birds. (Yeah, and Pluto isn’t a planet!) The music is by long-time Spielberg-collaborator, John Williams.
Dinosaurs walk the earth, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!
Remember, KWAX is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour difference for the Trenton-Princeton area. Here are the respective air-times of my recorded shows (with East Coast conversions in parentheses):
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday on KWAX at 5:00 PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EDT)
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday on KWAX at 4:00 PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EDT)
Stream them here!
*If we’re going to drag science into the thing, here’s an amusing article I discovered in Smithsonian Magazine, in which paleontologists speculate what dinosaurs may have been a part of Godzilla’s DNA. Before his radioactive mutation that is.
