#8: We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story and The Fading Dinosaur Renaissance

The cultural phenomenon they called the Dinosaur Renaissance found many modes of expression for making ancient giant lizards cool again. The trouble lay in precisely -who- was deciding what made them cool to begin with; Steven Spielberg certainly contributed his fair share to the craze with Jurassic Park and The Land Before Time preceding it, though tapping the screenwriter of Moonstruck to adapt a twenty page picture storybook for a cinema feature was perhaps a touch hubristic. Four directors; an expensive voice cast; the baffling resurgence of Bing Crosby impressions in the early 90s; they were so caught up in thinking whether they COULD they didn’t stop to think about whether they SHOULD!

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#6: Genndy Tartakovsky’s PRIMAL and The Tragic Heart Of A Warrior

There’s nothing like a bit of violent release to get the creative juices flowing again, not to to mention the torrent of blood, guts and sorrowful tears brought forth by SOTSM patron saint Genndy Tartakovsky’s foray into a wild & fantastic prehistory. Besides ceaseless Conan allusions and running a body count on exploded ape men it gets us thinking about a few other cartoons whose violent reputations belie a heart of gold, the catharsis we sorely yearn for in our actual savage world. So actually it IS big and it IS clever, saying so much while barely needing intelligible language itself.

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#5: Cadillacs & Dinosaurs (& Environmentalism & The Narrow Purview of Dinosaur Fiction)

An ancient beast from podcasts past reawakens to a savage new age, but has this world evolved to match? Cadillacs & Dinosaurs is just as much pulpy fun as when we last looked at it a decade ago; less fun is the real ecological catastrophe that has only intensified since then (STILL without giant lizards) and the ever-tightening chokehold the Jurassic Park franchise seems to have on what can be done with dinosaurs in popular media. How can we learn from these past mistakes and avoid our cruel fate? Would the message of environmentalism be better received in the form of two-fisted pulp adventure? And what is a “quahoon” anyway? This show ain’t prehistoric! It’s classic~.

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