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Jimmy’s Notes on Episode 56: The Omni Viewer vs. ‘The Lost World’ (1925)

Published January 20, 2022

Did I ever tell you about the time I visited the fabled dinosaur plateau Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about in his novel The Lost World? And how there was a “hot girl” involved? No? Good, because I’m saving that for my autobiography. Regardless, despite some sidekick shenanigans from that wannabe Muppet, Snazzy Chapeau, when Omni Viewer visited for MIFV’s season three premiere (episode 56), I managed to take a few good notes for my first Jimmy’s Notes blog of 2022. I may not be contractually obligated to do follow-ups for Nate, but someone has to fact-check this goofball. So, here you go:

  • William Rutherford wasn’t the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes; only Prof. Challenger. According to Wikipedia,

Conan Doyle repeatedly said that Holmes was inspired by the real-life figure of Joseph Bell, a surgeon at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, whom Conan Doyle met in 1877 and had worked for as a clerk. Like Holmes, Bell was noted for drawing broad conclusions from minute observations. However, he later wrote to Conan Doyle: “You are yourself Sherlock Holmes and well you know it”.[14] Sir Henry Littlejohn, Chair of Medical Jurisprudence at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, is also cited as an inspiration for Holmes. Littlejohn, who was also Police Surgeon and Medical Officer of Health in Edinburgh, provided Conan Doyle with a link between medical investigation and the detection of crime.

  • The Lost City of Z was a 2009 nonfiction book by David Gran. It was made into a movie starring Charlie Hunnam in 2016. As for whether it was found or not, Wikipedia says,

Researchers believe that Fawcett may have been influenced in his thinking by information obtained from indigenous people about the archaeological site of Kuhikugu, near the headwaters of the Xingu River. After Fawcett’s presumed death in the jungle, Kuhikugu was discovered by Westerners in 1925. The site contains the ruins of an estimated twenty towns and villages in which as many as 50,000 people might once have lived. The discovery of other large geometrical earthworks in interfluvial settings of southern Amazonia has since been recognised as supporting Fawcett’s theory.

  • I’m not sure this was the only time Willis O’Brien used a football bladder to simulate breathing in his creatures. Wikipedia claims this was also done in King Kong (1933), but a citation is needed.
  • I found the opening theme of the Lost World TV series mentioned by Omni, and Nate said he remembered seeing a bit of it when I show it to him.
  • All this prequel talk…I’m having flashbacks to sand…I can’t go to the beach now…and I live on an Island!
  • Mammoths and mastodons are, in fact, not the same. Similar, but not the same. Read more here.
  • I checked the film during the city rampage, and there wasn’t a full-sized head. However, there were some excellent close-ups of the stopmotion puppet.
  • I always do internet searches with safe mode turned off. It’s more…exciting that way.
  • “Jimmygon” has a nice ring to it. I’ll get the Island’s geneticists on that right now!
  • Actually, there are studies that show people with bigger brains are smarter. No wonder Nate is a genius: he has a big head. 😛
  • I am 110% behind a boxing Cope and Marsh skeletons sculpture. I’ll petition Winter and the Board immediately!

Now for the ever-important—and increasingly large—leftover notes from Nate’s research with my riffs commentary.

THE FILM

  •  “Jocko” played by himself.
  • The plot moves briskly compared to novel. Characters introduced very quickly. Skips to lecture to introduce Challenger.
  • Gotta love the “overacting” and funny jump cuts mid-scene. (Reminds me of the show’s host. 😛 –Jimmy)
  • “Cock-and-bull story.” Ha! (Is this the “rule 34” version? –Jimmy)
  • In the Amazon. Just South America in novel?
  • Dead for 10 million years. More than that!
  • There wasn’t a Miss White in the novel, either. Not gonna lie: she’s pretty. Maple White’s daughter. Of course she’s the beautiful assistant. (No complaining here. –Jimmy)
  • Wait…is that Sherlock!? Or someone cosplaying him? (The first in-film Easter egg? –Jimmy)
  • Jocko the monkey wasn’t in the novel, either. Added for comic relief. (At least he isn’t a Gungan. –Jimmy)
  • I think Malone’s letters are text from the novel.
  • They’re introducing the ape-men already?! Proto-Chewbacca. (Does he rip arms out of socket? –Jimmy)
  • Pterodactyl was first in novel.
  • Okay, don’t tell us that Malone saved the bug.
  • The tree bridge. Another forerunner to Kong.
  • Really? Stop to catch the insect in middle of bridge? (I did that once…but I don’t want to talk about it. –Jimmy)
  • Brontosaurus takes out bridge—and squishes some spiders. (Ah. A spider pit joke. Hilarious. –Jimmy)
  • PSYCHO MONKEY?! WTF?!
  • The allosaurus vs. other dino fight is impressive if inferior to Kong. He picks his teeth? Arms too long.
  • Yes, he wiped out the last of a wood-tick species.
  • The trees have eyes.
  • Is that a torch or a giant cigarette? And it’s in color?! (That’s what wiped out the dinosaurs: smoking. –Jimmy)
  • The allosaurus vs. triceratops fight is one of the more famous scenes—and it’s gory! Trike wins. But then another allosaurus gets revenge for its mate. (“Dino Vengeance” is a B-movie waiting to happen. –Jimmy)
  • No one is paying attention to the dinosaur fights! The proto-kaiju fights!
  • The ape-man is very drooly.
  • Challenger is taking up pole dancing, and he sucks at it. 😛 (This is the “rule 34” version. –Jimmy)
  • They never call this place “Maple White Land.”
  • They play drums when he shoots the gun. Clever. “Mickey Mouse-ing.”
  • “Dam liar”? A liar about dams?
  • The colors fit the moods of the scenes very well. Red for eruption.
  • Does the allosaurus want to eat the bronto or hitch a ride during the eruption?!(“Rule 34” version…again? –Jimmy)
  • “Rock climbing monkey, Joel.” You just better hope he doesn’t fill and hang himself.
  • Jocko carried a rope ladder?!
  • I was waiting for the ape-man with the Joker smile to kidnap Paula. Because Kong.
  • Oh my gosh! Paula looks like Ann Darrow at the end! It’s very Kong.
  • Ten feet long? That’s WAY bigger!

Other Sources

Byrd (in LeMay)

  • As a teenage drifter, O’Brien was a guide for a fossil excavation for the University of Southern California.
  • The origins of the film are a complex feud between O’Brien and a fellow animator named Herbert Dawley. They were constantly fighting over the credit to O’Brien’s work in short films, particularly The Ghost of Slumber Mountain, and the legal shenanigans led to O’Brien working with producer Watterson Rothacker on this film. Dawley sued O’Brien over the animation process, citing patent violation, but this was settled out of court. There’s still debate over how much of Slumber Mountain was animated by either of them.
  • Over 50 dinosaurs were made for the film, and they included bladders to simulate breathing, saliva made with shellac and rubber cement, chocolate syrup to simulate blood.

Commentary by Nicolas Ciccone

  • The credits in this restoration was made for it.
  • There’s a missing scene that explains why the paper sends Malone to cover the story despite his clumsiness: basically, to get lawsuit money.
  • Wallace Beery (who played Challenger) was just like his character.
  • Many scholars theorize that Malone’s coming-of-age story arc was inspired by Doyle himself.
  • Bessie Love, who plays Paula, hated all the close-ups of her. (I didn’t. –Jimmy)
  • The attack by the cannibals explains why Zambo’s arm is broken later. Only stills remain of these scenes.
  • A 15-foot pterodactyl fossil was found in Brazil in the 1990s and named after Doyle.
  • Gomez, a “half-breed” character cut from the film, caused the tree bridge disaster. He’s a traitor.
  • The film doesn’t say how Maple White died, but the script has Roxton find a rifle bent in half. The implication was it was the ape-man.
  • The plateau is a bit too easy to find in the film.
  • The cast didn’t like working with Jocko. He bit and peed on everyone.
  • The romance is trite, but it could serve as a metaphor for the plateau: it’s a place of adventure and wonder we all wish we could visit.
  • A scene unfilmed from the script has Challenger and company on a ship with a caged bronto.
  • The end of the drunk’s scene, while not in the script, was described in a review as returning with a bottle of milk for a cat that grew huge.
  • Missed opportunity: Make Paula more adventurous.

“The Lost World: Secrets of the Restoration” by Serge Bromberg (and other essays in the booklet)

  • Many film historians link the decision to destroy prints of this film with the production of King Kong a few months later.
  • The first restoration by George Eastman House, used surviving 35mm Kodak nitrate negatives and a 35mm print found in the National Film Archive of the Czech Republic in 1992. It was an export copy that didn’t use the best angles (it was filmed with a second camera). The restoration was made for $80,000 given by the National Endowment for the Arts—and classic film buff Hugh Heffner(!).
    • The animated map sequence was in the trailer, and no one knows if it was a concept for the film or only the trailer.
    • It’s 76 minutes long and was published as an unlisted bonus feature on the DVD of the 1960 version.
  • David Shepherd Restoration (2000)
    • This used the same materials plus a few more. This big difference was the use of digital technology to upgrade the picture quality to standard-definition TV.  
    • The promotional footage found by Doyle was found at this time in the Robert Youngson collection.
    • The original footage of Doyle at his writing table was lost but was replaced with footage of him sitting on a bench addressing the audience from a 1927 Movietone film.
    • This was edited at the Lobster Films studio in Paris.
    • Two scores were commissioned for the film, including one by Robert Israel that harkened back to ‘20s-era films. The other was more modern.
    • 93 minutes long.
  • 2016 Restoration
    • Several months after the release of the previous restoration, David Adamitis contacted Lobster Films and gave them several cans of film, including some A negatives for The Lost World. These included color tints and missing scenes.
    • This was put together frame-by-frame by a three-man team over the course of six months using 2k technology and several other newly-discovered elements. Robert Israel composed another score for this one.
  • The music Israel composed included a Brazilian lullaby about a bogeyman called “Tutu Maramba,” which is sung by mothers to children to ward off evil so they may sleep. He adapted it to strings for the native girl playing guitar.

Season three of my always-essential blogs is off to a great start. This is going to be fun.

Next time YouTuber and up-and-coming filmmaker Kaiju Kim returns to continue the “Godzilla Redux” subseries by discussing Rodan (1956), which was the only non-Godzilla kaiju she watched a lot as a child. Then we get back to “Ameri-kaiju” with (hopefully) the original Tourist crew (Nick Hayden, Timothy Deal, Joe and Joy Metter) for King Kong (1933)’s spiritual sequel, Mighty Joe Young (1949). Exciting times for patriotic Kaiju Lovers ahead!

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