Dinosaur Movies on Blu-ray

[Mikezilla3k]

Originally Posted by Röckzilla

I'd speculate that The Film Detective could be a possible label to release a few of these too, at least the ones from the "Wade Williams Collection".

Hopefully, along with other films from it. But I haven't heard anything recent about future releases.

[starsteam]

I made a list of dinosaur movies that do NOT have a world Blu-ray or US DVD release. Some of these do have international DVD releases but I haven't checked for all.
This list probably is not complete, it's based on my own research from over the years - but I'm always discovering more. When I made this thread I found Wizards of the Demon Sword, for example.

The Secret of the Loch (1934)
The Island of the Dinosaurs (1967)
Dinosaur Fights Against Cosmic Men (1969)
One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing (1975)
Age of the Great Dinosaurs (1979)
The Loch Ness Horror (1981)
Ttori and the Tyrannosaurus (1981)
Return of the Dinosaurs (1984)
Adventures in Dinosaur City (1992)
Coo: Come from a Distant Ocean Coo (1993)
Lost in Dinosaur World (1993)
Rex: A Dinosaur Story (1993)
Tyranno's Claw (1994)
Dinosaur from the Deep (1994)
Saurians (1994) - Coming Soon
Prehysteria 3 (1995)
The Lost World (1998)
Planet Raptor (2007)
Aztec Rex (2007)
Triassic Attack (2010)
World of Wonders (2012)
Monster: The Prehistoric Project (2015)
Dino King: Journey to Fire Mountain (2017)
Thugs vs. Dinosaurs (2017)
The Final Level: Escaping Rancala (2019)
Escape from Dinosaur Forest (2020)
Jurassic Island (2020)
Revenge of the Lost (2020)
Ebola Rex vs. Murder Hornets (2021)
Snake 3: Dinosaur vs. Python (2022)
Metamorphosis (2022)
Monster Attack 3: Dinosaur Island (2022)
Jurassic Revival (2022)
Jurassic Tale (2022)
Dinosaur Hotel 2 (2022)
65 (2023)
We Hunt Giants (2023)

[Hypnosifl]

This is probably a long shot but there are also some nice pre-CG dino animations from educational programs that I'd love to see on blu-ray or at least DVD (there's a good list of dino docs up to 2012 on this site)...maybe some company that specializes in lesser-known animation, like Thunderbean or Cartoons on Film, would consider some of these, assuming film elements still exist?

Probably the most famous educational stop-motion sequence of dinosaurs is the segment from Irwin Allen's movie "The Animal World" which was done by Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen, this one does have a DVD release but I hope it gets put out on blu someday. Another nice one that does have a release is Phil Tippett's short "Prehistoric Beast" which is available in HD on his youtube channel and also on the blu-ray "The Monster Collection". Parts of this short (which involved a Tyrannosaurus stalking a Monoclonius, a dinosaur that resembles a Triceratops but with one horn instead of three) were incorporated into the 1985 TV special "Dinosaurs!" and they got Tippett to do a bunch of additional stop-motion sequences for the show, which have never been released on DVD or blu. These include a scene of a pair of Deinonychus hunting their prey, which look and act a lot like the Velociraptors in Jurassic Park (Tippett supervised the animation of the JP Velociraptors), you can see that scene starting at around 3:30 in the youtube clips here:

Dinosaur! (1985) - just the Phil Tippett stop-motion sequences - YouTube

There's also some great stop-motion in the program "Muttaburrasaurus: Life in Gondwana" from 1993, by Norman Yeend and Graham Binding (stop-motion segments at 0:30, 5:30, 9:10, 13:48, 17:40, and 24:20):

Muttaburrasaurus: Life in Gondwana - Full movie - YouTube

An older one is "Dinosaurs: The Terrible Lizards" from 1970, done by Wah Ming Chang, who designed memorable props for Star Trek like the tricorder, and who also did the stop-motion dinosaurs on the original Land of the Lost:

Dinosaurs: The Terrible Lizards - YouTube

And Bill Maylone's "64,000,000 Years Ago" from 1981:

64,000,000 Years Ago - YouTube

Some dinosaurs also feature in the beginning of the 1981 short "Age of Mammals" by Mark Wolf:

Mark D. Wolf's AGE OF MAMMALS - YouTube

There was a short stop-motion segment done by Dougal Dixon at the start of the 1982 program "Dinosaurs: Fun, Fact and Fantasy" (from 1:23 to 3:30):

Dinosaurs: Fun, Fact and Fantasy - YouTube

There were also some old educational programs with 2D animation of dinosaurs, like "Journey Into Time" from 1960:

JOURNEY INTO TIME. 1960 Animated Classroom Film on Dinosaurs & Evolution. - YouTube

As well as the slightly trippy "Dinosaurs: A First Film" from 1978:

Dinosaurs: A First Film (1978) - YouTube

[Doomhunter]

Dinosaurs are awesome! In spite of there being giant dinosaurs in the hallway outside my bedroom that night when I was a lad

[starsteam]

^^Some of those are sparking up childhood memories. I had several VHS tapes that included those (or programs that incorporated footage from those). I'd love to revisit them on a modern format.

Phil Tippet's Prehistoric Beasts was the main reason I bought The Monster Collection. I was disappointed they didn't include the other footage he did later though.

I also remember the PBS series The Dinosaurs which had several hand-drawn animated segments. And the animated one by the Michael Berenstain just called Dinosaurs.

[RalphoR]

I've never seen it (but want to) and I think it's only available on DVD: Ice Road Terror. Not sure if it fits into any list you're creating.

[starsteam]

Originally Posted by RalphoR

I've never seen it (but want to) and I think it's only available on DVD: Ice Road Terror. Not sure if it fits into any list you're creating.

I've seen it, it's a big lizard but I don't recall it ever being identified as a dinosaur. Maybe a homage to the slurpasaurs of yesteryear.
I always saw the lizard in Journey 2: The Mysterious Island as a homage to slurpasaurs. There is a Taiwanese film that released last year (getting a US DVD in March) called The Beast Below which also has a oversized lizard.
But these are never referred to as dinosaurs, so I can't really count them.

I actually need to refresh my memory on some slupasaur films. Robot Monster is getting a Blu-ray soon, and that used footage from One Million BC, but I cannot remember if those were supposed to be dinosaurs or just big lizards. So many films used footage from One Million BC, it's hard to keep track.

[Hypnosifl]

Originally Posted by starsteam

I also remember the PBS series The Dinosaurs which had several hand-drawn animated segments. And the animated one by the Michael Berenstain just called Dinosaurs.

I see that someone compiled all the animations from the PBS series into another youtube video:

PBS The Dinosaurs! 1992 | All Animated Segments - YouTube

They reused a few clips from Phil Tippett but most of it is original 2D animation--some nice sequences are the dino-to-bird evolution at 2:25, the Ceratosaurus vs. Stegosaurus at 8:45, the Triceratops vs. Tyrannosaurus at 10:45, the Triassic scene at 12:45 with a Herrerasaurus and some non-dinosaur creatures (could be a Thrinaxodon, a Lystrosaurus and a Postosuchus), and the montage at 18:45 of various dinosaurs experiencing the effects of the asteroid impact.

Also looking at the 1990s section of that dino documentary site I mentioned, I found a couple other 1990s docs that are on youtube and which have pre-CG animated dinosaurs. #1 is The Great Dinosaur Hunt (apparently a retitled version of In Search of the Dragon from 1991)--this one has some nice stop motion at 32:42, and some 2D animation at 10:27, 48:30, 1:01:17 and 1:28:30.

The Great Dinosaur Hunt (VHS) - YouTube

#2 is Discovery Dinosaurs: Beyond T. rex (1998), which talked about two other big predators possibly bigger than Tyrannosaurus, Carcharodontosaurus and Giganotosaurus, with stop motion sequences at 0:48 and 25:37 and 27:37 and 32:20 and 39:28 and 43:40.

Discovery Dinosaurs Beyond T Rex - YouTube

And this tumblr list also mentioned the documentary Once Upon Australia (1995), which is pretty much all stop-motion:

Once Upon Australia TLC ★ Prehistoric Channel HD - YouTube

(unfortunately this one is stretched horizontally, there's a copy with the right aspect ratio at https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1381778281839057 )

The tumblr list also had Dinozaury, a Polish 2D animated short, which was edited and dubbed into English to become Dinosaur: The Age of the Terrible Lizard (1970):

https://chasmosaurs.com/2022/10/05/dinozaury/

[Hypnosifl]

Another one that comes to mind is Allegro Non Troppo, which was a kind of parody/homage of Disney's Fantasia by the Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto--it has a great sequence set to Ravel's "Bolero" that was inspired by the "Rite of Spring" sequence in Fantasia, featuring a parade of evolving creatures that roughly parallel the real history of evolution, though they were all sort of fantastical and cartoony, you can see some screenshots of the dinosaur-type creatures here (could always put it in the "Fantastic Dinosaurs" section assuming that's not just reserved for kaiju style giants). Apparently the movie has only been released on blu-ray in a German edition, and there's also a U.S. DVD with English subtitles for the live-action sequences between the musical parts (all of which are wordless).

[cakefactory]

Man, I'm glad that Dinosaur! special exists on youtube. I very vividly remember that Struthiomimus/Deinonychus stuff. I must have checked that tape out from the library about 30 times as a kid. It had tons of movie clips in it, like sections of Caveman and Planet of the Dinosaurs, bizarrely. I forgot about how Christopher Reeve was the host and how he pronounces everything incorrectly. Deinonickus! Struthiomimmus!

The other VHS tapes I used to get all the time were the ones with Gary and Eric (Dinosaurs Dinosaurs Dinosaurs, Son of Dinosaurs). I don't remember them well enough to recall if they had any unique effects footage. Well, besides the one where Gary turned into a dinosaur over the course of the special and at the end attacked Eric. I think.

This came up in some thread a year or two ago (maybe it was the one for the Phil Tippett collection?), and I think someone told me those were available on DVD. I should get them.

EDIT: Ah, yeah, there seem to be two DVD compilations that include them all, available on monstersinmotion.com. Does anyone have these/has anyone heard of this site?

[starsteam]

Originally Posted by cakefactory

This came up in some thread a year or two ago (maybe it was the one for the Phil Tippett collection?), and I think someone told me those were available on DVD. I should get them.

EDIT: Ah, yeah, there seem to be two DVD compilations that include them all, available on monstersinmotion.com. Does anyone have these/has anyone heard of this site?

I believe the DVDs are OOP. I bought them from the More-Dinosaurs online store years ago.

[russweiss1]

I watched Dinosaurs in a Mining Facility on someone else's recommendation and man what a stinker. Going in, I knew it was low budget and would likely have poor effects but it still didn't prepare me for how bad it really was. The film is just over an hour long and took five years to complete. Kudos to the filmmakers to put that kind of effort into it. Unfortunately the acting and effects are so bad that even the hour run time seemed really long.

[Hypnosifl]

Originally Posted by cakefactory

Man, I'm glad that Dinosaur! special exists on youtube. I very vividly remember that Struthiomimus/Deinonychus stuff. I must have checked that tape out from the library about 30 times as a kid. It had tons of movie clips in it, like sections of Caveman and Planet of the Dinosaurs, bizarrely. I forgot about how Christopher Reeve was the host and how he pronounces everything incorrectly. Deinonickus! Struthiomimmus!

The other VHS tapes I used to get all the time were the ones with Gary and Eric (Dinosaurs Dinosaurs Dinosaurs, Son of Dinosaurs). I don't remember them well enough to recall if they had any unique effects footage. Well, besides the one where Gary turned into a dinosaur over the course of the special and at the end attacked Eric. I think.

This came up in some thread a year or two ago (maybe it was the one for the Phil Tippett collection?), and I think someone told me those were available on DVD. I should get them.

EDIT: Ah, yeah, there seem to be two DVD compilations that include them all, available on monstersinmotion.com. Does anyone have these/has anyone heard of this site?

They're listed as sold out on monstersinmotion, as starsteam said you could once get them on more-dinosaurs here where they seem to be listed as available, however the main page says "Our store is closed for now", could always try emailing to see what's going on.

The 1980s dino documentary page mentions that the Gary and Eric special "Return of the Dinosaurs" did feature some original stop-motion done by the Chiodo Brothers, the full show doesn't seem to be available on youtube but here's a clip with at least some of the stop-motion:

Why the Dinosaurs Really Went Extinct - YouTube

[cakefactory]

Originally Posted by russweiss1

I watched Dinosaurs in a Mining Facility on someone else's recommendation and man what a stinker. Going in, I knew it was low budget and would likely have poor effects but it still didn't prepare me for how bad it really was. The film is just over an hour long and took five years to complete. Kudos to the filmmakers to put that kind of effort into it. Unfortunately the acting and effects are so bad that even the hour run time seemed really long.

You have to have the right expectations I guess. It's basically a wildly creative and ambitious movie made by high school friends who were middle class at best and didn't get outside funding that I'm aware of. If you can get into that and jive with it, it's really entertaining. If you're looking for any degree of professionalism, yeah, you're going to have a bad time.

I usually get turned off by stuff that's "intentionally bad" (ex anything made by the Syfy channel or whoever's pumping out Shark vs Giant Octopus and all that BS), but the DIY nature of this movie made it work. It reminded me of being a stupid high schooler and having to complete projects for video classes, and trying to have fun by doing all kinds of stunts or bad effects. For their resources, it's actually impressive. But yeah it's REALLY rough.

Compared to the shot-on-video stuff like Things that's out there and popular among bad movie fanatics, it's downright coherent and well-made. I mean, at least you can follow the plot and understand most of the dialogue and action. It's just really goofy.

[Hypnosifl]

This thread inspired me to finally check out Planet of Dinosaurs, which I'd heard had some great stop-motion dinosaur sequences--they were excellent, definitely recommend it to anyone who likes this sort of thing, the stranded space traveler story is nothing special but mildly entertaining as a 70s sci-fi time capsule. There's a nice behind-the-scenes gallery here, and Jim Aupperle, who did the stop-motion with Stephen Czerkas, was answering questions about it on this CHFB thread. You might consier replacing the Retromedia edition you currently have listed, which is OOP and a bit expensive to get used, with this edition which is still available and which shows it in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio that it was shot in, showing more of the image (though I don't know whether it was cropped for the original theatrical run, don't really trust that whoever wrote the imdb entry knew either...this post also mentions the Retromedia DVD had some minor added CG effects like lens flare, though Aupperle said he didn't mind them, and he also said the image quality on Retromedia was the best):



I also remembered that a while ago I had picked up the ebook of Mark Berry's The Dinosaur Filmography, I checked out the entry for Planet of Dinosaurs and it mentions that similar to One Million B.C., a bunch of later movies reused the dinosaur footage from this one--Berry lists Wizards of the Demon Sword (included in the DVD section in the OP), Galaxy of the Dinosaurs (included in the blu-ray section), Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills (included in the DVD section), Time Tracers (apparently never released on DVD or blu-ray), Cave Girl Island (not included, and it does have a DVD entry in the database, but the summary in The Dinosaur Filmography says 'The plot of this nudity-spiced idiocy involves three intergalactic bimbos who crash-land on a prehistoric island which isn’t really a prehistoric island but is just made to look like one', so they may be fake dinosaurs within the context of the movie), and finally The Phantom Empire which does have a blu-ray:



I watched this one too, it's a very low-budget exploitation movie about exploring a cave system that leads to a lost world, kind of a parody/homage to other movies like Journey to the Center of the Earth and Devil Girl from Mars...it does have some entertaining performances from a good B-movie cast, Jeffrey Combs is great as always. Just a few dinosaur sequences towards the very end, but this and Galaxy of the Dinosaurs are the only places I know where you can see some of that Planet of Dinosaurs footage in HD, not sure if it should go in the main section or in the "Films with Minor Dinosaur Scenes" section though (would you lean towards putting movie with a prehistoric/lost world theme into the main section even if the dinosaur scenes are fairly short?)

[starsteam]

Originally Posted by Hypnosifl

This thread inspired me to finally check out Planet of Dinosaurs, which I'd heard had some great stop-motion dinosaur sequences--they were excellent, definitely recommend it to anyone who likes this sort of thing, the stranded space traveler story is nothing special but mildly entertaining as a 70s sci-fi time capsule. There's a nice behind-the-scenes gallery here, and Jim Aupperle, who did the stop-motion with Stephen Czerkas, was answering questions about it on this CHFB thread. You might consier replacing the Retromedia edition you currently have listed, which is OOP and a bit expensive to get used, with this edition which is still available and which shows it in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio that it was shot in, showing more of the image (though I don't know whether it was cropped for the original theatrical run, don't really trust that whoever wrote the imdb entry knew either...this post also mentions the Retromedia DVD had some minor added CG effects like lens flare, though Aupperle said he didn't mind them, and he also said the image quality on Retromedia was the best):


I also remembered that a while ago I had picked up the ebook of Mark Berry's The Dinosaur Filmography, I checked out the entry for Planet of Dinosaurs and it mentions that similar to One Million B.C., a bunch of later movies reused the dinosaur footage from this one--Berry lists Wizards of the Demon Sword (included in the DVD section in the OP), Galaxy of the Dinosaurs (included in the blu-ray section), Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills (included in the DVD section), Time Tracers (apparently never released on DVD or blu-ray), Cave Girl Island (not included, and it does have a DVD entry in the database, but the summary in The Dinosaur Filmography says 'The plot of this nudity-spiced idiocy involves three intergalactic bimbos who crash-land on a prehistoric island which isn’t really a prehistoric island but is just made to look like one', so they may be fake dinosaurs within the context of the movie), and finally The Phantom Empire which does have a blu-ray:

I watched this one too, it's a very low-budget exploitation movie about exploring a cave system that leads to a lost world, kind of a parody/homage to other movies like Journey to the Center of the Earth and Devil Girl from Mars...it does have some entertaining performances from a good B-movie cast, Jeffrey Combs is great as always. Just a few dinosaur sequences towards the very end, but this and Galaxy of the Dinosaurs are the only places I know where you can see some of that Planet of Dinosaurs footage in HD, not sure if it should go in the main section or in the "Films with Minor Dinosaur Scenes" section though (would you lean towards putting movie with a prehistoric/lost world theme into the main section even if the dinosaur scenes are fairly short?)

My general rule is if the world the film takes place in is relevant to prehistory, then I count it. That's why I included Yor in the main section, even though it only has two scenes with prehistoric animals that aren't really important to the plot. But there's a few films listed where the dinosaurs are just scenery rather than the focus.

I haven't gotten around to watching The Phantom Empire yet, I thought I previously read the dinosaur footage was really minor, and I don't actually know what the plot of the movie is or how it relates to the dinosaur scenes. Where would you place it?

I'll have to do more research on Cave Girl Island. Sounds like it may fall in the same category as 'Clifford' where there are in-movie animatronic dinosaurs.

[Hypnosifl]

Originally Posted by starsteam

I haven't gotten around to watching The Phantom Empire yet, I thought I previously read the dinosaur footage was really minor, and I don't actually know what the plot of the movie is or how it relates to the dinosaur scenes. Where would you place it?

It's basically self-parody with a very thin plot, but it has a Journey to the Center of the Earth type story where they are exploring a cave system with a map that's supposed to show how to get to a lost underground civilization (and fending off some cannibalistic Morlock style creatures that live in the caves), when they finally get there it's a kind of lost world that includes cavewomen in animal skin bikinis, an "Alien Queen" who supposedly crashed there some time ago (who seems like she's meant to be racier version of the alien from the 50s movie Devil Girl from Mars), and some dinosaurs. I just went back and looked at the timing, the movie is just an hour and twenty minutes and they don't get out of the caves and into the lost world until about fifty minutes in, and the dinosaurs don't show up until a little past an hour and six. Timing the Planet of Dinosaurs shots with my phone's stopwatch, there's about 9 seconds of the two-legged dinosaur that Jim Aupperle said here was meant to be a Coelophysis, about 4 seconds of two Stegosaurs, and then a bunch of different shots of the T. rex totaling about 45 seconds, including a scene they edit together so that it looks like the Alien Queen threw the spear that impales it in the neck.

So they weren't playing a very central role in the story, but if a movie's quality isn't a consideration, the dinosaurs here play about as much role in the plot as the "Dimetrodons" in Journey to the Center of the Earth (just giving a lost world flavor and some brief moments of peril), and those guys didn't have that much screentime either.

[cakefactory]

Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds having a blu-ray is news to me. Looks like it was mentioned in like two posts in the Japanese thread, and the label's buried in the Anime subforum. I've always been curious about that movie, I remember seeing the title on lists of Dinosaur movies back in the 90s and desperately wanting to see it.

Another movie I never saw that I remember seeing VHS copies of once or twice as a kid going through discount bins at Kmart was Attack of the Super Monsters. Glad I never bought it, I didn't realize it was half animated.

Planet of the Dinosaurs seems like a weird one to be so relegated to gray market DVDs. That movie's special effects are really pretty good! The movie itself is bad, but the effects and ludicrous concept seem like something that would have made it a good seller if someone ever put out a half-decent release of it. As is, I only have the Rifftrax DVD that has the un-riffed version as an extra. Was the retromedia DVD any good?

[starsteam]

Retromedia pulled from several sources for their restoration for Planet of Dinosaurs, so the quality varies. That's one of the reasons why a HD remaster may be out of the question, though I'm hopeful that maybe someone like Vinegar Syndrome could do a little more digging around and find better elements.

Rifftrax also did Attack of the Super Monsters, which is quite fun. The DVD is only available as part of a tin lunchbox set on their website though. I'd like if someone could license the original Japanese series format for it.

[Hypnosifl]

Originally Posted by starsteam

Retromedia pulled from several sources for their restoration for Planet of Dinosaurs, so the quality varies. That's one of the reasons why a HD remaster may be out of the question, though I'm hopeful that maybe someone like Vinegar Syndrome could do a little more digging around and find better elements.

In that CHFB thread I linked, Jim Aupperle said in some old posts from 2013 that he and the others who worked on the movie were interested in the possibility of doing a new scan (and possibly a special edition with some new stop-motion sequences) but it was a matter of finding the time and funds. And in this comment from 2015 he said "As far as I know the original PLANET negative and sound tracks still exist though I don't know what condition they are in. Color negative from that period tends to fade so I'm sure it would need some help to restore the color. I think it would be mostly a matter of determining if there is enough of a market for the film to justify the cost of a new transfer."

Vinegar Syndrome could be a good fit for this movie, does anyone know how to contact any of the higher-ups there to see if they'd be interested in funding a scan/restoration if they could distribute it, assuming the director (or whoever has the negative now) was open to it?