It's Alive!: The Science of B-Movie Monsters
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Book preview
It's Alive! - Michael LaBarbera
It’s Alive! The Science of B-Movie Monsters
Michael LaBarbera
Chicago Shorts
It’s Alive! The Science of B-Movie Monsters was originally published as The Biology of B-Movie Monsters
in The University of Chicago Magazine, 2003, © 2003, 2013 by Michael LaBarbera
All rights reserved.
Chicago Shorts edition, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-226-09488-5
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226094885.001.0001
CONTENTS
The Fantastic World of Mr. Spielberg
Biology and Geometry Collide!
A World Distorted Beyond Your Imagination
The Bigger They Are, The Harder They Fall
Terrors of the Deep
Giant Ants Attack!
Unexpected Biology: Parallel Universes and Alien Worlds
Notes
The Fantastic World of Mr. Spielberg
In the late 1990s, the Chicago Tribune published an article entitled When seeing is disbelieving.
The article opened with the words Never, ever go to the movies with Michael LaBarbera. . . . Chances are that the University of Chicago anatomy professor will. . . . tell you, in excruciatingly minute detail, just how the action on the screen is unlikely, unrealistic, or downright impossible. LaBarbera is an unrepentant member of the plausibility police. . . .
It’s true. When Jurassic Park (1994) was first released, I went to see the film with a paleontologist friend. As the rest of the audience cringed and shrieked, we excitedly whispered comments to each other—Classic large predator behavior patterns!
Superb—they got the bipedal kinematics just right!
Folks in adjacent seats were not amused. The Tyrannosaurus and Gallimimus sequences are truly breathtaking. If you want to see our best guess as to how dinosaurs moved and behaved, see this film.
I have only two quibbles with Jurassic Park, both minor. First, the title. I suppose Spielberg was stuck with the title of Michael Crichton’s novel, but except for the Brachiosaurus (and the Dilophosaurus, which was a complete fiction) all of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park actually lived in the Cretaceous. But what’s 100 million years among friends?
::: The (Cinematic) Evolution of Tyrannosaurids
My second quibble has a bit more substance, for it concerns the posture of the Tyrannosaurus. It’s possible to trace our understanding of tyrannosaurids by their representation in the movies. For most of the 20th century, celluloid Tyrannosaurus were heavily influenced by Charles Knight’s early 20th century sculptures and paintings; these reconstructed Tyrannosaurus as standing with its body vertical, crouched on its hind limbs. This is the posture of the Allosaurus in the classic silent film The Lost World (1925) and the Tyrannosaurus in Disney’s Fantasia (1940); both are good examples of this classical
view, one probably unconsciously modeled after our own bipedal posture with a bit of superimposed lizard.
[A painting by Charles Knight in Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History shows a confrontation between a Tyrannosaurus and a Triceratops—a popular subject in movies and illustrations of the days when dinosaurs walked the earth. The classical
view of the T. rex posture seen here—body vertical, hind limbs bent—has since been rejected by researchers, who now believe that T. rex kept its body parallel to the ground and its hind limbs straight.]
Even as late as 1969, The Valley of Gwangi has its Tyrannosaurus walking in this posture, although growing appreciation of dinosaurs as more bird-like and active (birds are living dinosaurs, close relatives of tyrannosaurids) yielded the more agile Gwangi, with a sinuous, lizard-like tail. (Ray Harryhausen, who did the special effects, reportedly once had a dream in which cowboys lassoed a T. rex; Valley of Gwangi was the embodiment of that image.)
More careful consideration of the biomechanics of large tyrannosaurs—the position of the center of