Dinosaurs and Sequels (both good and bad)

So I conducted a brief poll today among my family members and workmates on their familiarity with different kinds of dinosaurs, beginning with more well-known varieties and moving to less common ones. Everybody was familiar with the good ol’ Tyrannosaurus Rex, as well as the Triceratops, Stegosaurus and Brontosaurus. Once I got to the Ankylosaurus, though, people weren’t sure. (I didn’t include the Pterodactyl as they weren’t dinosaurs. Ancient reptilian animals that lived at the same point in history as the dinosaurs, yes, but not dinosaurs.)

It seemed that people were most familiar with these particular beasties as they are the ones most commonly featured in movies, particularly The Land Before Time and Jurassic Park, (the latter being one of my favorite movies ever).

Speaking of The Land Before Time, how many of those movies are there now? I feel like it’s somewhere around six or seven, which seems entirely too many. I mean, I get it, if you have an intellectual property that is really successful, you want to wring as much money out of it as possible, and if people will pay to see your sequels, you’re going to keep making them, (look at Friday the 13^th franchise for goodness sake). Very rarely is there a sequel to a movie that is better than the original. Then again, it happens every once in a while.

Take Shrek, for example. The first one was funny, putting a cool new twist on all the fairy tale tropes. It was something we’d never seen before, but it had a lot of characters we were familiar with. But then Shrek 2 came out, and it was amazing. I loved it even more than the original. (The third one was abysmal and I can’t speak for the fourth one, not having seen it).

The same thing applies to Indiana Jones. The first one? Great. The third one? Amazing. (The second one wasn’t so good and a lot of people wish that the fourth one never happened. Personally, I liked it, but that’s just me.)

I think that this sort of thing happens for a reason. The first movie establishes a new universe for the audience, whether it’s hip fairy tales or treasure hunting and Nazi-smackin.’ But once that universe is established, the movies that come after the original can more widely wander. (Though should they wander too far we get something like Home Alone 3.)

Then again, it makes sense that this happens so rarely. If a movie comes out that is really innovative and thought-provoking, how are the writers supposed to top that? The audience already has the bar set pretty high just walking into the theater. They’re playing the original in their heads while the previews are on. (Or, if they’re like me and haven’t seen the original in a while, they watched it the week before to make sure they remember what’s going on.)

Linking this back up to my original point, velociraptors. Anyone who has ever seen Jurasic Park is familiar with what these hell-beasts look like. While the T. Rex is scary, it’s more like a tornado, a force of nature that destroys anything in its path, but something you could hide from. The raptors, on the other hand, were smart, could set up traps and even figure out door handles. You head to your T. Rex hideout, lock the doors and turn around only to realize you’ve just closed yourself in with a seven-foot tall, razor-clawed killing machine.

And yet… it seems Michael Crichton took a little bit of liberty with the paleontological record there. First of all, velociraptors measured about two feet tall and weighed around thirty or so pounds, making them about the size of a Cocker Spaniel. And recent fossils make it fairly clear that they also had feathers. So, rather than a man-sized scaly monstrosity, they were more like big angry chickens.

Then again, I’m an ornithophobe (scared of birds), so that’s almost worse.