Uh, guys? The scary eyes are BEHIND you.
This
probably comes at absolutely no surprise to any of you, but…I like giant movie
monsters, and Gareth Edwards’ upcoming Godzilla
film is no doubt the, forgive the wording, King of my “Upcoming Must See
Films” list. My excitement for this film
has been building for quite some time, mostly due to the hype built around the
2012 San Diego Comic Con teaser trailer that never found its way online until
October 2013…briefly. I was able to see
the trailer a few times before it was taken down
and it sent my anticipation into almost foaming-at-the-mouth levels. That being
said, I’m going to do a "Countdown To Godzilla," where I look at media involving giant monsters while I
boil in my own anticipation of May 2014’s release. What part of, “Shut up and take
my money” does Warner Brothers & Legendary Studios not understand?!
In our first
episode of Countdown To Godzilla, we’re
going to head back to 1988 (well, sorta) to look at Dinosaurs Attack!. In case
you need some background history on this subject, I aim to please.
In 1962,
Topps released a series of trading cards called
The Civil War News, the brain child of Len Brown and Woody Gelman who
created the cards using a similar series from the 1930s,
The Horrors Of War, as a template, depicting violent imagery on the
front and journal-like exposition on the back.
These cards were very graphic, very violent and very successful.
In the same year, Topps (under the alias of
“Bubbles Inc”) launched the infamous
Mars Attacks! series, which combined the violent nature of
The Civil War with the popular 50s-60s trend of invaders from outer
space attacking Earth.
Oddly enough,
these were the ones to feel the wrath of
parents that felt the cards were too violent and were actually pulled from the
shelves for a time.
In 1965, Topps tried
again with a series called
Battle, which depicted World War II battle
scenes but the series flopped and this was the last of the Topps/Brown/Gelman
combinations.
In 1987,
Topps said, “Fuck it, let’s try again…with
DINOSAURS!”
Writer Gary Gerani and artists Herb Trempe
& Earl Norem teamed up for
Dinosaurs Attack!, a 55-card & 11-sticker series that brought back the
“freewheeling ‘bad taste’ graphics and humor,” as Gerani described it.
Pictured above: DA in a nutshell.
The story of
DA is as follows (uh, guess I better go out on a limb just to cover
my own ass and say, “SPOILERS!”): Dr. Elias Thorne and his wife Helen have
created a Time Scanner on the space station
Prometheus.
The Time Scanner creates a window to the
past, which Dr. Thorne plans on using to answer the age old question of how the
dinosaurs went extinct.
However, when
the Time Scanner is fired up, something goes awry and
the screen is filled with a pair of large reptilian eyes.
When
this happens, dinosaurs begin materializing out of thin air and attacking the
human race.
Even creatures documented as docile herbivores become
blood-thirsty monsters that
devour anyone in their path. The planet falls into
absolute chaos as the human population faces mass casualties and the world’s
military forces are
unable to hold them back.
While Dr. Thorne tries to come up with a solution, he has a dream where
he is visited by a creature called
“The Saurian,” who informs him that the
dinosaurs are under the control of something called “The Supreme Monstrosity,”
who wishes for the planet to be put back under the rule of the dinosaur.
Once Dr. Thorne comes up with a solution to
send the dinosaurs back to their own time, a
giant fiery hand comes through the
screen, grabs him and pulls him into another dimension.
The hand belongs to the
Supreme Monstrosity, or “Dino Satan,” as some fans call him, and Dr. Thorne tells his wife to
throw the switch.
She does, which hurtles the
dinosaurs
back to the Mesozoic,
some of them not entirely intact, but in doing
so initiates the Prometheus’ self destruct and
traps Elias in with Dino Satan.
Elias dies but Helen manages to
escape from the Prometheus and upon returning to Earth, she comes to the conclusion that
what wiped out the dinosaurs
was the human race.
While the cards may not have broken
serious ground in the market, hardcore collectors absolutely
LOVED them and the series was popular
enough that Eclipse Comics was going to launch a comic series that told the
story of the cards.
However, that story
was cancelled after just one issue and
Dinosaurs
Attack! seemed to fade away.
Fast
forward to 2013.
Having crashed and
burned with their
Jurassic Park
comics, IDW Publishing, who, at the time of this blog’s production, had the
rights to
Mars Attacks! and was
crossing it over with every other IDW property possible, decided to take a
break from Martians and focused their attention of finishing what Eclipse
started all those years ago by not only completing the
Dinosaurs Attack! story, but by also expanding the story from the
initial 3-issue run to a new 5-issue run.
Now, when I first heard about this, I was like, “Okay, whatever.”
My neighbors had shown me a few of the cards
when I was a kid and I even had a couple of the stickers on my headboard, but I
didn’t go absolutely crazy over them because I honestly wasn’t too keen on the
over-the-top violence seeing as how I liked dinosaurs as I saw them in the
science books.
In
high school, I somehow rediscovered
Dinosaurs
Attack! and the knowledge of the series’ existence has stuck with me since
I was able to appreciate it more.
As an
adult, my curiosity got the better of me and I decided to look into IDW’s
Dinosaurs Attack!
Upon reading the five issue
series, one of the first things that really stood out to me was just how little
of the cards were used to draw source material from.
Only 29 of the 55 cards are referenced to/included
in the series, giving writer Gary Gerani enough breathing room to flesh out the
characters on the
Prometheus and in the Ohio News Station so that you aren’t
just rooting for the dinosaurs smashing stuff and eating people but for the
people who are actually trying to do something about the dinosaurmageddon.
Some minor changes are made to the Thornes as
well.
In the cards, they were married
but in the comics, they are recently divorced and Helen is trying to shut down
the TimeScan project not because she’s a bitter ex-wife but because she is
genuinely concerned of the ethics of a project like this.
This also allows for some mystery whodunit
moments during the dinosaur invasion as the crew of the Prometheus tries to
figure out if all of this
is caused by Elias’ ESP or if something more sinister
is at work.
The comics also
do a very good job of keeping the spirit of the card series going, seeing as
how both have the same writer and artists.
Earl Norem returns to paint any scenes with the dinosaurs reeking havoc
while Herb Trimpe handles the human-based art.
Ordinarily I find it frustrating when a comic bounces back forth from
artist to artist (the final issue of
Marvel
Zombies vs The Army Of Darkness was REALLY bad for this) but with the world
of DA, this works, and it truly disappointed me in issue 5 when Dino-Satan
appeared and was handdrawn instead of painted.
Of ALL the things that should’ve been painted, Dino-Satan was the big
one.
*Sigh* It's just not the same...
However, to make up for it a couple
of issues end
with a cliffhanger style similar to the end of the old Adam West
Batman series, featuring corny lines
such as, “New Thrills, New Surprises…As The Fantastic Dinosaur Invasion
Continues Unabated!’ Or “With Selected Scenes In Super-Realistic DINOSCOPE”
over images not only recycled from the card series but original artwork that
makes me wonder if it was done just for the comics or if they were intended to
be in the cards but never saw the light of day until now.
One last
good thing that I want to touch base on here is that much like the cards, the
comics of DA throws in nods and references to other “Prehistoric Animals vs.
Modern Man” media.
For example, those
two things trashing Italy
in issue 2?
Those are the creatures from
The Giant Behemoth and
The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms,
respectively (couldn't find the comic art online, but
here's the card for reference).
Issue #4 has a slew of
references on a single page.
Look at these two panels: There’s Godzilla,
Gorgo, the Rhedosaur (
Beast From 20,000 Fathoms), every four legged lizard looks like they came from
the 1960s version of
The Lost World,
that dragon-thing looks like
Reptilicus, there’s
Rodan and
Gertie The Dinosaur, of all things!
Was NOT expecting
her to show up here.
All this
being said, there were a couple of things that I DIDN’T like about DA.
I had already mentioned that I was really
disappointed that Dino-Satan was not painted, but there was something else that
bothered me.
When Elias is visited by
The Saurian in his dreams, in the cards he looked more like the
humanoid Troodon model that theorized what dinosaurs would look like had they not gone
extinct.
Here, he looks more like a
skinnier version of The Lizard from
The
Amazing Spider-Man.
Dr. Connors? Is that you?
I also found that he comes off as much condescending as he is
helpful and I had really hoped IDW ran with this and had it turn out that The
Saurian was actually Dino-Satan. It also didn’t help that Dino-Satan doesn’t
speak so this lack of banter once he grabs Elias, in combination with the
handdrawn art style and green instead of red skin, actually makes him less
menacing and more…derpy.
DA also
seems to have troubles with pacing, if you are reading it from the individual
issues. The first issue is mostly
exposition and character setup, making the first issue seem like a bit of a
bore if you’re expecting them to deliver on the title of Dinosaurs Attack right from the
get-go. Issues 2 through 4 seem to do a
pretty good job of balancing character interaction with the death and chaos and
that’s where this series really shines.
Issue 5 seems really rushed as if the writer and artists were having fun
with the ideas they had but the powers that be said, “Okay guys, you seriously
gotta wrap this up” so the climax with Dino-Satan feel like it was just jammed
together to meet a deadline. I’m hoping
that if you were to read DA in a trade format that it’ll blend together a bit
more seamlessly, but we’ll have to wait until March and see (which I intend to get, by the way).
Basically, if you were to ask if I would
recommend this comic to anyone, I would probably suggest that they acquaint
themselves with the card series beforehand, just so they know
what they’re getting into. Because if you go into DA expecting something with little things like scientific accuracy, you’ll HATE it.
Now, would I want to
see a sequel?
Actually, yes.
Gary Gerani had come up with a sequel idea,
but since the original DA didn’t quite take off it never saw the light of day,
save for a
bonus card that came with the original Eclipse comic issue so it’d
be nice if, much like the first arc, IDW was able to finish that.
Of course,
the idea has been kicked around for some time of a DA movie. When Tim Burton had acquired the rights to Mars Attacks, he also had the rights to
DA with the intent of making that film first.
However, the release of Jurassic Park
crushed those ideas, which included both a live action and animated series, so Mars Attacks got to see the light of
day…for all the good that did for the film.
Really, I think DA’s time to be a film has come and gone. The series is too much of a throwback to the
man vs. prehistoric monsters movies of old to work nowadays as a film, in my
opinion. DA doesn’t take itself
seriously and has many nods to the old stop motion, guys-in-suits and trick
photography days that in a world rampant with CGI-fests and dark, gritty Christopher
Nolan reboots, it just wouldn’t feel the same and in the end, probably not
worth the efforts of both the studios and the filmmakers financially. If this was 1989 and the old special effects
technologies were still being used, then yeah, I’d be all for it…but it’s
not. I know nothing is sacred in
entertainment anymore, but DA works well as a tongue-in-cheek card and comic
series. Just leave it at that.
And
that concludes my review of Dinosaurs
Attack! Check back in a little bit
for the next episode of Countdown To Godzilla, where we’ll be looking at the
David Carrodine film, Q: The Winged
Serpent.
-The Cynic
