There ain’t no Brontosaurus, bonehead^[Pachycephalosaurus]. Or, rather, there was, but then there wasn’t, even if everyone thought there still was. American Natural History Museum signage said so for like nine decades. And then there’s the whole Apatosaurus skull swap debacle at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History^[Camarasaurus]. But then, about a decade ago, someone discovered/decided there really was, in fact, a Brontosaurus. ((Paleontological play-by-play in the podcast “I Know Dino,” “Episode 100: Brontosaurus.” The red herbivore meat starts thirteen minutes in.))
So maybe you can’t blame Disney for their madcap 1975 portrayal of 1920’s paleontology in the forgotten not-so-classic, “One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing.” Or maybe you can. Regardless, they get a pass for saddling Dippy^[Diplodocus… and krayt dragon] with the gag name “Brontosaurus Rex.” ((“Brontosaurus Rex, My Ass!” … you know, the porn version.)) That’s only one of many faux pas in their wanton attempt to cash in on the wave of post-Poppins nanny-sploitation films.
Less controversial, for starters, is the nuanced portrayal of East Asian culture—firmly in the Mickey Rooney school of social satire.^[Read: Yellowface.] According to the internet, this was a compromise. The original book, written by a pair of Brits under a pseudonym as “The Great Dinosaur Robbery,” was set in the U.S. in the 1970s with villains from communist China. The script ping-ponged the setting back across the pond, eighty-sixed (most of) the sexual innuendo, added kids and comedy, and subtracted half a century from Big Ben^[And Elizabeth Tower]. The kowtowing doesn’t stop there: The movie’s title riffs on “One of Our Airplanes is Missing,” a World War II propaganda film funded by the U.K.‘s wartime Ministry of Information*.* ((Imagining the writers’ room is at least as entertaining as the resultant movie. Hey, remember that Key & Peele sketch about “Gremlins 2”?))
Anyway, the fanciful flick has aged about as well as Roger Ebert’s contemporaneous review: “it’s inoffensive.” Not sure who owns Ebert’s likeness and scrapeable data, but I suggest his heirs to circle the wagons before ElevenLabs fires up a hologram, à la the Stan Lee the Undying™ booth that charged fans $15-$20 a pop for a three-minute “conversation” at the L.A. Comic Con last September. ((Wait, this sounds familiar. Wasn’t there a 900-number printed in X-Men comics in the '90s…?. Hey, bub—call 1-900-288-XMEN!))
There’s a tradition in our family. Every New Year’s Day, we watch a movie so horrible we know that, without a shadow of a doubt, we won’t see anything worse in the coming year. That movie is the 1993 kartwreck “Super Mario Bros.” But, this year, we’ll be watching “One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing” on Christmas. And probably drinking heavily.
BLACKOUT BINGO
