12 Days Of Dino Dicember #12: Journey To The Beginning Of Time (1955)

It’s the final day of the 12 Days Of Dino Dicember, so let’s end it with a proper obscure gem, the Czech movie Journey To The Beginning Of Time. As in the original, not the re-cut, re-filmed version that reached US territories in 1966 under the same name.

Today thankfully you can watch it as it was released on a region-free Blu Ray by Second Run, which also includes the English version, but i’m not gonna bother with that for now. Sorry, but i simply can’t afford the time to watch that as well and compare the two.

This comes from Karel Zeman (no, not the soccer manager), nicknamed the “Czech Melies”, famous for his fantasy films combining live action and animation, and hugely influential, not surprising to fellow czech Jan Svankmajer (you can’t imagine how happy i am by just having the occasion of nominating him in any of these reviews, retrospectives, but beloved by many american directors, like Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton, and serving as inspiration to Jurassic Park itself.

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Alice: Otherlands (2015) [REVIEW] | Uncertain Fate Kickstarted

While Alice Asylum (as said in the review of Madness Returns) is now officially in the pre-production stage of development, the path to this potential third game in the series hasn’t been a walk in the park for anyone involved, and it was bound to be full of bumps and by-products because a third game was never certain, so it makes sense that American Mc Gee tried to bring closure to his series back in 2015, with the project known as “Alice Otherlands”, made of artworks and two short animated films produced by Spicy Horse, funded via Kickstarter, as the owner of the Mc Gee’sAlice IP itself, EA, wasn’t interested in funding a third game, at all, so they had to pivot the project.

Fuck EA, btw. Just in case you needed more incentives to do so. You didn’t.

What came out of it where – mostly – the two aforementioned short films, Leviathan – A Journey Through Jules Verne’s Mind and A Night At The Opera.

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Dino Dicember #28: Gyaru And Dinosaur anime (2020)

I’d figured we do at least an anime series on the subject, not really up to review stuff like My Girlfriend Is A Dinosaur (which doesn’t have an anime adaptation anyway… yet), and it’s not like we’re drowning in “dinosaur anime”, so yeah, Gyaru And Dinosaur has been chosen as champion.

Even though this is an exception for me, not so much the subject, but the fact i choose it despite being still incomplete at the time of vetting the candidates for Dino Dicember, the COVID-19 pandemic delayed this one as well, so despite starting in April 2020, the series went in hiatus from May 17, 2020 to then resume November 20, 2020.

So this is by far the more recent piece of media to be featured here, as it just finished airing a week ago. Very, very very fresh, i’d say.

I don’t think i fully understant the term “gyaru”, but for what concerns this anime (based on the manga of the same name), it means there’s a “gal” and a cute dinosaur that look like a stuffed doll or a children mascot, especially a Sesame Street character. They’re roomies, watch TV together, eat, even enjoy being fashionable. That’s really it as far as premise goes, the only explanation for the dinosaur is that the girl, Kaede, drank too much last night and she brought it home with her.

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Dino December #15: The Ghost Of Slumber Mountain (1918)

Let’s do something a bit different, and fitting, not only because this is one of the older movies i’ve ever spotlighted, it’s a silent film and it’s in the public domain (at least for the US), but it’s also a partially lost film as well.

As in we know the original runtime was 40 minutes, but for years the only surviving version clocked at 12 minutes, until a print of the film running 19 minutes was found. As for why half of the movie’s is still missing, Christopher Workman (citing a scene in the restored footage where Joe tries to convince Jack to take off his clothers and pose as a faun) suggested it was due to the homosexual subtext. Probably naming the hermit’s ghost “Mad Dick” didn’t help.

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