Rex Appeal

A one-shot BBC TV Documentary from 2011 about the history of Dinosaur Media. Discusses several stock tropes present in dino-movies, and reflects on their cultural importance in a lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek way.

Thoroughly talks about:

• Gertie the Dinosaur
• The Lost World
• King Kong and its Remake
• Godzilla and its sequels and remake
• Gorgo
• One Million Years BC
• The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
• The Valley of Gwangi
• Jurassic Park and sequels

... and also features a stock of other, often pretty obscure productions, most of which are best left extinct.

Tropes used in Rex Appeal include:

• Computer Generated Images: The latest method of bringing dinosaurs and other monsters to life. The program also has a brief Take That moment at it, or more specifically at the '05 King Kong Remake, saying that the movie suffered from an overdose of over-the-top CGI scenes.
• Cultural Translation: Gojira's brash, American Recut. Also the later remake.
• Everything's Better with Dinosaurs: The main theme.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: The T. rex's defeat at the hands of King Kong. Some of the Talking Heads found it too disturbing.
• Feathered Fiend: Velociraptors. The real ones.
• Fight Scene Failure: "The fight between the ape^[1] and the dinosaur in Unknown Island. It has to be seen to be believed!"
• Frazetta Man, and their contrast with sexy cave-women.
• Fur Bikini: Raquel Welch could not be left out.
• Lost World: One of the more commonly used settings in early movies.
• Nubile Savage
• One Million BC: Discusses the time the "genre" was at its peak, and also how the overflow of Fan Service and increasingly diminishing roles of dinosaurs lead to its downfall.
• People in Rubber Suits: Godzilla, Gorgo, and tons of other, forgettable monsters the Narrator just calls "Crapasauruses".
• Prehistoria: The "inventive" new setting that dethroned the Lost World, but brought about a gigantic Anachronism Stew. Again, the cave-woman made audiences gloss over this.
• Prehistoric Monster: What Gertie, Gorgo and Ray Harryhausen's creatures were definitely not.
• Raptor Attack: The program goes on to point out that real-life raptors looked nothing like their Jurassic Park cousins, but even so, faux-raptors are still cool and scary.
• Sequelitis: Mostly in reference to the Godzilla and Jurassic Park movies, and how none of these sequels managed to overshadow the original.
• Slurpasaur: Strangely an avoided topic.
• Special Effect Failure: Films with poor SFX are mercilessly mocked.
• Somewhere a Palaeontologist Is Crying: Briefly touched upon, while JP is being analyzed.
• Stock Dinosaurs
• Stop Motion: A lost form of art in dinosaur media.
• Tyrannosaurus Rex: It's almost everywhere.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Dinosaur movies are all about spectacle. The documentary can thus also be seen as an overview on special effects history.

1. ↑ actually supposed to be a giant sloth, but yeah... from the looks of it, it might just as well be called an ape