all right so let's talk a little bit more about dinosaurs in fiction um so we've covered cinematic dinosaurs pretty good detail scientifically attempts at making scientifically accurate dinosaurs in movie okay going all the way up to Jurassic Park and there's a reason I end Jurassic Park because there's not really much to say after Jurassic Park especially not the sequels of Jurassic Park which have sort of moved further and further away from trying to be scientifically accurate um there's an attempt at adding in more Surfin but often with uh either very minimal feathers added or no feathers at all and um in many cases they're they're simply animals that likely did have feathers in a lot of the cases for the theropods all right so they're not really um uh there's not really significant Innovations there to talk about um and we've talked about Henry going back we' talk about har we talked about uh the original Lost World we talked about birtie Etc however there are a few more works really that we should talk about and really those are more fictionalized piics of dinosaurs which is why I bring up you know the Jurassic Park sequels and that those are you know um maybe more exaggerated appearances of dinosaurs um so you know I think part of this kind of goes to you know what is a dinosaur in popular opinion and um obviously means some sort of large rep monster and IA Reptoid and all embracing that not really even a reptile just like a thing with scales and a general reptile like appearance but that is what is that's the sufficient explanation of what a of what is a dinosaur right um you know and we can see that going through Godzilla and Flintstones and Barney where there's combinations of melon and uh um uh reptile characteristics that make up these things they call dinosaurs you know like uh what is it um uh there was uh hoppy the the Flintstone pest that was a combination of kangaroo and reptile features I don't know there was no dinosaur really like them but that was a dinosaur GL Stones we'll go back tostones later um and you know obviously part of that has to do with movies too right and Godzilla was inspired by a not very scientifically accurate you know um uh aquatic reptile creature um that came out of the ocean and attacked London and then we have Godzilla and then we've got all the various iterations of things around Godzilla you know everything what is clearly an attempted sort of a parasaur and and and a giant moth but then all sorts of weird spiky reptile things right and then there were you know various movies that had you know the the live iguana and the live um monitor lizard Etc as standards for dinosaurs um one animal that I am reminded of while I bring all this up is that for example in the recent um Adam Driver film 65 which is I guess about um I mean I I saw it but the best I can say is it's about people who are crash land in a film that uh crash land on a planet that apparently is Earth 65 billion years ago um uh so maybe they're aliens or they're prehuman humans you know like a battle star Galactic kind of situation I don't know I don't know but the the main antagonist of the film turns out uh other than Adam driver's characters uh deep and nearly suicidal depression is a giant quadrupedal Predator that's like a T-Rex but on four legs I'm not certain what that would be in the Cretaceous it's like it's basically like a I mean I mean there's no quadrupedal predatory dinosaur so the best I can say is it's like a maybe like a giant crocodilo form with a T-Rex like head I don't know either way it dies I'm sorry I just s sorry but anyway um you know that kind of goes okay so so scientific accuracy is often not the point of including dinosaurs in any form of media right um but why do we include dinosaurs in different forms of media what is the what's the point there um I think that you know one one element is that dinosaurs are an archetype of the old yeah dated the thing that it needs to be replaced you know they represent Age dinosaurs in a popular sense that is of course and here's an example there's a T-Rex on the side of the van depicted as a boiler it's like a boiler T-Rex anyway you know it means replace your water here because it's it's old like a dinosaur it's going extinct right and so this kind of goes back to really old ideas about uh competition and the idea that dinosaurs went extinct because they were outdated they were outmoded by by previous um by other types of animals that were around at the time by the things that succeeded them modern birds and and mammals um okay so that's one kind of thing another thing that I think is kind of interesting is that you know sometimes dinosaurs come up because they're just kind of a they're a Nexus of where science and fantasy kind of collide right like so like dragons in a popular sense there's no rules about what a dragon really is um you know that that you can you can throw the Monstrous manual right out the window it doesn't really mean anything in terms of what a dragon is I mean the word Dragon means that it is uh it comes from um ancient Greek and it actually means a giant snake a serpent um and that makes a lot of sense if you know much about what Greeks and ancient Romans thought about snakes and how certain nature Spirits were often portrayed as snakes and you know like so the idea of these draun as kind of like um representations of of of natural power and wisdom and um okay great but that's very very different from what a modern dragon is and there's really no right they they're they got you know whatever however many legs Wings Etc you want to give them um you know uh but I don't really think um and you know is there are rules about what is a dragon I don't really think there are there are kind of rules for what is a dinosaur though and so if you bring in dinosaurs that are recognizable as dinosaurs if you put in a little more effort than you know the um Than The Flintstones in terms of what you define as a dra as a as a dinosaur then they become a little bit more than than than dragons you're kind of more constraining yourself to a set of rules and then that kind of like unites science at least an understanding of the ancient Earth and and an understanding of what animals once existed and and fantasy in a sense and that I think is really intriguing to think about about how the the dinosaurs unite those two things and that kind of goes to something that um I think it's part of but it's not the whole whole essence of it which is the dinosaurs are just like this primordial Wellspring of of Wonder for Humanity they they have inspired humans since the the dawn of Dinosaurs being recognized as being these these these ancient animals by humans you know I mean I will certainly argue pretty consistently that you know I think a lot of the claims that mythological animals are inspired by fossils is probably somewhat exaggerated because often the fossils of a lot of prehistoric animals are not recognizable as even being the remains of prehistoric animals um uh uh uh without expert knowledge and you know that wasn't really developed until the last few centuries I think a little bit of it you know particularly when when skulls which are gener pretty recognizable come out come out those those I think have been inspiration for certain tales and I also think that you know we can look at what happened in England and North America and and Continental Europe as the IDE idea the concept of dinosaurs was first recognized and they were being Unearthed and they were being reassembled and mounted and they really captured the um the Curiosity and the amazement of society when they did that um and we can see that going right back to the crystal Garden so I started this whole story with you know about dinosaurs in the media with the crystal Gardens because that's you know where we see that there is is this enormous somewhat unexplainable Fascination we have with dinosaurs and other extinct animals um and you know I think one way to to actually measure this you know this was this was pointed out to me many decades ago and it's is still true I looked it up just now is that dinosaurs just do way better at the box office than dragons do okay like it's not hard to look at the Box off like and and it's consistent all right it's not just the two examples in give but these just happen to be at the moment the highest grossing films I can find that not only feature a dragon or a dinosaur but are really centered around the dragon or the dinosaur right so the highest grossing dinosaur film is Jurassic world which earned $653 million at the box office the highest grossing Dragon film that I can find once I throw out you know Harry Potter films where dragons you know are occasional obstacles or or friends as case may be or if I throw out um shk films where Dragon is a second secondary character um in a relationship with donkey um then we have The Hobbit Desolation of small at $73 million all right so like and this is this is something that people have talked about since the 90s is that dragons don't just don't capture the Public's eye in the same way that dinosaurs do there is something fundamentally more fascinating more interesting than dinosaur than than about dinosaurs than dragons and I don't know I don't actually know exactly what that is but it is about dinosaurs you know I like I said I think it's part of that that they unite the fantastic and the and the science in a way that few other things really do in our society but I know but all right let's talk about some examples about fictionalized dinosaurs and so to you know finish off our list of films obviously we cannot talk about dinosaurs in the media without mentioning the 1988 um Stephen Spielberg film Land Before Time which was beautifully animated by Don Bluth yes Don bluth's um studio and you know a very classic style of Animation um and they were mostly recognizable as as the particular dinosaur they were it was kind of unclear if you know I'm I'm I'm still actually not entirely certain whether spike is an En kyur or a stegosaur I believe there's a Canon answer and I do not remember what it is at the moment um um I'm pretty sure I've got it wrong at least on two different occasions um but you know was about these juvenilization has this funny thing where you know they'll animate environments that just don't make sense the more you stare at them especially as an adult but as a kid they totally made sense but like there's there's times where it's like are they entering like a bowl or something like there's a valley that's it doesn't matter anyway but the dinosaurs what so what did the dinosaurs represent in L for time why is it a film about dinosaurs um you know I mean I think there's clearly a sense of um world decaying and getting worse in the film and maybe that makes maybe it doesn't seem it maybe it that would wouldn't seem to require dinosaurs maybe in this day and age but maybe back in 1988 you needed to invoke dinosaurs in that sort of sense of like you know dinosaurs and to connect this in another sense to animation you know it very much in a lot of elements seem to be calling back to the appearance of dinosaurs in uh the right of spring in Fantasia which was back in the 19 uh late 1940s think 19 1948 maybe 1952 it's somewhere around there I'm gonna put it right on this slide I'm not gonna look it up just at this moment but and so um you know this there's a wasteland there's there's these dying dinosaurs they're trying to get to the valley in Land Before Time so there's this there's a um I think there's something there about dinosaurs is sort of a symbol of of not outmoded but but creatures that live in a world that is moving beyond moving past them and that they need to still are struggling to survive and then know that goes to another dinosaur film uh Disney's dinosaur where um the main characters in Iguanodon I think which was being raised by um some very primat like uh early mammals very lemur like and um they were leading a mixed herb of dinosaur and surviv mixed herd of dinosaur and survivors to uh a place where they would be safe from some carachas Source um and so like that's okay all right so it's the same sort of thing again right like there's kind of like the dinosaurs live in this sort of dangerous world and they're just trying to get to like they're trying to find a place to survive and so it's dinosaurs is a representation of people that live in a world of danger that that that the audience will know going in is a is a is is is experiencing an apocalypse um another dinosaur film that we cannot possibly leave out is 1995's we're back a dinosaur story where a bunch of um dinosaurs returned to Central Park I think maybe was it time travel or aliens um I don't remember but anyway um we had a little bit of diversity of dinosaurs here um very characteristic I thought of of cartoon Dinosaurs the time being a child of the 90s myself um and the final you know dinosaur film i' like to point out is Pixar is the good dinosaur which again is the question is is why is it about dinosaurs you know why is it about a young sorod who gets lost and befriends a cave boy like a cave like an early human who who um he um doesn't trust at first and then learns to trust and they they end up sort of surviving and getting back home together um uh and at the end then he lets the the small human go off with his own kind um you know I don't know you know there was there's some interesting ideas in there you know there's a there's there's Raptors um uh that um if I recall there's there's Raptors or there's T-Rexes that are like ranching their own like cows or something and there's um uh a a really nice bit where there's a A catops in that has all these spikes on its on its head maybe like a ciosa and it's just covered in and also like branches and stuff that make it look like that then have like birds hanging off of it some really interesting motifs in that film but Again by dinosaurs and I have to think that like in this case it's um to invert the idea of what if dinosaurs had not had not been replaced by the million successors what would the world look like but then why would people still evolve in that world than mamals too I don't know I know all right maybe in some ways I kind of felt like maybe Soo much like a Ice Age where you try to like replace the Ice Age characters with dinosaurus I don't know think about that one um all right so let's move on to TVs and because they are often so connected toy lines you know and so going back you know we've got the flinton stones they start off in 1960 they go all the way to 1966 um and largely a lot of the episodes of The Flintstones were kind of like old episodes of the of the of The Simpsons you know they they un joke packed but you know kind of like just the TRS of a modern Suburban family and the you know guy working a 95 job and the woman's cooking at home and and there's all these appliances replaced by dinosaurs um but I mean like let's just take an example you know like the dinosaurs were very poorly defined I mean what is Dino he apparently a snorkosaurus okay um I don't know what is he uh I Dino I guess is like a like a prorad or something he's got a pretty long neck all right so that's all that as much as I can say about that um uh there was the there was the TV show Land of the Lost which was actually like a like a sister show to um Lost in Space um uh so like a family falls into like a valley under the Earth Earth that's full dinosaurs and reptilian people that are like dinosaur descended it was you know very um uh pulpy very confusing there was a '90s Revival that was just as confusing um yeah you know and of course the focus on you know the the very dinosaurs like a T-rex or whatever um the U release of land uh Before Time in 1988 actually caused several dinosaur lines to spark up um in TV shows one was Denver the d The Last Dinosaur and Denver was a green corythosaurus that used a skateboard I I can't even obviously recognize that Denver's caurus if I if it was not canon that Denver was a corythosaurus I don't think I can tell you that um the other one a little more interesting is Dino writers which had somewhat more scientifically accurate dinosaurs including a fairly accurate danicus as a as a as a dianosaur you know a raptor um uh the dino writers uh were um two races of alien Interstellar Stellar Travelers who find this world and obtaining um its uh uh Prehistoric Beasts although they have you know things like heran synapses mixed in with um even modern like sabertooth tigers and you know Tyrannosaurus Rex and stuff like that so it was kind of like you know take a few hundred million years and treat it as as all contemporaneous yeah it's a comic and you know your time travel and you see all the animals from the entire you know wing of your local Natural History Museum all in one place um and they had they such a toy yeah all right um the uh next stop on our dinosaur TV show train is Jim Henson's dinosaurs which was not a really great sitcom but it was it was a sitcom yeah it was a sitcom with a whole lot of puppets and Prosthetics yeah um most known I guess today still for baby dinosaurs and not the mama and banging the dad dinosaur on the head with a frying pan yeah um the dad Dinosaur by the way is Earl Sinclair named after of course Sinclair Gas which was well known for its dinosaur chief yeah now all right Dinosaur Train uh is next on our list uh yeah we go ways I mean there there were dinosaur shows between Dino riters and JY Henson's dinosaurs which was by the way that was 1991 going all the way to Dinosaur training starts in 2009 so that's a 20 20 year time span lots of dinosaur shows in there I'm not gonna talk about um I'm leaving documentaries by the way to the to the end of this little thing but um uh uh there were a lot of shows that were made about dinosaurs they were many of them shortlived um dinosaur train we kept going for a long time it still is going actually I believe um dinosaur train is a PBS show that introduces children to dinosaurs um by way of the of the pterodactyl family which um has a uh child therapod that they've adopted and so it's actually kind of a that sweet sort of metaphor for Blended families um none of the dinosaurs are very like you know there's not there's there's some uh there's a quite time of course given to the different features of dinosaurs but there isn't much attention given to their appearance actually matching what the scientific expectation would be which for what is effectively an infotainment show kind of surprising right like conductor is a trodon but he's pretty big and tron's actually you know not that's not that big really probably yeah so I know um certainly child child terrasaur would probably been bigger bigger than than a trulon by the time they can fly so you know and of course you know ter walk on Force unlike um unlike how they do dinosaur train but I'm not I'm not complaining about the scientific actors Dinosaur Train I'm just saying you know so there's dinosaurs and of course this is a way of you know trying to bring children been um you know learning about and understanding of dinosaurs through you know children love learning facts about dinosaurs and we can also hit other aspects of uh Early Child Development with this sort of of a structure um but you know there's there's some particular things that are sort of very characteristic of Dinosaur Train one is the very sort of simplified expression of dinosaurs which is makes it a bit of an outlier compared to many other particularly more more information related shows about dinosaurs there were there were dinosaur shows um you know in that period between dinosaur training and um uh Jim Henson's dinosaurs I'm not certain how much of note they were but some of them were shortlived like for example um a little ways in further into the future we have teranova that that was around um in 2011 and it was uh I believe Steven Spielberg produced it was about like Time Travelers that had jumped back in time to start a human settlement in misso because the future was no longer livable and it was drama and there was like somewhat realistic looking dinosaurs you know Jurassic Park level looking dinosaurs and it was like a one hour drum show on Fox and it was quickly canceled which is just very typical was very typical of fox D for for many years um yeah um the last TV show I think that's kind of not is uh primeval which survived a little longer it went from 2007 to 2011 um and that that was a a I think um I think some of the creative staff I don't think it was a spin-off do cre but I think there was some Connection in terms of you know the the Staffing and the production Crews and Etc um and they they focused on time traveling D time traveling creatures that included dinosaurs in some cases and and stopping the misuse of time traveling creatures for nefarious purposes um so you know alongside all of this you can got books and obviously two books we've already discussed really are well Lost World ire CRI do which then inspired the movie and then Michael Kon Jurassic Park which then inspired the movie so um but there's a little bit more going on books in dinosaurs one one is you know what's going on in the comic book world and then there you've got zen zen zenzo which was uh a comic book series started in 1986 later it was developed into a children's cartoon following success of Jurassic Park um the children's cartoon was renamed as C and dinosaurs so zenos soak was kind of like a a mix of like postapocalyptic themes um centered on like a a guy who knew how to still use technology and um but the world have been taken over by like dinosaurs jungles um in this far-flung post-apocalyptic future but he still had a work in Cadillac yeah Cadillac and dinosaurs yeah um some of the episodes are on YouTube they're kind of Tri anyway um I think a really important development on the book side was in 1992 same year as Dress Park came out the artist of James gar who came out with Dinotopia and you know personally for me that was that was I think that was that was big that was I think that because James uh granny had a very um uh he put a lot of effort in trying to be as um up to date as possible with his representations of dinosaurs um and it just it really worked into the space of you know uniting science and fantasy right about about putting dinosaurs there at the middle of those two things so this this whole fantastic world has sort of you know Alternative forms of of Technology from what we generally expect um and beautiful art just beautiful if you get a chance you know you should check out some of the the copy some of the the you should check out the original Dinotopia maybe some of the sequel books they're just beautifulart um and so I think kind of added to an overall popular cultural Revival of dinosaurs in the early 90s along with Jurassic Park um so sort of more kind of energized by Jurassic Park I think we have to go with Raptor Red which was written by Bob Baker the famous paleontologist um and it was about Utah raptor which was a large um genus of deras stur that had been discovered shortly after Jurassic Park and sort of pointed at as being kind of the Jurassic Park Raptors but at that at that size scale the Utah raptor at at the size scale that Utah raptor would have been at um uh and so it's a whole novel following Utah raptor based upon what we knew at the time um I uh uh uh the the main character is of course the Raptor Red and there's no dialogue because they are not talking Raptors it's more kind of a know I think it much like um Call of the Wild by Jack London that it's kind of you know treating an animal as kind of main character um uh there's um on the fantasy side there's been um books about set in the world of dinosaur Knights which are it's actually kind of like a complicated like political machinations going on within the world which people ride dinosaurs as part of um the Marshall advances um I had not read that series I cannot tell you much other than that about it um I think well apparently it's got sort of a science fiction twist to it um that then you don't know about until later the other thing is is that the another series of books really important and this I have read and I I very strongly recommend is Ricardo delgado's age of reptiles which is a graphic novel series um that was started I think in the I been actually down the year here but I think it was the year early 2000s and um uh the uh most recent I think came out in in 2014 which was ancient Egyptian and that volum I highly highly recom it was a they're all really good stories they're all very at the time scientifically accurate representations of dinosaurs um and for example the most recent ancient Egyptian is about a Spinosaurus which is living a very um Aquatic Life which is our current um U understanding of of of how spinosaur lived um and I really wonderful art wonderful sense of um T between the different CS all right so where we moving on here cover books and comic books and Stu video games okay now obvious viously the first dinosaur that one we might think of in video games would of course be Yoshi Yoshi's not even recognizable as what is that oh that's a dinosaur okay we're in the sort of Bary Flinstones world again right um I think uh in terms of more recognizable dinosaurs you don't actually have much going on until I mean you've got some things like um uh there were there were games there was things like Sim life and Sim Earth um that were from the makers of Sim City that were kind of they had sort of things like dinosaurs in them there was also the um was also you know various um gangs focused on um kind of like a arcade progression of evolution that were you know for the Super Nintendo and stuff that from Japanese Studios um but I really don't think you really get much recognizable dinosaur video games until Jurassic Park comes out and then you saw a huge swarm of dinosaur video games because a lot of them were licensed Jurassic Park things in fact there was a series of games that were similar but not quite identical across different consoles um uh you know and you know you're play as um Alan Grant shooting a whole lot of dinosaurs to make I don't to make I don't um the um I think it kind of maybe takes more of a step forward particularly with the release of the Dino Crisis games in 1999 um particularly chol in arcades where they're often a shoot them up kind of game they're shooting dinosaurs with guns um they're kind of like it's kind of like a Resident Evil kind of thing but instead of zombies it's dinosaurs and that's a little more interesting I think apparently it's been a successful arcade game for for more than for several decades now so clearly clearly pretty interesting right um uh you've got um Horizon zero Dawn in 2017 and you're probably like that's not a dinosaur game no but there's big robots in that like dinosaurs right and that's kind of like sort of be like a future world only the robots have taken over and the robots have evolved into different organisms I'm not really certain what's going on I don't I not play R on however interesting okay so like you know obviously dinosaurs kind of gives you that primeval kind of prehistoric brutal World kind of thing to it right but than the robots Okay twist it's twist um 2015 Arc survival evolved a very popular Survival game where you play humans on a dinosaur infested Island um I don't think the dinosaurs are particularly realistic some of them are I think really Humes to the Jurassic Park style dinosaurs and others are not sort of a mix now if really we want to talk about video games that try to be scientifically accurate you really cannot go any further along that than sorion which is trying to be an explicit simulation of the hell's Creek CL it wants to only depend things that were in that area at that point in time that we know we there all right um just to depict that that en Cretaceous ecosystem as accurately as possible um if we move out of other games there's obviously been a lot of board games just like there's been many computer games that try to sort of mimic the act of running your own sore theme park um but really you know I think and this is again it's because it's because of the art I really got tell you guys about Exelon what is Exelon Exelon is actually a setting from Magic the Gathering um and it just I think it's just so amazing because it's a setting filled with um dinosaurs there's Pirates and more people too but there's like a an um an Aztec inspired civilization and they all use dinosaurs in sort of a um a domesticated sense much like the kind of like Dinotopia kind of setting so I you know I find that just you know I I think there's one thing that's true about me and that I could stare at really well painted scenes of people and dinosaurs doing um relatively uh mundane tests of like building buildings and stuff for a long time um so finally all right so we've gone through all the fictionalized stuff there's two Milestones I just want to talk about in terms of the really really really pointed scientific accurate documentaries of dinosaurs there's been two really significant things because they really impacted I think what people have done in terms of dinosaur documentaries um one is Walking with Dinosaurs which came out in 000 um and that really impacted what people try to do in terms of prehistoric um animal documentaries for many years to come from for many years after that and more recently prehistoric Planet which is come out from Apple TV and that was um a really well done documentary directed by Richard atono and directed by David atono Richard's rer but David ateno and um uh uh really really tried like Walking with Dinosaurs to have as much scientific accuracy the the representations of dinosaurs as showing as possible particularly a really incredible scene that I've seen um uh that i' I've been shown which is a T-Rex fighting two cuts of cultist for for dinosaur that's just that's heck of the scene right there okay so I want you to take all this information with you you know um it's not just about how is it that we try to represent dinosaurs to the public expressing them through um big models or mounted dinosaurs or through Museum art or through cartoons or through liveaction movies or through TV cartoons or through books you know the the thing you should be asking yourself is why are we expressing dinosaurs in this what's the what we want to talk about dinosaurs is being actual organisms or is there sort of more the Thematic sense you know um Jurassic Park as far as the book goes isn't really about dinosaurs there's a lot of information about dinosaurs in there but really the book version of jurass Park it's really in my honest opinion it's it's Michael kon's attempt at rewriting an island of Dr Moro it's uh writing a book about um a man about men who humans who believe they can control life and the fallacy the the humorous of that attempt you know it's not really about dinosaurs it's it's about the inability of man to control nature you know so you should ask yourself this when you look at some representation of dinosaurs you know what really is the reason why they're using dinosaurs in this particular case and if it's not about if it's not about scientific representation what is the reason why dinosaurs and you know in dress part I think that that argument could be made it's it's about um using dinosaurs because dinosaurs are this um group we don't know very well um because they're they're extinct right that's the reason we don't know them very well we know them as best as we can and so there's these uncertainties so if you were to figure out a way of bringing them back to life like in Jurassic Park you might find they aren't as you expected because um you know there's there's things you weren't going to know because the fal of record can't tell you everything you know that's the the dilophosaurus in it's venom spitting is a completely un-based is is has no basis whatsoever in reality but it's a statement about the depth of the lack of knowledge we have about dinosaurs and that if we could just magically wish a dinosaur alive and and be able to interact with it we might find it's very different from what we thought because there are great UNC certainties and trying to understand which of and that's very different from why time use dinosaurs or if why The Flintstones use dinosaurs you know what was the what was the reason for these dinosaurs are they metaphors of of Extinction of being outmoded of being replaced are they are they a representation of how things have in actually changed is The Flinstones a statement about how things have been actually changed from today going back to the Stone Age that that things are just exactly the same as they are today you know I think this is all um these I think are all reasonable things to ponder particularly as you work on own your project time source