
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, June 11, 1993                   TAG: 9306110017
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

GIVE ME THE DINOSAURS OF OLD

Dinosaurs have been around for a long time -- movie dinosaurs, that is. The ones in the highly hyped "Jurassic Park" may be technically the best, but those old stop-motion beasties -- models painstakingly moved one frame at a time during filming -- had a charm of their own.

Willis O'Brien created the ones in the 1925 silent film, "The Lost World" (based on a story by Sherlock Holmes-creator Arthur Conan Doyle), and those in the 1933 "King Kong." Remakes of both movies paled by comparison.

My first as a child was "The Lost Continent," really a lost mountaintop that obligingly crumbled to volcanic destruction as our heroes escaped (a fate of many movie prehistoric oases to come). Next was "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" in which O'Brien admirer Ray Harryhausen used stop-motion to make a model of a frozen prehistoric creature unthawed by an A-bomb blast rampage through New York City.

After that, most of the dinosaurs became either enlarged desert lizards or men in rubber suits. In the 1966 re-make of 1940's "One Million B.C.," Rachel Welch added her own special effects to a supposedly prehistoric creature, this one amazingly well-coiffed, made-up and manicured.

Even computerized creatures could not improve on that.

by CNB