False Advertising

I saw this poster for the 1975 dinosaur flick The Land That Time Forgot over at the ever excellent Island of Terror blog, and borrowed/stole it for today's post. It fascinated me for a number of reasons, but chiefly because it is so misleading.  Sure, the actual movie has dinosaurs, albeit not as frightening or accurate looking as the ones in the illustration, not to mention a submarine, but it is those other underwater elements which puzzle me.  Let's start with the obvious - that submerged Tyrannosaur.  Whilst it is entirely possible that large bipedal carnivorous dinosaurs could swim, I think it unlikely that you'd ever find one apparently walking along the sea bed.  In the film itself, it is some kind of plesiosaur, which were fully aquatic, which attacks the sub.  But as I said, at least there are dinosaurs in the film, whereas I don't recall there being any giant octopuses, bathyspheres or divers in it.  Indeed, that diver appears to be wearing a fairly modern type of gear, of a kind which didn't see widespread usage until World War Two.  The film itself was set in World Ware One, making the diver somewhat anachronistic.  Not as anachronistic as that submarine, though.  In the actual movie, it is a bog standard U-Boat, but on that poster it looks more like the Seaview from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, complete with glass nose!

But most perplexing is what appears to be a laser beam armed giant manta ray, which is attacking the sub.  Quite where that came from I don't know.  There is nothing remotely resembling it in the film!  The key to all of this lies, I think, in the fact that this appears to be a US poster for the film, (it refers to AIP as the distributor, whereas, as I recall, British Lion distributed it in the UK).  Clearly, experience exploitation merchants AIP didn't think that the movie's ropey - yet endearing - special effects, including puppet dinosaurs, alone would be sufficient to sell it to US teenagers.  Hence the beefing up of the supposed threats faced by the protagonists.  I also suspect that the anachronistic diver and submarine were an attempt to disguise the World War One setting, which the distributors probably feared would put off their target teenage audience.  Interestingly, although the octopus and bathysphere didn't appear in this film, they do appear in a later film from the same producers: Warlords of Atlantis.  Released in 1978, it even starred Doug McClure again.  I wonder if the makers were inspired by this poster?  Anyway, for the the purposes of comparison, here is the slightly less misleading UK poster: