How to Invent Jurassic Park with Clay Models, a Badger Beard, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Blessing
It’s 3:15 AM. My eyes feel like they’ve been rubbed with coarse sandpaper, the cold pizza on my desk is starting to look back at me, and I am currently witnessing a rubbery Allosaurus having a twitchy, slow-motion wrestling match with a Triceratops on a cardboard volcano, while a man with a fake beard physically assaults a newspaper reporter.
Welcome, my friends, to the charming, pioneering, and delightfully jerky world of Willis O’Brien.
If you’ve never heard of Willis O’Brien, congratulations: you’ve never appreciated the godfather of special effects. For the uninitiated, O’Brien was the genius animator who would later make King Kong in 1933. But eight years before that, his filmmaking method for this silent dinosaur epic was a monument to absolute, mind-boggling patience:
- Build dozens of miniature dinosaur models out of clay, rubber, and metal wire armatures (complete with soccer bladders inside them that could be pumped with air to look like they were breathing).
- Painstakingly move those models one millimeter at a time, snapping a single frame of film, and repeating the process 24 times for every single second of screen time.
- Keep doing this in a dark studio for months on end until your eyes bleed and you’ve created the world’s first-ever giant monster blockbuster.
The result? The Lost World (1925).
The “Plot” (If we can even call it that)
Based on the famous novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the movie stars Wallace Beery as Professor Challenger—a hot-tempered scientist who claims that prehistoric monsters are still alive on a remote, hidden plateau deep in the Amazon jungle. The scientific community thinks he’s a lunatic, so Challenger organizes an expedition to South America to prove them wrong.
Once they climb up to the plateau, they find out that Challenger was 100% correct. The place is practically crawling with stop-motion dinosaurs who spend all their time eating each other and knocking over trees. Naturally, our heroes get trapped up there when a volcano erupts. But instead of just running for their lives, Challenger decides the best souvenir to bring back to England is a live, angry, full-sized Brontosaurus.
What could possibly go wrong?
Why You Need to Watch This Tonight
- The Arthur Conan Doyle Flex: Before the movie even starts, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (the literal creator of Sherlock Holmes) appears in a special prologue. He just sits in his study, looks at the camera, smiles, and essentially tells the audience: “Yeah, I wrote this, and yes, it’s going to melt your brain.” It is the ultimate author flex.
- Wallace Beery’s “Badger Beard”: Wallace Beery plays Professor Challenger, and his fake beard is so aggressively, hilariously fake it looks like a deceased badger was strapped to his chin with duct tape. He spends half his screen time screaming, waving his fists, and tackling journalists. He is an absolute joy to watch.
- The Grandfather of the City Rampage: Long before Godzilla stepped on Tokyo or King Kong climbed the Empire State Building, The Lost World invented the “monster wrecks a city” genre. Watching a 1925 clay Brontosaurus loose in London, knocking down Tower Bridge, and eventually falling into the River Thames is a glorious piece of cinema history.
The Verdict
Is it a good movie? It is an absolute treasure. For a film that is over a century old, the stop-motion dinosaurs still have an incredibly creepy, dreamlike quality to them. They twitch, they drool (thanks to the glycerin O’Brien used for saliva), and they carry a raw, handmade charm that modern CGI green-screen blockbusters can never replicate.
My Rating: 5 out of 5 rubber tails that twitch in 12 frames per second.
Wanna see where Jurassic Park actually began?
Turn off your phone, dim the lights, and go search for this silent dinosaur masterpiece on your favorite public domain video platform. Because it was made over a hundred years ago, this entire historic creature-feature is completely free for you to watch whenever you want to see claymation beasts kick some serious butt.
[WATCH “THE LOST WORLD (1925)” ON YOUTUBE (Opens in a new window)]
