Dinosaur! — Wikipedia

Dinosaur! is an American television documentary on dinosaurs and broadcast for the first time in the United States November 5, 1985 ^{[ first ]} on the CBS television channel. It should not be confused with Dinosaurs! , written in the plural, which is another American television documentary broadcast two years later, in 1987, nor with another American documentary entitled exactly the same ( Dinosaur! ), but presented by Walter Cronkite and broadcast in 1991 ^{[ 2 ]} .

Directed by Robert Guenette and written by Steven Paul Mark Dinosaur! had been presented by the American actor Christopher Reeve, made famous a few years earlier for his title role in the film Superman . Jointly with its narration, the documentary alternates scenes with special effects (reproducing dinosaurs and their time) with interventions of paleontologists, the best known when making the documentary. Some of these paleontologists were Jack Horner and Robert Bakker (Americans) or Phil Currie and Dale Russell (Canadians). The animated sequences of Dinosaur! show hypothetical scenes of coupling “duck beake dinosaurs” (in English, ducked-billed dinosaurs , term referring to the dinosaurs of the Hadrosauridae family), the care that these animals had towards their young, the hunting techniques of Deinonychus or of Tyrannosaurus , the eating behavior of Struthiomimus etc For the rest, the documentary retraces the knowledge of the dinosaurs available in the first half of the 1980s as much as the influence of dinosaurs in the arts or their sociological impact on human societies.

At the beginning of Dinosaur! First there was an experimental sequence of special effects based on the animation technique image by image. This ten -minute short film, entitled Prehistoric Beast and directed by Phil Tippett in 1984 ^{[ 3 ]} , told how a Tyrannosaurus (carnivorous dinosaur) gave a hunt for a Monoclonius (a herbivore). This sequence was projected only during animation festivals but convinced Robert Guenette and Steven Paul Mark to make a documentary for television. They thus asked Tippett to make other sequences which included other species of dinosaurs, such as the Hadrosauridae, Deinonychus , Struthiomimus , Brontosaurus (Sauropod dinosaur which, in the time of this documentary, was considered to be synonymous with Apatosaurus ) and also the images of an asteroid which represented to be that of the theory according to which the great extinctions of the Cretaceous resulted from the impact of a celestial body with the earth. By adding the images already shot to Prehistoric Beast Everything was mounted in a single documentary film and Dinosaur! was born in 1985. Tippett had already set up an animation technique for the taunar The counterattack empire (1981) and the images he made for Prehistoric Beast And Dinosaur! served him as an experimentation laboratory for the dinosaurs he was later to animate image by image in the film Jurassic Park (1993).

• Dinosaur! received in 1986 the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Visual Effects : ” Price Emmy to the best visual effects of an early evening show ”(in the television world prime time is the “higher level of audience level”, often corresponding to the start of the evening).

Filming, distribution and marketing in VHS format [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

• This documentary was shot in New York and Los Angeles, but also on different fossiliferous deposits of the United States.
• Special effects of Prehistoric Beast and of Dinosaur! were made in the garage of Phil Tippett ^{[ 4 ]} . Tippett received assistance from Ilm Randy Dutra volume animators (which developed the mussels and skins of dinosaurs) and Tom St. Amand (which made the internal skeletons articulated with dinosaurs) ^{[ 5 ]} .
• Some film extracts were included in the documentary to show the attention that cinema has always focused on dinosaurs. One of these films was King Kong (1933) and in the extract chosen one of the characters pronounces the words ” prehistoric beast », Title of the short film which served as a basis for Dinosaur! ^{[ 6 ]}
• Christopher Reeve showed a particular enthusiasm during his participation in the shooting: to attend this one he moved with his own private plane and being filmed he himself asked that certain sequences were turned several times.
• Dinosaur! was first broadcast on the American television chain CBS November 5, 1985 . In the 1990s he was also broadcast by Disney Channel, at the time when this television channel was still a paid shaken.
• Dinosaur! came out in VHS cassette format in the United States the May 5, 1993 , by the distributor Lionsgate Entertainment.

• Audiovisual resources :