THIS summer's monster hit, Jurassic Park, is not the only film in Hollywood history to have captured the attention of the world thanks to our obsession with dinosaurs. These reptiles have been a major meal ticket for Hollywood for more than 90 years, starting with silent animated short subjects like Gertie the Dinosaur to straight-to-video features made this year like Prehysteria.
One of the earliest monster hits was King Kong (1933, Turner Home Entertainment, 105 minutes). This original feature was so far ahead of its time it was released four times between 1933 and 1952, and on its fourth and most successful release, was named the feature of the year by Time magazine.
Robert Armstrong plays Carl Denham, a wildlife film-maker who heads an expedition to the uncharted west of Sumatra with scream queen Fay Wray. Here they run across the mighty gorilla King Kong, and the rest is film history.
Although the star of the film is unquestionably Kong, what made King Kong ''the stuff of which movies are made'' was largely the special effects by stop-motion animation pioneer Pat O'Brien.
Films like One Million B.C. (1939, Media Home Entertainment, 80 minutes) took a different approach to the supply of dinosaurian talents. In this abysmal production by veteran comedy producer Hal Roach senior, vintage he-man Victor Mature starred oppositethe ample Carole Landis, while most of the prehistoric menace was supplied by lizards filmed on miniature sets.
While a bogus ''ancient tongue'' was used to pass off as stone-age communication, elephants with fur coverings and wigs were passed off as woolly mammoths.
Despite Ray Harryhausen's immaculate animation, dinosaurs did not get a better representation in Hammer Films' 1966 remake, this time titled One Million Years B.C. (1966, Nostalgia Family Video, 100 minutes). Instead, his brilliant animation was relegated to the back seat thanks to Raquel Welch and a line-up of false eye-lashed, fur-bikini-clad cavegirls.
