When Dinosaurs Ruled My Life

When I was a child, I loved dinosaurs.  I don't recall how I came across them originally, probably through a book, but they quickly became an obsession.  I mean, a real obsession that lasted through several years of my childhood.  The young me decided that it wasn't enough just to know the names of a few of them - I decided that I was going to be an expert on the subject.  Back then, though, dinosaurs simply weren't as prevalent in the popular consciousness as the are now - there were far fewer books about, some plastic kits imported from the States and, on occasion, they turned up in films.  There was far less known about them, even in scientific circles.  The prevailing view then was that they were incredibly stupid, cold blooded and sluggish creatures, a larger version of modern reptiles, that had to spend lots of time basking in the sun.  The larger ones were thought to have to spend most of their time in lakes, like hippos, in order to support their body weight.  All of which now, thanks to greater research and new fossil discoveries, is considered wrong.  Dinosaurs are now seen as dynamic creatures, probably warm blooded and very different from their modern day reptilian cousins.  Of course, the comparisons with modern day reptiles wasn't helped by the fact that many films used photographically enlarged lizards with fake horns and the like stuck on then to represents dinosaurs.  Obviously, to my budding youthful dinosaur expert, this was anathema.  I treated such films with disdain.  Almost as bad were those with men in bad dinosaur suits playing the monsters.  

The only films I thought worth watching were those with stop-motion animated dinosaurs.  Not only were they anatomically correct (according to the knowledge of the time) but also surprisingly dynamic, forever fighting each other or chasing cavemen around.  Now, being an 'expert' on the subject, I obviously knew that cavemen and dinosaurs didn't co-exist: they lived tens of millions of years apart.  Yet, for some reason, that didn't bother me as much as seeing dinosaurs misrepresented by lizards.  So, I happily suspended my disbelief and enjoyed the likes of One Million Years BC (1966) and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1969).   They have been historically incorrect, but they had great stop motion dinosaurs.  Then there were the 'Lost World' type films, like the original King Kong (1933), which featured a lot of dinosaurs on Skull Island, (although, for some reason, even the herbivorous ones seemed Hell-bent on killing the human cast), a film that the younger me loved when it was shown on TV during my childhood.  Another favourite film of this ilk was Valley of the Gwangi (1969), which mixed dinosaurs with cowboys in a hidden valley South of the border.  nowadays, of course, there are far more dinosaur movies about, with more accurate dinosaurs in them.  But the funny thing is that those CGI created dinosaurs we have today, despite their accuracy and realism, just don't do it for me like the stop motion ones did.  Perhaps they just look too real, taking some of the inherent magic away from them.  Or maybe it is because I know that they have no actual physical existence, unlike those stop motion model dinosaurs, which were physical objects, which I knew had been lovingly and painstakingly animated by the likes of Willis O'Brien, Ray Harryhausen or Jim Danforth.  They just don't make dinosaurs like they used to - I should know, I was an 'expert', after all!