The LBT Project: I Wish There Was More Dino Fighting
The U.S. Bureau of Fabulous Bitches was directed in the Fall of 2008 by the federal government to conduct an ongoing investigation into the scope of the Land Before Time (LBT) animated series. Our department is forging ahead on this by watching all thirteen movies in the LBT continuity. This is likely to be followed by reviewing the entire discography, fanfic community, and television show. You can read more about the project here.
So, we’re only one week into the project, but it’s clear already that I’m going to be a complete annoyance. Specialists need their own lingo, after all, and apparently referring to the movies as LBT, as in “LBT One is so much sweeter than the weird subplot that dominates much of LBT Four” is “obscure.” I just take my work very seriously.
The plot of LBT One is pretty simple: in the twilight of dinosaur dominance, geological cataclysm, and climate change, all the dinosaurs in the land are migrating for The Great Valley, a semi-mythical place rumored to exist where they can thrive. We’re introduced to Littlefoot, Cera, Ducky, Spike and Petrie, a diverse-group of kid dinosaurs that learn to work with one another (the directors tack on this ham-handed racism-is-bad subplot by having all the dinos live in a stratified, classist social system that stereotypes the other dinosaurs) and team up to reach the Great Valley after they are separated from their parents.
Watching it again though, what’s really striking is how phenomenally lame LBT One is. Really. Even for a kids movie, LBT One is shallow as the creepy puppet toys that were merchandised with the movie at Pizza Hut. The whole thing is mainly exciting for the totally badass few minutes where Littlefoot’s mother desperately fights off a maurauding “sharptooth.” More awesome perhaps is the endlessly amusing resource on this project, the terrifyingly comprehensive Land Before Time Wiki, which maintains a poorly written ongoing debbie-downer list of historical inaccuracies:
* “Tarpits are not just giant pools of tar, they are supposed to have a layer of water and sand. This way the creature being fooled would not realize it was a trap. Also, tarpits did not form during the age of the dinosaurs, they formed during the Cenozoic era.”
* “A Dimetrodon appears once in the film, which would have been extinct before the dinosaurs appeared. Also, Dimetrodon was bigger than the way it is depicted in the film.”
* And, favorite: “Tyrannosaurus couldn’t jump the way it did in the movie.”
What’s clear from the USBFB’s research though, is that LBT, James Taylor-like, has never, ever been cool to anyone. It was considered mass-market kitsch even before it got a chance. One Variety reviewer skewered the piece, calling the movie “one of the slowest hours ever to crawl across a screen. Animation quality is fine, but two-dimensional story will try the patience of all but the youngest viewers. Spielberg-Lucas aegis should lure initial business in 1400-screen release, but pic faces extinction soon after.”
Another wrote, “”Though LAND awes us with some wonderful animation and gorgeous backgrounds, the effect is ruined by shoddy editing and a lackluster story.”
And, in what is perhaps the most backhanded review on a kids movie ever, one New York Times review commented that “Luckily, it isn’t very long…it ought to win audiences’ hearts without wearing out their patience.”
Same goes for the production: as director Don Bluth recalled, “Spielberg said, ‘Basically, I want to do a soft picture that does not have a real driving plot. It’s about five little dinosaurs and how they grow up and work together as a group.’” The movie was aggressively blunted, “Nineteen scenes were cut, including front-on scenes portraying the children in severe jeopardy and distress. In addition, the children’s screams were replaced with milder exclamations.” And, ANIMATION magazine reported that “One of the principal sections that was cut was the Tyrannosaurus Rex attack sequence. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas apparently felt that it was too frightening and could even cause some psychological damage in very young children.” But instead of sanitizing the movie, the result is correspondingly schizo: Littlefoot’s mom gets axed, and ten minutes later we see Littlefoot frolicking around and laughing with all his new friends like nothing ever happened. The fact that their species is dying out, their home has been destroyed, their parents are dead, and they are lost and without food is rarely commented on.
Fascinating in a train-wreck kind of way, it’s worth commenting that this was the quality of work when the talented, successful people were still on staff. After LBT One, Bluth, Lucas, and Spielberg would never again work on the series — and were instead replaced by eighties-animation genius Roy Allen Smith for the next three movies (who, as IMDB indicates, was bizarrely involved as director in Family Guy and was layout editor for, successively, the “Mister T” animated series, “Thundarr The Barbarian,” “The Godzilla Power Hour,” and “Scooby Doo’s All-Star Laff-A-Lympics”)
All this, and the movie was still a financial success. Go figure.
