By Todd Garbarini
The
Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass production team are best known to millions of
television audiences as Rankin & Bass for their unforgettable holiday-themed,
stop-motion animation outings such as Rudolph
the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964), Santa
Claus is Coming to Town (1970), Here
Comes Peter Cottontail (1971), and The
Year Without a Santa Claus (1974). Christmas
and Easter would not be the same without a viewing of these specials on either
television or home video. Though the
bulk of their work is comprised of television movies and specials, they also collaborated
on theatrically-released films like The
Daydreamer (1966), Mad Monster Party?
(1967), Wacky World of Mother Goose (1967),
and The Last Unicorn (1982). This prolific producing and directing team
assembled a crew of talented sculptors, writers, editors, photographers and
musicians to create some of the most memorable family entertainment.
Warner
Archive is continuing their extraordinary work in bringing more of the Rankin
& Bass catalog to their burn-on-demand library. Thus far they have released a double feature
of Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey
(1977) & The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (1985) and the long-desired,
beloved made-for-TV movie The Bermuda
Depths (1978). Just prior to the
latter, Rankin & Bass made The Last
Dinosaur (1977), a low-budget film that was originally intended for
theatrical release, but was shortened by eleven minutes to a 95-minute running
time and aired on ABC television instead on February 11, 1977, which is good
because the film has a TV-movie feel to it. Warner Archive has recently released the full, uncut 106-minute theatrical
cut on DVD-R. Written by William
Overgard, scored by Maury Laws, and directed by Tsugunobu Kotani (listed in the
credits as Tom Kotani) who all repeated their roles for The Bermuda Depths (also released theatrically in Europe), The Last Dinosaur is a fun movie for the
twelve year-old set and under, though I am sure that Rankin and Bass
completists will find much to enjoy here. Mason Thrust, Jr. (Richard Boone) is a cantankerous and misogynistic safarist
who meets the sole survivor of an expedition who witnessed the existence of a
Tyrannosaurus Rex. Intrigued, Thrust puts
together a team that includes the sole survivor, some experts, and, against his
wishes, photographer Francesca Banks (Joan Van Ark), just because she’s a woman. They travel to the jungle locale and have a
few close encounters with beasts that should have been dead millions of years
ago, one of which is the T-Rex who roars a little like Godzilla. Along the way, they run into some Neanderthal
dwellers, one of whom resembles Nova from Planet
of the Apes (1968) who runs off with Francesca’s purse. It’s a fairly straightforward tale involving
the usual Rankin & Bass special effects which, at times, look just like
that. The cheesiness is part of the
film’s charm, though it is slow-moving by today’s standards. The
nighttime scenes are all shot day-for-night, and the film begins and ends with
the Nancy Wilson tune “The Last Dinosaur.â€
Previous
Warner Archive titles featured non-descript DVD covers that were comprised of a
publicity shot from a particular film superimposed over a blue background. The company’s subsequent success has allowed
Warner Archive to invest in providing a film’s original artwork on the DVD-R
cover, and The Last Dinosaur boasts
the exciting painting that was originally intended for the film’s theatrical one-sheet;
this image also appeared on the French poster when the film was distributed
theatrically as Le Derniere Dinosaure.
Click here to order from Warner Archive