Dinosaurs: Fun, Fact and Fantasy review
Hello, and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind for the new year!
Also, please excuse the low quality screengrabs. The video ain't even HD.
After a montage of dinosaur related B-rolls (and featuring the OG King Kong from 1933), we begin with a stop motion short on life in Mesozoic England, most notably a stooped-over Megalosaurus on the prowl and eventually felling an Iguanodon, because really, what else is it gonna eat? Cetiosaurus or anything it actually lived with? Nevertheless, its a fairly enjoyable start. The designs of all the fauna in the sequence is very reminiscent of the work of early 1900's palaeoartist Neve Parker. Just compare his Megalosaurus and Iguanodon and tell me the crew didn't take influence from his style, meaning it's probably the only major work in palaeo-media to be based on his work. Although I do find the whole thing a bit unnerving, thanks to the growling sounds of it and the bright red colour of it making it downright demonic.
The narrator then starts talking about how the world the dinosaurs lived in was very different, and explain the timescale of prehistoric Earth, done with a fun, creative sequence where the periods as they were thought to be back then are on a piano as a figure dances on it, changing from species to species as it goes further back.
His attempt to hype up how fearsome and terrible dinosaurs were inadvertedly gets the attention of a crocodile puppet when he draws attention to their "Terrible faces". The crocodile, named Dil, takes offense to it. The narrator demands an answer to why Dil's here. He says that the mesozoic is where he lives, and while not an actual dinosaur, he and other crocodiles are relatives and they can remember their origins quite well.
Dil then sings an Elton John-esque ditty which tells about the origins of dinosaurs from the thecodontians and how they diverged from crocodilians. If you're wondering what a thecodontian is, well that's emblematic of how old the movie is, but the song is still a bop for what it is, helped by the decent Ornithosuchus museum model that crops up in many a book from the period.
After the song, Dil is on the shores of a body of water, where his conversation with the narrator is interrupted by a parade of cutout dinosaurs seeming to move on rails, two of each at a time representing the biggest one known at the time, hence why Brachiosaurus and Thecodontosaurus are the biggest and smallest sauropods, and T. rex and Compsognathus are the bigget and smallest theropods.
This brings us to Dinosaur Dozens, which rat off various dinosaurs of each kind. In order of appearance, first come the Plodding Dinosaurs (Sauropods), Bird-Footed Dinosaurs (Ornithopods and Pachycephalosaurs), Killer dinosaurs (Theropods), Last Dinosaurs (Ceratopsians), and Armoured Dinosaurs (Thyreophorans). All of them are the same, so I won't go one by one instead just review them at once. Basically, Dil sings a short song, then the narrator lists of various dinosaur in each group. That's it and not much else to it, and the designs are too nondescript to comment on, though they at least have some form of patterning to some extent or another. Mind you, there are a few surprises, like seeing Pachyrhinosaurus when it was otherwise on no one's radar in 1982.
Also, I saw many of the same illustrations in a book when I was young, a kind of spotter's guide. Let me know if you too have read let alone know that book too.
The Plodding Dinosaurs segment sees Dil express the sauropods as the favourite of him, as they're peaceful and slow, and through yet another song, imagines what it would be like to be one with its long heck. Its a gentle, soft song.
After the song, Dil ends up in a Sussex quarry. Given the subject, this is going to be about the Mantells and how they discovered one of the first dinosaurs, the iconic Iguanodon through its teeth. A costume drama-style segment occurs, which tells the conventional, simplified account of it, and flashes back to the famous Mary Anning uncovering an ichthyosaur. In the middle of it while the question of how the tooth got into stone was raised, the narrator explains how fossils are formed as mud builds up around bones, using a DIY experiment with a chicken bone and layers of plaster to demonstrate.
However, the narrator explains that Gideon and the rest of England's scientists didn't know what they were, and though another of Dil's songs we are shown the confusion people had, as mounted skeleton at Oxford are shown and people shrugging in confusion at skeletons. Afterwards, we get the Dinosaur Dozens on Bird-Footed dinosaurs.
Afterwards, Dil discusses how dinosaur discoveries would grow and grow throughout the centuries and around the world, from the Bernissart coal mine discovery of a whole lot of Iguanodon, to the boom of discoveries in North America with the Bone Wars between Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh, and even one town named Dinosaur. However, its also mentioned those under them had to fight of native americans... referring to them as red indians. Ouch.
After that's done, Dil and the narrator have a convo about everything from how dinosaurs all stood with hips straight down, egg finds, and how frightening and huge T. rex was, with the scene from 1925's Lost World being used to demonstrate, but they say that the film's depiction of theropods as fast and lithe creatures got it wrong and instead they were slow scavengers. Um, WHAT!? They even show the four-legged reptile from When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth that's clearly not a T. rex and yet call it so. It ends with some comments on how supposed small dinosaur brains were, but the theropods had big brains compared to their own body weight (and I emphasise that last points), mostly for helping in hunting. This brings us to the Killer Dinosaurs Dinosaur Dozen, or theropods. Dil is quite afraid of them, seeing how they were carnivores and thus automatically scary, because kids' logic. Immediately after, the narrator finishes up explaining how fossils are formed, and we then transition into stratigraphy, noting the first fossils to be formed are found lower then later ones. Dil gets in an elevator and goes though each period, and a slide show of illustrations of dinosaurs while saying their names in increasingly silly ways.
After passing through the Tertiary and back to our time, we eventually reach a segment on why dinosaurs went extinct, but not before a Dinosaur Dozen on ceratopsians, which are said to be the last dinosaurs to evolve. Dil sings about theories about their extinction at the time, such as extreme temperatures, new species eating their eggs, and earthquakes. Dil even suggests that aliens abducted them or the Great Flood happened and there wasn't room on the Ark, theories only taken seriously by nutjobs and christians, respectively. It bounces between models, crude illustrations by kids, and B-Roll from movies, like a horrifying wildfire from Land that Time Forgot that seems very out of place. The music meanwhile bounces between bouncy new wave and solemn piano, making for a jarring song impossible to take all that serious. As of the 21st century, the idea of a foreign body impact (itself brought up in the song) is now most widely accepted due to the bevy of evidence for so, but this was made just two years after Luis and Walter Alvarez proposed that theory and hadn't quite caught on.
After that, Dil brings up the creatures that are related to dinosaurs. Since this is the 1980's, reptiles like crocodiles, lizards and snakes (as usual treated separately instead of as the same group), and turtles are treated as so, while birds, now understood as literally being dinosaurs, are treated as possibly being descendants of dinosaurs, though its still nice they bring it up, even showing a live cockatoo for the segment. The discussion of the other flying reptiles, pterosaurs, leads to yet another and final song about how pterosaurs, marine reptiles, and crocs aren't dinosaurs. Always good when that happens in my book.
Now that everything's just about wrapped up after the final Dinosaur Dozen on Armoured or Thyreophoran dinosaurs, we get... a quiz with several puppet dinosaurs and a welsh red dragon on what we all learned through the film. Fun to watch, but yawn, I don't, so moving on.
D:FF&F ends with a montage at Natural History Museum that will surely give nostalgia and potential palaeo-activities for then then-young viewers.
So even though its 40 years old, how does Fun Fact & Fantasy fare?
The story and information is both broad and basic, much like a typical encyclopaedia for kids at the time, mostly focusing half on biology and the other on history, each subject of them flowing well into one another. Most of the information is fairly basic and hasn't been told nowhere else, which is a minus in my book, even if it is for young kids still learning the basics.
The the voice acting is pretty decent and charming, with both the narrator and Dil having british accents pleasant to hear and listen to as they talk and converse, a bit friendly yet sometimes rough. The comedy of the documentary (as it's aimed at kids), while not exactly one that makes me laugh out, is a bit amusing. I like the T. rex puppet from the quiz section's rough cockney accent, on another note meanwhile.
On the visual side of Fun, Fact, and Fantasy, you have a mix of decent puppetry and stop-motion, . Both are fairly good for their time, though some may find Dil creepy, and same for the rest. However, it may just be the film's VHS quality, but I can't pick up specific details, so I won't go further into it. The rest are illustrations taken directly from books.
The use of stock footage is pretty decent, even if totally fictional movies aren't exactly accurate depictions.
But let's face it, when a work is older then probably half the people in the world right now, it's bound to have inaccuracies. Most obviously, the feathers are completely absent on every theropod that should have them, many of them and the ornithopods stand upright, and the sauropods are nigh-tail-dragging and elephant footed, and that's just in the illustrations in the Dinosaur Dozens.
Some of the topics don't exactly always flow as well as they could. For instance, the Killer Dinosaurs segment leads into one about fossilisation and the periods of the Mesozoic, which doesn't have much connection to me beyond "dead" and just dinosaurs. Another is the Armoured Dinosaurs is followed up by one about dinosaur relatives and what's not a dinosaur, clearly just put there out of obligation since they had nowhere else to put it.
This may just be the upload, but the 480p quality of it doesn't lend itself well to picking up subtle details.
On one hand, Dinosaurs: Fun Fact, and Fantasy is firmly dated to the early 1980's in both production and scientific information, and beyond the fundamental basics of palaeontology is not up to date at all. On the other, a mix of the classic british charm, fun banter, and good ol' nostalgia do make it still a lovely watch after four decades.
- Accuracy - 5/10
- Aging - 5/10
- Presentation - 8/10
- Visuals - 7/10
- Music - 8/10
- Songs - 7/10
- Storytelling - 8/10
- Rewatchability - 8/10
Well that was a bit more difficult to write then I thought. Hopefully by the time you come for the next thing, I'll be more motivated. Goodbye, and stay safe in these trying times of Omicron!
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