Mesozoic Mind

I apologise for the nearly-month hiatus at Mesozoic Mind. I had other projects to work on. But don't worry, this blog is still active, so welcome back everyone. And I've been to a new place today (well kind of, as you shall learn) that's on my my mind today - my Mesozoic mind. Today as part of an excersise walk with my personal trainer, I went along the waterfront of Toronto and eventually went to Budapest Park, located on the west side of Toronto on its Lakeshore. It wasn't planned, and I have never set foot thewre, but we did so. Budapest Park itself is a smalk lakeside park not unlike others out there, save for one thing I came for now that it was in walking distance for me: it has dinosaur statues. The statues consist of two ornithischians, Chasmosaurus and a Stegosaurus . They are made of concrete and are small, at the very least as tall as me. Apparently they came from a now-closed park open in the 1960's and 70's in Huntsville, Muskoka Dinosaur Land, that...

Ah, Computer graphic imagery. Before you became so commonplace and went too far in development so fast, you were a fascinating, bergeoning little world living on college campuses and inside basic computers, one of an optimistic future of 1980's Reaganite and Clinton's 90's America. Really, I have a nostalgia for early CG, as there is a genuine, endearing sense of care put into it and a fuzzy dreamlike feel to many of them, as well as growing up with many of these early CG projects.  Today we will be looking at two courtesy of one John C. Donkin, ananimator who worked at Ohio State University's Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design . I know nothing about him at the moment, but I do know he went on to work at Blue Sky Animation and worked on Ice Age . he created two works in a two-part project about the prehistoric creatures we know and love. Keep in mind, this was at the peak of the Dinosaur Renaissance when the image of dinosaurs as succesful and fast creatu...

Today's subject was watched a lot by me as a kid on the mythical format known as DVDs, an animated film with the rather generic title of Dinosaur Island , direcyed by Will Meugniot of Exo-Squad fame and released by defunct animation studio DiC. Dinosaur Island 's plot is about four teens being selected for a competitive reality show to win a million dollars, but the plane taking them to their destination crashes, and where they land is a lost world wehere dinosaurs still roa, ans must survive it. Sound familiar? Supposedly this is is an adaptation of The Lost World  by Arthur Conan Doyle, the Camp Cretaceous to the latter's Jurassic World if you will. Let's get the biggest problem out of the way with DI'02 : the animation is not very good. DiC was infamous from its stiff and flat animation and art style, especially towards the end of its lifetime, and here the animation is very reflective of that. Everything moves relatively jerky, and the backgrounds aren't...

Well, I did promise I'd review it back in April....   Hoo boy, where do I even begin with 2010's  Tyrannosaurus Sex ? This documentary is pretty much only known for one thing: being about dinosauur sex and mentioning penises a lot, even discussing the size of it. You probably saw this clip below as a kid and snickered your ass off as the repeated mention of penises and sex. In the greater scheme of things, the infamous reputation probably stems from how as with most of recent human history, it was deemed by the ruling classes taboo to discuss such topicsto gain control of them for themselves and so was pushed into unacceptability territory, which ended up backfiring through the forbiden fruit effect, meaning were were better off of humaity just accepted it from the start.... but that's beyond the scope of this blog post. Anyway, for the longest time Tyrannosaurus Sex was lost media, with the sole upload getting taken down thanks to that darn copyright, and only being uploa...