210-King Dinosaur

Film Year:  1955
Genre:  Science Fiction
Director:  Bert I. Gordon
Starring:  William Bryant, Wanda Curtis, Douglas Henderson, Patti Gallagher
MST Season:  2
Featured Short:  "X Marks the Spot"

The Short

Lunkhead Joe demonstrates improper driving safety and winds up ascending into traffic safety heaven, where his driving habits are put on trial for final judgment.  Of course, this is all the gods and angels take into consideration before allowing one to pass on, which finds me pitying those poor schmucks born before the invention of the motorized carriage.  Without one, they must be stuck in limbo for all eternity!

The short does what it’s supposed to and drives home a point about driving safety.  It’s an important point to make and you can easily forgive the film for being a tad somber about it.  But there’s an inordinate nature of the production, taking place with angels and the like.  It doesn’t want to simply tell the audience what it’s stating, it wants to scare the crap out of you while doing so by taking you beyond the grave.  Shorts like these aren’t scary anymore, with the silly depiction of a crude afterlife, so anything it says gets lost.

Last Clear Chance does it better.  “Why don’t they look?”

The Movie

Four scientists land on a planet called Nova to study it, and find a large array of Earth-like creatures wandering around in stock footage.  However the planet isn’t just home to cuddly, playful animals, but also to massive dangerous prehistoric beasts, including the blood-thirsty Tyrannosaurus Rex (in name only).

The directorial debut of MST favorite Bert I. Gordon is a bit of a plodding affair.  At times it seems to take forever for something to happen, and waiting around for the titular King Dinosaur can be a bit irritating.  This movie definitely won’t impress people with its pace.

On the plus side, this movie’s production values bring plenty of smiles.  Not because they’re lavish and awe-inspiring, but because they’re absurdly crude even for the period.  One can easily tell exactly what they’re getting toward the beginning when we get an absurd (and transparent) process shot of a rocket taking off superimposed over a backdrop in order to create the illusion of a rocket landing.  It gets just as bad as it goes on, with the attacking wasp taking the award for biggest offender.  The costumes (namely humorous space suits) illicit much unintentional laughter as well.  The finale is a gas, where our heroes set off an atomic bomb for kicks.

King Dinosaur is the 50s equivalent of a kid with a Super 8 camera trying to make his own movie with his toys.  It’s crude and seems to have a very loose idea of what kind of craftsmanship goes into filmmaking, but you have the desire to pat the director on the head and say “Good for you!”  King Dinosaur kind of sucks in many ways, but I find it hard to hate.

The Episode

Instead of filling out their time slot with chapter four of The Phantom Creeps, our MST crew tries something new.  X Marks the Spot is the first non-serial short of the series, and while it’s irritating that the series has now abandoned its second serial in a row, it’s for the best.  X Marks the Spot is a liberating experience for the series, because they’re given a program ripe with melodrama but with cheap and silly production values and an inflated sense of self-importance.  There’s plenty of opportunity to make fun of it and they jump on it.  It’s little wonder they rarely looked back on serials after this point (Undersea Kingdom notwithstanding).

Moving on to the feature film, the riffers go through ups and downs.  They struggle with the opening narration, but once the movie gets started they are in full swing and playing with it.  However as the movie drones on and lags in its middle portion Joel and the bots become a tad lost again.  Things pick up a bit for a bit of leaping lizard action toward the end, but we are overall left with an uneven experience.

The host segments are mostly duds.  I do very much love the Pocket Scientist during the Invention Exchange, and the closing segment has a few bright moments, but everything in between is a bit of a mess.  This is of course the home of the infamous Joey the Lemur host segment, which is a wild tangent of nothing, but in my view has more going for it than the Emotional Scientist sketch, which is just a major miscalculation.

I want to give King Dinosaur points for a wonderful short and soaring highs during the movie, not to mention it’s our first taste of the delightful efforts of Bert I. Gordon on the series.  But it’s hard to be blind to just how patchy the episode is even if you did enjoy it at the best of times.  Maybe if the episode had better host segments I’d be singing higher praises, but overall this episode lingers down in middling territory.

Average

The DVD

Shout Factory released a pretty solid print of the episode in Volume XXIII, with good picture and sound.  Included is the Incredible Mr. Lippert, a documentary on producer Robert L. Lippert, who produced King Dinosaur among others.  The documentary is excellent and very interesting, making the disc highly recommended.  Also included is King Dinosaur’s original trailer.

X Marks the Spot was also released by Rhino as a part of Mr. B’s Lost Shorts, featured on their Volume 6 set.  This set and compilation was also re-released by Shout Factory.