"Dinosaur" (2000) Should Get a Theatrical Re-Release
Foreword:
This was originally written on Tuesday November 22, 2022, and was posted on DeviantART on Wednesday November 23, 2022. This is yet another repost, this is my fourth one in a roll this month because I haven’t written about anything new. I haven’t found a topic that I would want to write about that would warrant its own post, and I haven’t reviewed anything new. I still haven’t seen The Killer’s Game even though I really want to, and I missed my chance to see it in theaters. I’ll have to watch it on digital, like on Fandango at Home or something. It used to be called VUDU, but Fandango acquired it, and they changed the name to Fandango at Home.
I do still plan on reviewing The Ghost and Molly McGee, that Disney Channel cartoon show that aired from 2021 to this year, 2024. I just have one more episode to go in Season 2, and then I’ll write my review. Hopefully by the end of October, but if not, then I’ll review it sometime in November, hopefully early November. Of course, Election Day 🗳️ is coming up, and I do plan on covering that once the election results 🗳️, to kind of reflect on who won and who lost. Fingers crossed that Vice President Harris wins 🤞, I’ll be casting my vote for her 🗳️. She can only win if we all help her win, if we all vote for her 🗳️, so let’s gear up and dig in deep.
If you do early voting 🗳️ then go out there and cast your votes now 🗳️ because early voting 🗳️ does give up an advantage, and it makes it difficult for Trump and the Republicans to catch up on Election Day 🗳️, which is when most Republicans cast their vote. Trump and MAGA 🇺🇸 have scared Republican voters so that they don’t do early voting 🗳️. They have so thoroughly brainwashed them and convinced them that early voting 🗳️ is bad and that’s it’s just a way for Democrats to steal the election 🗳️ from Trump and MAGA Republican candidates 🇺🇸. When in reality, it’s just another way of voting 🗳️, making your voice heard, and strengthening democracy overall by enfranchising more people and enabling them to vote 🗳️.
Early voting 🗳️ is convenient and makes the process easier for a lot of people who wouldn’t have voted otherwise 🗳️. So, early voting 🗳️ is strictly within the domain of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans who have woken up and sworn off Trump. MAGA Republican voters 🇺🇸 just don’t do early voting 🗳️ at all because Trump and his cronies have brainwashed them into hating it and being suspicious of it.
They’ve hurt themselves by doing that, and have given us an advantage that we wouldn’t have had otherwise if Trump and the MAGA Republicans 🇺🇸 didn’t propagandize people and gaslight them into hating early voting 🗳️. I won’t be voting early 🗳️however, that all being said. I prefer voting 🗳️ on the day because it makes it feel more official. Plus, I don’t even think early voting 🗳️ is even possible where I live. I live in Acoma, I’m an Acoma tribal member, and I don’t you can vote here 🗳️ until Election Day 🗳️. I’ll going with my grandma and we’ll be voting for Kamala Harris together since we both support her over Trump.
Like with the Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones journal and the Inhumanoids journal, this is journal that I had no plan on reposting here on the blog, until I was scrolling past it, looking for the journals that I did actually want to repost on the blog. I thought, “Why not? This is good enough topic, it’ll be good for my blog,” and so I’m reposting it here your reading pleasure. You can wrote those two posts that I just mentioned here if you want. Here are the links. I wrote this during the lead-up to Avatar: The Way of Water 💦.
The first Avatar movie had just been re-released in theaters to both get people caught up with the story since it had been 13 years since the first movie was originally released, and to hopefully get people hyped for the sequel, since the 2022 re-release apparently had an after-credit scene that was basically just a clip from or a preview for The Way of Water 💦. Similar to what the Wachowskis did at the end of The Matrix Reloaded. They not only ended that movie with a “To Be Continued…” line before the actual credits started to roll, but it also had an after-credit scene that was pretty much just a preview for The Matrix Revolutions, which was released six months later that same year, 2003.
I wonder how people actually stayed in the theater long enough to actually see that preview after the credits. This was long before the MCU, people weren’t accustomed to stayed after the credits to catch a glimpse at what comes next yet. The reason for that of course, was not only to generate hype for the third Matrix film, but also to show how interconnected Reloaded and Revolutions are. The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions were much more closely connected to each other than even the first Matrix (the original one from 1999) is to those films.
I still say that Reloaded and Revolutions are one movie split into two parts rather than being two separate movies. I think that because they were both made back-to-back, they were made by most of the same people, they were released the same year, and they have both titles that start with the letter R. The filmmakers themselves even said that they approached them as if they were one movie in two parts. The producer, Joel Silver pretty much said that. And I think if more people viewed them that way, people wouldn’t dislike them as much, especially Revolutions.
One of the biggest complaints levied at Revolutions is that it didn’t have a lot of stuff going on, that it was one long action scene after another. You had the battle inside Zion, which nearly ends in Zion’s total destruction for the sixth time (if you’ve seen the Matrix sequels, you’ll know what I mean by “the sixth time”), and then you had the climatic battle between Neo and Smith, which ends in a stalemate with neither combatant able to best the other because of how powerful they are. Neo ultimately has to defeat Smith by letting him corrupt his body and turn him into another Smith clone, so that the Machine leader, Deus Ex Machina could upload an antivirus software into the Matrix to eliminate all of the Smiths at once. Since Smith had pretty much become a computer virus that infected the entire Matrix, and threatened to destroy it all, and then spread to the Real World. He represented a threat that the Machines couldn’t defeat on their own, and needed Neo’s help to defeat, they needed the help of the One, even if they didn’t want to admit that they needed his help.
Those two action sequences happen practically back-to-back, and a lot of critics had a problem with that. They felt there was too much action and not enough story or character development, even though I felt that the movie had plenty of character development, particularly for Neo, Morpheus, and Smith. They’re all different men ♂︎ at the end of this movie than they were at the beginning, and at the beginning of the trilogy overall. They also complained that the movie didn’t have a traditional three-act structure, and was more of a two-act movie, or even a one-act movie.
Well, duh, of course it does, it’s the concluding chapter in this trilogy…or at least it was until The Matrix Resurrections came out. The previous movie, Reloaded was pretty much all setup, all story and plot, laying the groundwork for everything that will happen in the next movie, and then Revolutions is the payoff to everything Reloaded set up, showing the final battle at Zion and the final fight between Neo and Smith. The way the movie is structured makes even more sense and isn’t as jarring when you think of it as the second part to a two-part movie because Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was pretty much the same way.
Deathly Hallows Part 1 was pretty much all story, all character development, and was pretty much all plot. Some people complained that it was too slow or that didn’t have a lot of action at the time, but it was all to set up what happens in Part 2. Then Deathly Hallows Part 2 comes along is pretty much the payoff to all of the setup from Part 1, and is pretty much nothing but action from start-to-finish. Like, once they get to Hogwarts, it’s pretty much nothing but fighting, wizards casting spells against each other, and Harry Potter confronting Voldemort for the final time.
Though, Harry is not the one who kills him, it’s actually Neville Longbottom that ultimately kills Voldemort. He destroys the last Horcrux, and then Voldemort just turns to ash, and fades away like dust in the wind, never to seen again. Deathly Hallows Part 2 is pretty much just one long third act, just in the same way that The Matrix Revolutions is. It is one long third act, one long climax. Except Revolutions did first, years before Deathly Hallows Part 2 ever did and it wasn’t even titled as if it were a Part 2 to a singular movie. And yet, Deathly Hallows Part 2 got mountains of praise 😁👍 while Revolutions got mixed reviews 😕 at best.
People just weren’t ready for that sort of thing yet, they weren’t accustomed to it when Revolutions came out. Yeah sure, there was Lord of the Rings, but those those films were more individualized and self-contained than Reloaded and Revolutions were, like you can watch each of the three Lord of the Rings films by themselves and enjoy them as individual movies without feeling as if something’s missing. That means of course that they can be judged as individual movies on their own as well as be judged as parts of a single whole.
But, you can’t really do that with Reloaded and Revolutions, you have to watch them and judge them as if they’re one movie split into two parts. Revolutions more so than Reloaded, like Revolutions doesn’t work or it doesn’t work as well if haven’t watched Reloaded first. Reloaded, you can kind of get away with watching it by itself without watching the next movie, and it does kind of work on it own and can be judged on its own, but Revolutions can’t. You have to Reloaded first to truly appreciate Revolutions, the movie is way more rewarding if you do that.
Disney also re-released Avatar in order to increase the movie’s box office gross. In the intervening years, Avatar was outgrossed by Avengers: Endgame, the concluding chapter in the Infinity Saga of the MCU. Star Wars: The Force Awakens also outgrossed Avatar, but only domestically here in the US 🇺🇸, I’m talking worldwide total gross. And of course, they couldn’t have that, they couldn’t have an Avatar sequel come out when the first movie’s one claim to fame was trampled on by one of their own movies.
So, they had to rectify that by re-releasing Avatar two months before The Way of Water 💦 came out. I also think James Cameron had something to do with it too, he also wanted to increase the movie’s box office gross and help it reclaim its title as the “highest grossing movie of all time” after Endgame stole its thunder and claimed that title from it. Yeah sure, he congratulated Endgame at the time for becoming the highest grossing movie of all time, but you could tell that part of him was jealous and resentful that this superhero movie that dethroned his little sci-fi alien movie. He wanted it to get to reclaim its throne and become the highest grossing movie yet again.
So, he convinced Disney to re-release the movie in preparation for The Way of Water 💦, and he pitched it to them as a way of promoting The Way of Water 💦, rather than what it actually was which was just a petty and spiteful ego-boosting move. Cameron’s ego was hurt by Endgame outgrossing Avatar, and he needed something to repair his little ego. But, he presented as a way to promote the sequel, as part of that film’s marketing strategy and ensure that made just as much as the first one when it first came out. And Disney were more than happy to go along with it because it meant more money 💵 for them 🤑.
This bumped up the movie’s box office total to $2.923 billion 💵, bringing it pretty close to $3 billion 💵. Avatar had officially reclaimed its title as the highest grossing movie of all time (unadjusted for inflation), and both Disney and Cameron pretty much assured that no other movie would be able to top it. At least not any time soon. It might take several decades and several generations for another movie to come along that could have any chance at outgrossing Avatar. As unlikely as that seems. Not even Avatar’s own sequel could top it. While The Way of Water 💦 did make a lot of money 💵, and did cross the coveted $2 billion 💵 mark, it still made less than the first Avatar movie, even when it originally came out.
When Avatar first came out in 2009, it made $2.749 billion 💵 worldwide, becoming the first movie to ever make more than $2 billion 💵, while The Way of Water 💦 only made $2.320 billion 💵 worldwide. That’s way less than what Avatar made when it originally came out, so if Cameron’s intention, or one of his intentions, was to ensure The Way of Water 💦 would make just as much, if not more than the the first movie, then I’d say he failed. I think the big reasons why The Way of Water 💦 made less than the first one is that A, it had been 13 years since the first one, and Avatar had faded from people’s memory.
A lot has been said about the lack of cultural impact that Avatar has made, and it how it just kind of came and went without leaving much of a lasting impression on pop culture where people were still talking about it, still watching, parodying it, referencing it in other movies or shows, and still buying merchandise from it years later. That didn’t happen, or at least, not to the same degree as other franchises like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, or even Cameron’s own movies like The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Aliens, and Titanic (1997). Titanic (1997) had more of a lasting cultural impact than Avatar some people argued.
The huge gap in-between didn’t help matters much either as the sequel was taking so long to make that people stopped caring after a certain point. Some people, including myself, started thinking that maybe the sequel would never come out, that it would eventually get canceled and never see the light of day. And even when it did come out, a lot of people still didn’t really care, like, “Whatever 😕, we’ll just stay home or watch something else. Going to the theater is too expensive now anyway. And what, the movie’s over 3 hours long? 😬 I got better use of my time and money 💵 than that.” And the box office gross kind of proved that without a shadow of a doubt. People weren’t drawn to Avatar, or at least, not in the same numbers as they were when the first one came out.
B, it was a sequel, and while sequels are usually expected to make more than the first movie, that’s not always the case. Each of the Star Wars sequels made less than the one that came before it, with Star Wars: The Last Jedi only making $1.334 billion 💵 compared to The Force Awakens’s $2.071 billion 💵 gross, and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker making only $1.077 billion 💵 compared to The Last Jedi’s $1.334 billion gross. And of course, most recently, we had Joker: Folie à Deux, which bombed at the box office 💣, making only $165.9 million 💵 worldwide so far against its estimated $190 million to $200 million budget 💵.
That is in stark contrast to Joker (2019), which made $1.079 billion 💵 at the worldwide box office against its much smaller and much more modest $55 million to $70 million budget 💵, becoming the first R rated film in history to make $1 billion 💵. Like, that is a pretty steep drop off from the first movie to the second movie in terms of box office gross. So, it’s never a guarantee that a sequel will make as much or more than the first one, sometimes, it makes less. Just like we saw with Transformers: Age of Extinction and Transformers: The Last Knight, just like we saw with the Star Wars sequels, just like we saw with Avatar: The Way of Water 💦, just like we saw with Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, and just like we saw most recently with Joker: Folie à Deux.
And lastly, C, people just didn’t like The Way of Water 💦 as much as the first one. I mean, yes, there were people who hated the first one and were going to hate this one no matter what, but even people who liked the first Avatar didn’t really like The Way of Water 💦. Whether it was because of the insanely long runtime, 192 minutes (3 hours and 12 minutes), or whether it was because of the plot, people just generally thought that The Way of Water 💦 was inferior to the first movie. As a lot of sequels tend to be.
I’ve never seen The Way of Water 💦 for myself, but watching reviews of it on YouTube, listening to way people describe the plot, it makes sense to me why people wouldn’t like it. It pretty much just sounds like the first movie again but in the ocean with a bunch of kids and teenagers. There’s also a bunch of stupid characters, like a human character named Spider 🕷️, who’s the son of the main villain from the last movie (who we never heard about until now), and the main villain from the last movie coming back in an Avatar body and having an entire squad of over-the-top cartoonishly evil military dudes. And I do emphasize “dudes” because they made one of the evil military guys in Avatar bodies that are led by Quaritch (also in an Avatar body) look like a stereotypical right-wing chud, sunglasses 🕶️ and all. Like, if you look up the word “chud” on the Urban dictionary, they show a picture of one of the Avatar military guys as an example.
If this trend continues on with the next movie, Avatar: Fire and Ash 🔥, we could see a situation where the Avatar series has diminishing returns, with each Avatar sequel making less money than the last, until we get to point where Avatar 4 and Avatar 5 only make $1.765 billion 💵 or $1.432 billion 💵, not even making it to $2 billion 💵. Especially if they all hit their intended release dates. James Cameron and Disney both plan releasing each of the Avatar sequels after The Way of Water 💦 on a 2 to 3 year basis, with Fire and Ash 🔥 set to come out next year in 2025, the yet to be titled Avatar 4 set to come out in 2029, and the yet to be titled Avatar 5 set to come out in 2031. I feel like people will just get burnt out after awhile, just like how they got burnt out on Star Wars, and Marvel to a certain extent. Though, honestly, I feel like James Cameron and Disney might pull that re-release bullshit and re-release The Way of Water 💦 and some of the other sequels just to bump up their box office so that they’re almost the same as the first movie.
When I saw that Avatar did get re-released in theaters, and not like a small limited one, but a full worldwide (or at least nationwide) theatrical re-release with the works, I thought, “Why not re-release Disney’s Dinosaur in theaters?” When Dinosaur (2000) came out, it was not a huge hit 😞. Despite the marketing blitz and media hype for it, the movie bombed at the box office 💣, making only $349.8 million 💵 against a $127.5 million budget 💵. That was not enough for the movie to break even, due its high production costs and its equally high marketing costs. It did better on home media, making $198 million 💵 in sales for the DVD 📀 and VHS releases 📼. But, as far as the theatrical release went, it was not a huge success.
If any movie needs a bump in its box office total, it’s definitely Dinosaur (2000), a movie that wasn’t anywhere near as successful as it could’ve been and should’ve been. Not a movie like Avatar, which was already a huge success, and is only getting re-released to generate hype for its sequel and to further inflate the director’s ego. I especially think now that Dinosaur (2000) deserves a theatrical re-release more than ever, not just because it’s a good movie and is pretty underrated, but also in light of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and The Mummy (1999) being re-released theatrically earlier this year for their 25th anniversaries. I also mentioned Ice Age 🧊 in here, which did actually get a theatrical re-release, albeit a very limited one.
Even Morbius was re-released in theaters, back in 2023. I guess Sony Pictures and Jared Leto thought that all of the jokes and memes about the movie were out of genuine love and adoration rather than mockery and disdain which is what they actually were. It failed, making even less than it did when it was originally released in theaters back in 2022. The re-release barely added $280,000 💵 to the movie’s worldwide box office total. If those movies can get , then why not Dinosaur (2000)? The movie’s 25th anniversary is next year, so it could work. Just the music from that film alone would make it worth it. I also think that Attack of the Clones should get a theatrical re-release since its 25th anniversary is around the corner in three years, but that’s a different story. Go read my review to learn more about that.
A lot of people used to hate Dinosaur (2000), saying that it was one of the worst animated films that Disney ever produced, simply because the dinosaurs talked. There were other reasons people gave for why they didn’t like Dinosaur (2000), but one of the main ones that I learned for many years was that they didn’t like that the dinosaurs talk. Which is pretty much the same reason people give for why they didn’t like the 2013 Walking with Dinosaurs movie. I actually saw that movie in theaters, and I actually enjoyed it. Apparently, my family and I were the only ones since everyone else f-ing hated it 🤬. And it had to do with the decision to add voiceovers and making the dinosaurs talk instead of having the dinosaur act like animals and have no dialogue whatsoever.
That’s pretty much the same situation with Dinosaur (2000). It was going to be this much more ambitious movie where the dinosaurs didn’t talk at all, they weren’t cartoony, they were more realistic looking, and the whole movie didn’t have any dialogue. It was originally conceived by Phil Tippett and Paul Verhoeven as a stop motion project before it morphed into the CGI live action hybrid that it ultimately became.
It was going to be a much darker film about dinosaurs in their natural habitat, living as they might have lived millions of years ago. But, as the years went by, the movie became much lighter in tone, and much more cartoony especially once Disney got involved. They “Disneyfied” the project. It was no longer the naturalistic movie about more realistic animalistic dinosaurs, but instead, more of a traditional Disney animated movie, but with dinosaurs. Which isn’t bad, but a lot of people didn’t think so.
A lot of people hated and resented the movie for denying them what could’ve been: a darker and much more naturalistic movie where we just see dinosaurs in their element, behaving as a real animals, no narration, no dialogue, no nothing, just dinosaurs walking and running around, doing their thing. That’s not to say that this movie wouldn’t have had any story, it probably would, it just wouldn’t be conveyed through traditional means, like dialogue or even narration. It would’ve been a bit similar to Phil Tippett’s own stop motion animated short film, Prehistoric Beast, but at feature length.
Walking with Dinosaurs (2013) was going to be much the same way, until Twentieth Century Fox made the controversial decision to add voiceovers as a way of “relating more” to the general audience. It failed. Walking with Dinosaurs (2013) seriously underperformed at the box office, making only $126.5 million 💵 against a $80 million budget 💵, which might sound good on the surface, but once you factor in marketing costs, it’s a disappointment.
But, we never got that. To this day, dinosaur enthusiasts have never gotten that pure naturalistic dinosaur film with no dialogue or narration that they’ve been wanted ever since they saw Phil Tippett’s short film, Prehistoric Beast all those years. Prehistoric Beast came out in 1984 after all, so it’s been a long time. And I fee like that a lot of people took their anger out on this movie 🤬. Even though the movie wasn’t that bad, in fact it wasn’t bad at all from my perspective, people were so angry 😡 about not getting the movie that they were promised all those years ago, back in the 1980s when Phil Tippett and Paul Verhoeven were still attached, that they just trashed on this perfectly fine, perfectly serviceable, perfectly decent movie. It’s a good family movie, and it has a lot of entertainment value, that is just barely now, being recognized all these years later.
The movie’s finally starting to get more of a following, especially now that the people who grew up with it, such as myself, are adults now and express our opinions and articulate the reasons why we like this movie. Obviously, the music is great, the characters are great, they’re all pretty likable, well written, and well voice acted. The voice cast is actually pretty diverse for a movie from the year 2000. Most of the lemur characters were voiced by black actors with the exception of Zini, who is voiced by a Latino actor (maybe…), the main antagonist of the film, Kron is voiced by a black actor, and the elderly female Styracosaurus ♀︎, Eema is voiced by a black actress. That was a cool little fun fact that I learned about after I wrote this journal, and I even wrote an update mentioning it. It just goes to show how progressive and forward-thinking this was for a movie that was made during the 1990s and came out in the year 2000.
The story is pretty good too, it’s very well-written. It’s the closest thing to an alternate history story showing what would’ve happened if the dinosaurs survived the K-T extinction, besides maybe Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur, which I do not count, mostly because I think it was bad. Yeah I said it, I think Dinosaur (2000) is better than The Good Dinosaur. The one key difference is that in this movie, Dinosaur (2000), the asteroid ☄️ still hits the Earth 🌎 around the Yucatán Peninsula in what is now modern-day Mexico 🇲🇽, it’s just that the dinosaurs somehow survive this, and the ones that did survive migrate in-land to find a new home untouched by the asteroid impact ☄️.
I mean, yes, recent scientific research and discoveries have shown the dinosaurs did survive for quite some time after the asteroid impact ☄️ in the Yucatán, like thousands of years after the disaster, and that their ultimate extinction wasn’t an instantaneous process like many had assumed for years after the asteroid theory ☄️ was first proposed, like it wasn’t over night. But, it wasn’t as if the dinosaurs found some promise land, some idyllic paradise where they could all live together in harmony, and that’s where the movie completely diverges from any possibility that it is based in any scientific reality, or based on a paleontological research.
It is pure fantasy, and is pretty much alternate history as I said. The presence of lemurs should’ve told you that this was pure fantasy since, correct me if I’m wrong, lemurs did not exist during the Mesozoic era. They did not exist in the Cretaceous period, they evolved later on in the Cenozoic era, when primates evolved since lemurs are primates. Compare that to The Good Dinosaur which is also an alternate history/what if story where the dinosaurs never went extinct, only in that movie, the asteroid ☄️ never hits the Earth 🌎, it misses, and that’s where the timeline diverges from our own.
In some ways, you could say that Dinosaur (2000) is like a dinosaur version of The Ten Commandants, or The Prince of Egypt 🇪🇬 for those closer to my generation. It’s like the Book of Exodus where Moses is adopted as a baby after floating down a river in a basket, and then frees his people, the Israelites from slavery by the Egyptian pharaohs, and then leads them to the Promise Land. It’s that story, only replace the basket with a baby inside with a dinosaur egg 🥚, replace Moses with Aladar, the Israelites with the other herbivorous dinosaurs that migrated after the asteroid ☄️ hit, and the Egyptian pharaoh with Kron, and the Biblical plagues with the asteroid ☄️, the Velociraptors, and the Carnotaurs. This isn’t the only movie that has used the Book of Exodus as the basis for its story, nor is the only film that could interpreted as a metaphor for that story or for that character, Moses. But it is pretty striking to see that movie is basically “Moses with dinosaurs.” No one ever thought to do the Moses story with dinosaurs until this movie came along.
The animation was pretty good too. Like I said before, it’s a CGI live action hybrid, meaning that the characters are CG, but the environments were live action. They actually went out and filmed scenes on location to places like Hawaii, Florida, California, Jordan 🇯🇴, Australia 🇦🇺, and Samoa 🇼🇸, and then they would composite the CGI dinosaur and lemur characters into. This is probably why the movie cost so much to make, besides the long development time. The movie went into production and began development under Disney in 1994, so it took them 6 years to make this, and the movie was technically already in development long before that, starting in 1986, and had entered a period of development hell before Disney picked it up and made it happen.
The longer a movie takes to make the higher its budget will be since the costs keep racking up, and the movie just goes over budget and over schedule. This is probably why Avatar: The Way of Water 💦 ended up costing so much. I’ve talked so much about that movie and I haven’t even mentioned what its budget was. Avatar: The Way of Water 💦 is said to have had a $350 million to $460 million budget 💵 😱. I know, that’s pretty big, that makes it either the ninth most expensive movie ever made, or the most expensive movie ever made if the $460 million 💵 estimate is the correct amount. That’s almost half a billion dollars 💵.
That would make it more expensive than The Force Awakens, which had a $447 million budget 💵 and is the current record holder as the most expensive movie ever made. But, the Wikipedia page listing the most expensive movies ever made (unadjusted for inflation) has The Way of Water 💦 at ninth place as I said, and lists the more conservative estimate, $350 million 💵. So, it’s likely that amount, or some amount in-between those two extremes. As I said before, that movie was delayed multiple times, was being worked on for a total of 13 years. Whether it was due to technology limitations that had to be overcome or due to reshoots or due to James Cameron’s own self-aggrandizement, the film was delayed and pushed back and that caused the budget to balloon until it was between $350 million and $460 million 💵.
I don’t know if this is true, I’m just speculating, but I think the reason why they did it this way because Disney was able to create entirely CGI environments that looked convincing and looked aesthetically pleasing to the eye. That looked good in other words. Pixar could do it to a certain extent (there were still technological limitations at that time that not even Pixar could overcome), but not Disney Animation themselves. They were behind Pixar when it came to CG animation, or 3D animation as it’s also known as. So, to work around, they thought, “Why not shoot the environments in live action, and then animate the dinosaurs on top of that?” It’d be a lot like shooting a live action film, and they had already seen that works with Jurassic Park, the premier dinosaur movie at the time and even now since no dinosaur movie since has topped it in terms of quality, cultural and filmmaking significance, except here all of the characters would be computer animated.
It made the animators’ job a lot easier, and was a clever work around for the technological limitations at the time. The end result looks pretty unique. We hadn’t really seen that many animated movies animated in that style before, and we haven’t seen it since, especially now that 3D animation and CGI has improved significantly since the 1990s and the 2000s when this movie was being made. But, I wouldn’t might if we got an another animated movie that was animated in this style again, where the characters were animated, but the environments were live action.
Two of the best animated sequences in the whole movie are the egg scene 🥚, where we see Aldar’s egg 🥚 getting picked up by all these different dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures, traveling up rivers and streams, until it gets picked up by a pterosaur, likely a Pterodactyl or a Pteranodon until it finally lands on the island 🏝️ with the lemurs. I think it’s literally called Lemur Island 🏝️ in the film. It’s not supposed to be Madagascar 🇲🇬 or anything, I’m not even sure if Madagascar 🇲🇬 even existed back then in the Cretaceous Period, but then again, lemurs didn’t exist back then either, so who knows 🤷♂️? It’s just a random island 🏝️ with nothing but lemurs. No other animals seem to live on this island 🏝️ except lemurs and maybe insects, which is why they’re all shocked when this egg 🥚 just falls right out of the sky and hatches a baby dinosaur. They don’t even know what a dinosaur is because they’ve never seen one in their entire lives. Aladar is the first one.
It’s a good thing they don’t even eat meat or otherwise they’d be died a long time ago, long before Aladar ever arrived. Or they do eat meat and they just cannibalize each other 🤔. Or maybe they eat bugs 🤷♂️. That scene was great, it was visually stunning, and it has great music too, some of the best music in the entire movie. It’s no wonder they put that scene in all the trailers, and put a lot of emphasis on it. There’s no dialogue in that scene, in fact, there’s no dialogue at all in the opening scene. There’s just the narration by Plio, the main female lemur ♀︎ of the film, who becomes like a mother figure to Aladar after he hatches from his egg 🥚.
She’s pretty much his adoptive mother, since his birth mother was chased away from her nest by that Carnotaurus at the beginning, and then having her nest be stepped on by that same Carnotaurus during that same scene, and then having her one surviving egg 🥚 be stolen by an Oviraptor, only for it to get lost and through some improbable circumstances, end up on an island full of lemurs 🏝️. If this movie had been successful enough to get a sequel, especially a direct-to-DVD sequel 📀 like every other successful Disney animated movie got back then, it probably would’ve been about Aladar meeting his biological mother. It’s a sequel plot that writes itself.
I think that’s also why a lot of people were misled about this film because they just kept showing that scene in all the trailers, and it made some people think the movie wasn’t going to have any dialogue at all. And they were kind of led into a false sense of security when the movie started because none of the dinosaurs talk in that opening scene, and it’s not until we get to the lemur island 🏝️ that the characters start talking, and never stop talking. Like, it got their hopes like, “Oh yeah, this movie’s not going to have any dialogue, and it’s going to be a completely naturalistic movie where we dinosaurs in their natural habitat, doing their thing 😁.” But, when the lemurs show up, and they start talking, they were like, “Oh 😕, it’s going to be a standard Disney animated movie with talking animals, only with dinosaurs instead of modern day animals? Nevermind 😒.”
But besides that, besides it contributing to the somewhat misleading marketing, it is a truly great scene, and very few animated movies since then have had anything that close to topping it. Not even anything else in this movie comes close to topping this scene, though they get real close. In a lot of ways, this scene was kind of extension or a natural progression of the flying scene in The Rescuers Down Under, where that giant gold eagle 🦅, Marahute takes the main kid in that movie, Cody out on a flight through the Australian Outback 🇦🇺. It’s like that scene but taken to a whole other level. They really perfected it in a lot of ways.
BTW, Rescuers Down Under is another great movie that’s pretty underrated and is worth watching that unfortunately didn’t do that well at the box office 😞. It bombed at the box office 💣, making only $47.4 million 💵, being outgrossed by both Home Alone and Rocky V. Which is funny because Home Alone also featured John Candy, although he had a much smaller role in that movie than he did in Rescuers Down Under. He’s pretty much a cameo in Home Alone, whereas he’s a main character in Rescuers Down Under.
Another great scene in this movie that’s well animated, and shows how great animation is, is the asteroid impact scene ☄️, where we see the asteroid ☄️ actually hit the Earth 🌎, and Aladar and the lemurs are running for their lives, dodging all of the falling debris, and escaping the oncoming blast 💥. It’s a truly unsettling scene that kind of gives you a sense of what it was back then when the asteroid ☄️ hit the Earth 🌎 66 million years ago. Even if the characters do survive this one despite being pretty close to it, and the dinosaurs overall never go extinct.
It’s the asteroid scene ☄️ that does signal a significant turning point in the film, where it comes a fight for survival, as Aladar and the lemurs migrate in-land to find a new home unaffected by the asteroid impact ☄️. It stops being as light-hearted and playful as it was before, and becomes a bit darker because the characters are no longer in a position where they play around and have fun. They lost their home, and they have struggle to survive and find a new home, one just as good if not better than their previous one.
If none of what I just said was enough to convince you that Dinosaur (2000) is a good movie, at least you could say that it had dinosaurs that were not typically depicted in movies or TV shows. This is one of the few mainstream movies to feature on-screen depictions of Iguanodons, Styracosaurus, Altirhinus, and Carnotaurs. For the longest time, this was only real on-screen film depiction of Carnotaurus, you know until Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom came out and put a Carnotaurus in there, only for it to be killed the main T. rex of the Jurassic franchise, Rexy. BTW, did you know that Fallen Kingdom is technically the second most expensive movie ever made (unadjusted for inflation). It had a budget of $432 million 💵, isn’t that insane? It’s crazy how expensive that movie was.
The Carnotaurus was also featured in Jurassic World Dominion, during the Malta scene 🇲🇹 in the dinosaur black market, but that movie only had a $265 million budget 💵, which is still big, $265 million 💵 is nothing to sneeze at (it’s still a lot of money 💵 for a movie), but it’s nothing compared to Fallen Kingdom’s $432 million budget 💵. Why did Fallen Kingdom cost so much I wonder? Anyway, at least you could say that Dinosaur (2000) had Carnotaurs as its main antagonists rather than resorting to the typical and expected T. rex. Even if, admittedly, the Carnotaurs in this movie are not really accurate, at least to not according to current science (they’re pretty outdated), and are really just T. rexes but with horns.
I mean, yes, if you were to over generalize and oversimplify, you could say that Carnotaurus was essentially a T. rex but with horns, it was a carnivorous theropod dinosaur, but they were not the same. There were significant differences between the two species beyond just one was bigger than the other and one had horns and the other didn’t. They weren’t part of the same genus as T. rex, they were not Tyrannosaurids, they were apart of their own genus, the Carnotaurus, pretty much being the only described species in that genus so far. And the latest scientific research indicates that it may exhibited behaviors that were quite different from that of T. rex or any other Tyrannosaurid species.
And give this movie credit too, it did have the most accurate on-screen depiction of Velociraptors at the time. The Velociraptors in this movie were much more accurate than the ones in Jurassic Park or The Lost World: Jurassic Park which is hard to believe. Like, people viewed the Jurassic Park films has having the most accurate movie dinosaurs of all time (they almost viewed the movies as edutainment in a lot of ways even though they clearly weren’t 😬😅), but the two areas where they missed the mark and were pretty inaccurate were the Dilophosaurus and the Velociraptors. But, this film doesn’t do that.
Instead it has raptors that are much closer in size, appearance, and behavior to what scientists currently believe that the real-life Velociraptor was actually like. The only thing missing are the feathers 🪶, but I’m willing to let that slide since the feather thing 🪶 was still a highly contest debate within the paleontological community at the time, and none of the other dinosaurs in the movie (or any other dinosaur movie around that time) had feathers 🪶 either. Also, there is some debate over whether Velociraptor was a true pack hunter or not, and this movie definitely depicts Velociraptors as pack hunters, but most media that depicted Velociraptors or any other Dromeosaurid as pack hunter, so I’m willing to let that one slide too since it’s still a somewhat debated issue and the science on it has not been settled.
If the science has ever been settled on anything relating to the dinosaurs. Science is ever changing, ever evolving with the times and with the currently available evidence, and it will change on a dime depending on whatever new evidence arises. That’s probably the best quality about science is that it’s never stagnant and never set in its own ways and its own doctrine, its own dogma, it’s always open to new evidence that may radically change previously held conclusions.
Also, the Dinosaur (2000) ride at Animal Kingdom in Disney World was pretty cool when it was still up from what I’ve heard. I wish I could’ve experienced but I’ve never been to Disney World in my entire life, or Universal Studios for that matter. If none of the reasons that I’ve talked about here are good enough reasons for Disney to give this movie a theatrical re-release, on its 25th anniversary next year in 2025 or some other year, then I don’t know what will.
I just really want to see this movie get the redemption that it deserves, and get more of the attention and love that it deserves because it is a genuinely good movie, tremendously well-made, and it is one of my favorite movies. I haven’t seen it in a while, I really want to re-watch it, and I’m sure that if I ever do, I’ll still like it a lot. I mean, the movie’s not a musical 🎶, and that’s always a plus in my eyes 😁👍.
However, that all being said, I highly doubt that Disney would ever give this movie a theatrical re-release because it was a disappointments, and they don’t seem particularly keen on rewarding failures and disappointments from their past. I know they’re doing that a lot in the present with their current work, but I’m referring to all of their older movies from decades past, pre-2010s, pre-MCU, that kind of stuff.
For the past 24 years, it really does seem like Disney has been trying to bury this movie and pretend like it doesn’t exist, along with the other Disney animated movies that were released around that time that were not huge financial successes, like Fantasia 2000, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Treasure Planet, and Home on the Range. Two of those movies, Atlantis and Treasure Planet are both really good and really underrated, and I think are both deserving of theatrical re-releases.
Both of their 25 anniversaries are coming up real soon with Atlantis’s 25th anniversary being in 2026, and Treasure Planet sharing its 25th anniversary in 2027 with Attack of the Clones, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Spider-Man (2002), Lilo & Stitch, Super Mario Sunshine ☀️, Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, and Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. So, it’d be perfect. It’s funny I mention Lilo & Stitch because it’s been confirmed that it’s going to get a live action remake sometime in the future. It was successful enough and popular enough to get the live action treatment from Disney along with all of their Renaissance classics; the most recent one being The Little Mermaid 🧜♀️ (2023).
But, Lilo & Stitch was a post-Renaissance movie, which makes it getting a “live action” remake (I say “live action” in quotes because let’s face it, most of it will still probably CG anyway) all the more weird. But hey, Moana’s getting a live action remake too apparently, and that movie came out in 2016, which was 8 years ago, not even that long ago. So, Lilo & Stitch getting a live action remake isn’t all that weird, even if it is completely unnecessary. Just re-release the original (on its 25th anniversary), no need to do yet another live action remake for it. A remake that will probably cost twice as much as the original did. I’m calling it now, the live action Lilo & Stitch remake will have a budget that either gets close to $200 million 💵 or exceeds $200 million 💵. Disney spent over $240.2 million 💵 to make The Little Mermaid 🧜♀️ (2023), so it’s not too far out of the realm of possibility.
Of all the post-Renaissance Disney animated movies, I think Atlantis is the only one that would make sense to do a live action remake of because it is more of an action adventure film, it’s more comic book-style, and there’s nothing particularly cute or cartoony about it. It does go for that more realistic look, all of the human characters are drawn in a more realistic fashion, and there’s no cute animal mascots, there’s no slapstick, and there’s no cartoon logic to really speak of. The most cartoony aspect of the film was the character, Mole, that weird eccentric French geologist 🇫🇷 that no one likes and kind of just tolerates and puts up with because he’s the geologist. Despite weird mole-like behavior, he knows his stuff when it comes to rocks 🪨, volcanoes 🌋, and drilling, things that are valuable to know on an expedition to the underwater lost city of Atlantis 💦.
But, besides him, there’s nothing really that cartoony in the film that wouldn’t translate that well into live action. Treasure Planet is more cartoony than Atlantis because it has that cute little shapeshifting alien blob, Morph that’s John Silver’s companion. Oh, and it also has B.E.N., that bumbling idiotic loud-mouthed robot voiced by Martin Short that lost all of his memories due to Captain Flint removing his memory chip so that he couldn’t tell anyone that he rigged Treasure Planet with explosives 💥 (like he set up a self-destruct system at the planet’s core that’s triggered whenever anyone trips the laser security alarm) so no one could steal his treasure…that he himself also stole since he was a pirate 🏴☠️, an alien pirate 👽🏴☠️. I guess a pirate 🏴☠️’s worst enemy is other pirates 🏴☠️. They don’t trust each other, and are always paranoid and convinced that they’ll steal the loot that they stole first from someone else. Captain Flint just took this to the extreme and set his own planet that he built to explode 💥 if anyone tried to steal his stash of stolen goods. All of those gold doubloons 🤑.
This is a movie that would be pretty easy to translate into live action compared to something like The Emperor’s New Groove, or Lilo & Stitch, or Brother Bear 🐻, though luckily they haven’t announced a live action Brother Bear 🐻 movie, probably because it wasn’t that successful or popular when it came out. The only question with a live action Atlantis movie would be whether or not keep it in the 1910s or set in the modern day. I would keep in the 1910s because that was part of what made it unique, but I wouldn’t be too broken up about it if they set it in the modern day. I mean, we hardly get any Atlantis movies (as in, movies about the mythical lost city of Atlantis) period, let alone ones set in the 1910s.
The only other post-Renaissance Disney animated movie that I think could maybe work in live action is Treasure Planet, for many of the same reasons as Atlantis. You could even try something different with making the spaceships look like actual spaceships instead of like sailboats ⛵️ with rocket engines on them, but that would kind of take away from one of the things that made Treasure Planet unique, that made it stand out, and truly made it science fantasy rather than science fiction. It broke all the rules when it came to depicting space travel in science fiction, and had no regard for scientific accuracy whatsoever because it is not a true sci-fi movie, it is more of a science fantasy movie, which is a subgenre of science fiction that incorporates more fantasy elements like magic, wizards, witches, dragons, ghosts, spirits, angels and demons, and what not. Anything that isn’t considered purely scientific and isn’t considered plausible under any circumstance is part of science fantasy.
Star Wars could be considered science fantasy because it has the Force, which is much of mystical force (no pun intended) that is beyond scientific explanation. It has the Jedi and Sith, which have been described by many people as “space wizards.” You also have ghosts and spirits called “Force ghosts,” and something close to resembling an afterlife. You have these somewhat godlike beings called the Whills, which have never been seen or elaborated on outside of George Lucas’s writings and original pitch for the Sequel Trilogy. You have even actual dragons, like the Krayt dragon. Rebel Moon could also be considered science fantasy too because it has a griffin and it has magic and mysticism and all that. It is Zack Snyder’s off-brand Star Wars, so it makes sense why has all these fantasy elements in it because Star Wars has a lot of fantasy elements to it too.
The Marvel universe (cinematic or otherwise) could also be considered science fantasy since it has a lot of fantasy elements as well as sci-fi elements, blended together into one pot, into one stir fry if you will. You have gods, devils, angels, demons, aliens 👽, wizards, witches, dragons, giant wolves 🐺, werewolves 🐺, vampires 🧛♀️🧛♂️, spaceships, ghosts 👻, zombies 🧟♂️🧟♀️, mermaids 🧜♀️, mermen 🧜♂️, you name it, they pretty much have it all. Same goes for the DC universe as well since it’s pretty much the same as the Marvel universe. Marvel and DC kind of copied each other when they were creating their comic book universes, with Marvel ripping off DC more so than DC ripping off Marvel. Though, it did rip off Marvel a few times over the course of its long history, don’t let DC fans and DC fanboys tell you any different.
And lastly, Mortal Kombat is also science fantasy, although it is a bit more fantasy than any of the other examples I listed and described. But, it does have plenty of sci-fi elements to go along with the overwhelming fantasy elements, like cyborgs, drones, laser guns, robots, anti-gravity warships, interdimensional portals that are technological rather than mystical, camouflage/invisibility technology, power gauntlets, and even laser swords that look like lightsabers but aren’t, among other things. But it is more fantasy than sci-fi, so while it is technically science fantasy, it’s not a perfect match, and isn’t a 50/50 representation, it is mostly fantasy, but with some sci-fi elements sprinkled in. That’s part of what makes Mortal Kombat unique, and what makes it so intriguing.
The CGI animated Final Fantasy movie, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is another good example of science fantasy since it’s a futuristic science fiction movie, a post-apocalyptic science fiction movie in fact, that has all these spaceships and highly advanced technology. Even the clothes the human characters wear in that film is pretty futuristic, especially the main female lead ♀︎, Aki Ross, she has probably has the most futuristic outfit of them all. And yet, they’re dealing with spirits, the literal ghosts of aliens 👻👽 whose planet was destroyed, that attacked humanity and brought it to the sorry state that we see in the film.
There’s all this mysticism involved especially when it comes to the Earth 🌎 and the main conflict of the film which is this debate over whether to use the Earth 🌎’s core to defeat the alien spirits or not. Aki and her closest allies argue against this because they believe that it will destroy the Earth 🌎’s own spirit called Gaia, and all remaining life on Earth 🌎 will perish with no hope of recovery. I mean, it’s literally in the title, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, though some Final Fantasy fans argue that it shouldn’t be called Final Fantasy at all and should just be called The Spirits Within due to how little it actually resembles the Final Fantasy games. At least, the ones made up until that point, like Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy XI, and Final Fantasy X, which was the most recent Final Fantasy game when The Spirits Within was released.
But, according to the director, Hironobu Sakaguchi (who is the actual creator of the Final Fantasy game series BTW), the movie does have actual connections to the Final Fantasy games. But, regardless of whether or not you think it should have the name Final Fantasy or not, the movie is still a good example of science fantasy due to being set in the future, in a post-apocalyptic future, having spaceships and advanced technology and weapons, and having spirits that are the ghosts 👻 of dead aliens 👽. Even the Earth 🌎 is somewhat of alive in the film with its own soul, a spirit or life force if you will, that the characters refer to as Gaia in the film as stated before.
Speaking of live action adaptations and CGI live action hybrids, the Rugrats reboot series was removed from Paramount+ earlier this year, back in March. Thursday March 28, 2024 was when it was removed from the platform without warning. I found this out after I had re-watched an episode of All Grown-Up! Because I wanted to watch an episode of that series and I didn’t feel like re-watching another episode of All Grown-Up! at that moment, and I went to look for it, and it was gone. I was all surprised like “Woah 😧, I can’t believe they took the Rugrats reboot off of Paramount+.” The reason Paramount gave for why they did this that they wanted to focus on content with global appeal, it’s same bullshit reason they gave for why they removed Middlemost Post from their streaming platform. Making it impossible to watch that show anywhere legally. There are plenty of illegal ways to watch Middlemost Post, but I’d rather not do that. I’m not a pirate 🏴☠️.
However, despite it being removed from Paramount+, the Rugrats reboot has not been canceled. They just moved it over to Nicktoons, Nickelodeon’s sister channel, which has become infamous for being a dumping ground for shows that Nickelodeon no longer has any faith in and has every intention of canceling. Given that they put it on there, I think it’s only a matter of time until it is officially canceled. Because just straight up removing a show from your streaming platform and dumping it on a TV channel where you put all of your failing shows that you no longer want to air on the main channel is not something that you do if it’s a show is still going strong, and is still something that you have faith in it. These are all the markers that a show is about to canceled in the near future. I mean, it premiered on Paramount+, it was a Paramount+ Original. They were so proud of it, they promoted it all over their platform. I remember seeing the ads for Season 2 every time I would watch any Nickelodeon shows on Paramount+. So, this is a pretty epic fall from grace.
If it does get canceled, it wouldn’t be all that surprising. This is a show that has suffered low viewership throughout its entire run. Very few people outside of the cartoon reviewing community seemed to have seen it or seemed to care about it at all. It just goes to show you that Rugrats just isn’t that strong of a brand as it once was. It just doesn’t have the same pull that it once it did, when it was in its heyday, when it was the #1 show on Nickelodeon before it was dethroned by SpongeBob SquarePants 🧽.
It kind of makes me wonder how that live action CGI hybrid movie that’s being made by people from Saturday Night Live (SNL) will fair if it doesn’t get stuck in development hell again and doesn’t get canceled itself. If a CGI 3D animated reboot of Rugrats couldn’t work and couldn’t be a success, then what makes them think that a live action movie will do any better? It just seems like a waste of time and money 💵 that could spent elsewhere on other endeavors. People are already gearing up to hate it, just based on the news that it’s going to be live action and it’s going to be a so-called “live action CGI hybrid,” even before we’ve gotten any pictures and before we’ve even gotten a trailer. I’m not angry 😡 that they’re making a live action Rugrats movie, I’m more confused 🫤 by it than anything else, like why are they doing this? Why do they think that this is a good idea?
Especially when they said it’s going to be a CGI live action hybrid, whatever the hell that means. I can only assume that means the baby and toddler characters will be CGI and the adult and teenage characters will be live action, which, if that’s the case, then why are they doing it like that? Why not just make all the characters live action? Or hell, why even do a live action movie at all? But that’s beside the point. If they are going to do it that way, they’ll be walking a fine line. There’s always a risk whenever you do humans in CG that you’ll end up alienating people. People know what humans look like, they know how they move, and when they’re confronted with something that is artificial and isn’t exactly how a real human looks or moves despite how realistic it tries to look, they’re put off by it because it looks odd and it even looks creepy in some instances. That Uncanny Valley, man, it’s a bitch.
I said this in the foreword of my post about the Lebanese Civil War 🇱🇧, but if they do this, and especially if they do it, wrong, they could be faced with a situation similar to the one that the filmmakers behind Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) faced when they put out that initial trailer and everyone saw the first initial design for Sonic, the weird ugly looking one that tried look realistic but not really, and that no one liked. Not a single person liked that design, and the filmmakers were forced to go back and change it months before the release into something more appealing and much closer to the original design from the games.
The people behind this live action Rugrats movie could face similar backlash if they aren’t careful. And I could see a scenario where this movie bombs at the box office 💣 because like I said, Rugrats isn’t as popular of a brand as it used, people aren’t just going to flock to this live action movie just because it has the Rugrats name on it, so they can’t skirt by with name recognition alone, they need a lot more than that. And if the babies are CGI, and if it’s as bad as some people are already assuming that it will, then that will further drive people away, and that’s how you’ll get a flop ☹️. Honestly, I think Paramount took the reboot series off of Paramount+ and pawned it off to Nicktoons just so that they could focus on and prioritize this live action movie that they’re making with SNL talent. Maybe the reason why they want to do it as a live action CGI hybrid is so that they can reuse the assets from this reboot series, those same character models. Might as well 🤷♂️, don’t want them to go to waste, especially if the show gets canceled.
The Rugrats reboot absolutely failed to capture the hearts ❤️ of demographics that it tried to capture, mainly kids and fans of the original, all of whom are adults by now. It failed to win over kids because despite its best efforts to stay relevant and keep it up-to-date with the current year, it had nothing that actually appealed to kids of the younger generation, Gen Alpha and the absolute youngest Gen Z. It’s attempts to stay current and be hip with the kids fell flat because it came across as older people trying way to hard to appeal to kids. You know, the ol’ “how do you do, fellow kids” meme, it was kind of like that. It did a better job at appealing to the Millennial generation because it included a lot of references, slang, lingo, and just general trends that Millennials would understand and appreciate. More so older Millennials, and by older Millennials I mean older American Millennials 🇺🇸 since this is an American show 🇺🇸, but still. They had a whole episode where the adults play a tabletop game that’s very reminiscent of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), so they’re appealing to those kind of Millennials, the ones that did play D&D with their friends on Saturday nights.
It’s funny that I say all that because the show failed to older fans of the original Rugrats just based on nostalgia, it failed to appeal to their nostalgia for the original series, even though a lot of the older fans are Millennials in their 30s. Some of them now pushing 40. Crazy how time flies. A lot of the older fans in fact hated it 😠. I didn’t hate it, I thought the show was fine for what it was, which is why I was willing to watch another episode of it, but a lot of the fans hated it 😠.
They hated it 😠 because they didn’t like the animation, they didn’t like that it was in CG and thought the character models looked ugly in that 3D art style they went with. They especially hated the way Tommy looked in this new art style. Tommy’s the one character who they’ve never been able to nail in 3D animation. Whether it be in this show or in video games. And it’s because his head is so weirdly shaped. His head’s like a potato 🥔, a weirdly shaped round potato 🥔. That works fine in 2D animation, but not so much in 3D animation where everything’s three dimensional and where things can be seen from more than one angle.
Fans also didn’t like a lot of the changes they made to the characters and to the story and timeline of events. The character changes people hated the most were Susie, Grandpa Lou, and even Kimi to a certain extent. But there were other characters they changed a lot from the original like Didi’s father, Boris Kropotkin, who is also Tommy’s other grandfather. They not only radically changed his design, but also changed his personality too. He’s still Jewish ✡️, but they got rid of his Russian heritage 🇷🇺.
He’s no longer a Russian immigrant 🇷🇺 who was born in the Russian Empire 🇷🇺 just as it fell in 1917 at the tail end of World War I, and lived in the Soviet Union ☭ for most of his childhood and adolescence after it was officially founded in 1922 following the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War 🇷🇺. Until he left the USSR ☭ to start a new life in America 🇺🇸, just as World War II was about to begin. That whole aspect of his character is gone in the reboot, as it’s implied he was born in the US 🇺🇸 and lived there for most of his life. But, he still has the same last name, Kropotkin. So maybe the implication with the reboot version of the character is that his parents were from Russia 🇷🇺 or the USSR ☭, and then fled from the USSR ☭ to the US 🇺🇸 to escape the turmoil of World War II. The Soviet Union ☭ did suffer the brunt of the war in Europe, taking the highest amount of casualties of all the major belligerents of the entire war, the Pacific War included.
But, given the way the Soviet Union ☭ and Joseph Stalin was at that time, every able-bodied man and woman was conscripted and forced to take part in the Great Patriotic War (which is what they referred to World War II as, and what the Russians 🇷🇺 still refer to World War II as even to this day) whether they wanted to or not. A lot of them did to be fair since the Nazis had attacked them along with other Axis forces, and they were fighting for their survival not so much for the nation of the Soviet Union ☭ or for Stalin. Stalin was a bastard who put them through a lot of turmoil himself as the dictator of the Soviet Union ☭.
So, it’s not likely Boris’s parents had left the Soviet Union ☭ when the war going on. It’s more likely that they left sometime in the 1930s before the war in Europe truly broke out, long before Adolf Hitler ever invaded the Soviet Union ☭. The Rugrats Wiki does say that the reboot version of Boris was born in the 1940s, 1946 to be exact, so it kind of lines up. Or maybe, they both could have served, but they somehow survived it, managing to stay away from the worst fighting, the full brunt of it, and then they moved to the US 🇺🇸 after the war over, and then had Boris once they moved to the US 🇺🇸 and started their new life there.
He’s even younger than Lou in the reboot. He used to older than him in the original, but now he’s younger, and the age gap isn’t as vast as it was in the original as the reboot version of Lou was born in 1945, the year World War II ended, while Boris, as we established, was born in 1946. So, they’re one year apart. It is funny too that the reboot version of Lou was born after World War II, or born just as it was drawing to a close, because that used to be a big part of his character in the original, the fact that he was a veteran of the Second World War. A lot of people hated that they removed that aspect of Lou’s character in the reboot, and made a hippy instead 😒. I’ve suggested numerous times on this blog that they could’ve made him a Vietnam War veteran 🇻🇳 now that he was a Boomer and is no longer apart of the Greatest Generation, but they didn’t do that. They either didn’t think of it, or they didn’t want to do that.
There were other characters that they had drastically changed from the original, like Susie’s parents. Her mom was mostly the same, she’s still a doctor 👩🏾⚕️, but her design was drastically different and her personality was also kind of different too. Likely due to the younger age of the character in the reboot, even aspects of her personality were different like she’s no longer a perfectionist, like she’s no longer perfect at everything she does, and she no longer has a singing background. Which begs the question what they would’ve done with Susie had that they rebooted All Grown-Up! too in the same timeline, and had shown the reboot version of the baby and toddler characters as preteens and teens.
Singing was her passion in All Grown-Up!, something that she got from her mom. But now that aspect of the character is gone in the reboot since her mom wasn’t a singer either, nor does she have singing talents either. But, the show will probably get canceled before they get to any of that. Susie’s dad is also pretty different too, like he’s obviously much younger in the reboot, and he’s no longer a writer on The Dummi Bears, Rugrats’ equivalent to The Care Bears. Instead, he has a much different job, but I just don’t remember what it was.
Charlotte’s thankless and loyal assistant, Jonathan is also pretty different. He looks completely different, he’s now a white guy ♂︎, whereas he was a person of color in the original, having noticeable darker skin. And his personality is completely different. He’s more loyal to Charlotte in the reboot than he was in the original. He actually likes her, and doesn’t secretly hate her guts 😡, and isn’t secretly plotting against her like in the original. Let’s just say that this version of Jonathan isn’t likely to stab her in the back and get her fired from the company they work for just so he could take her job like the original version did in All Grown-Up! The reboot version of Jonathan is very submissive towards Charlotte, he’s a very submissive man ♂︎. They even somewhat queer coded 🏳️🌈 him, like they gave him this super exaggerated lisp and kind of sort of made him a bit flamboyant, which kind of implies that he might be gay ⚣🏳️🌈. The reboot tried so hard to avoid perpetuating stereotypes, and yet they reinforced another.
Speaking of which, Betty is now a lesbian ⚢, I mean, some people kind of assumed that already or they wanted her to be, based on her relationship with Howard (who was removed in the reboot entirely) in the original, but now it’s confirmed that she’s into women ♀︎. On top of that, she has a Latino heritage now, or Latina I guess since she’s a woman ♀︎. The only characters who they didn’t drastically change and are mostly the same were Stu, Didi, Chas, Charlotte, Drew, Kira, Tommy, Chuckie, Angelica, Phil, and Lil. But, even if the Rugrats reboot is gone from the platform, and can only be viewed on regular TV, or on FuboTV, or on YouTube TV, or on the Roku Channel, or on Amazon Freevee, wherever Nicktoons is available, at least the original Rugrats and All Grown-Up! can still be watched on Paramount+. As well as the three animated Rugrats movies and the two direct-to-DVD 📀 specials, Tales from the Crib: Three Jacks and a Beanstalk and Tales from the Crib: Snow White.
If they removed either of those two shows from Paramount+ I would lose it 😤. Same if they removed The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius or The Mighty B! 🐝. I wrote a review of The Mighty B! 🐝 if you’re interested. They still haven’t added The Fairly OddParents reboot, The Fairly OddParents: A New Wish to the platform, instead they insisting on airing the show on Nickelodeon itself, so I currently have no way of watching it. But, the original Fairly OddParents is on Paramount+, so there’s that. The Loud House is available on Paramount+, so that’s good, only they haven’t updated it and added Season 7 on there yet. What gives guys 😑?
Big Nate got removed from Paramount+, mostly because it got canceled, so I got the chance to watch that when it was still free to watch with subscription and ads. Now you can only watch it through renting it or purchasing it from digital platforms like on Apple TV+ or on Amazon Prime Video. BTW, I wrote a review of the original Rugrats film trilogy that you can go read on my blog right now. It was one of the first few DeviantART journals that I ever reposted on the blog. Ah, memories~ 😌.
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Hey, I just thought of something, wouldn't it be cool if the movie Dinosaur was re-released in theaters, just once? I know that it would probably never happen because Disney has pretty much disowned it and doesn't really acknowledge it since it wasn't as successful as they wanted it to be. Plus, it's likely never going to get a sequel, since it wasn't a hit, so there's financial reason to re-release it in theaters. Disney won't really gain anything financially from re-released this obscure and somewhat forgotten animated movie from the early 2000s.
The only reason they re-released Avatar in theaters a few months ago was because it has a sequel coming out next month, and they wanted to help audiences get caught up on the story so that they can understand the sequel, or to refresh their memory on the story so that they can understand the sequel since it's been 13 years and Avatar hasn't exactly been in the public eye since it was originally released back in 2009; 2010 if you want to be generous with that Special Edition release.
Even if people did see it when it came out, or when re-released in theaters for the first time, or when it hit home video, they likely don't remember anything about the story and the characters since, let's face it, the story and characters were pretty forgettable and unremarkable compared to the CGI special effects and the world-building of Pandora itself. Plus, they wanted to boost its box office numbers so that it could beat Avengers: Endgame and reclaim the title of the highest grossing movie of all time 🤑.
But, I would really like to see Dinosaur get a re-release, since I never got the chance to see it in theaters since I was so young when it came out, I was still practically a baby. I did eventually see it on DVD 📀 when I was actually old enough to remember and comprehend what I was seeing, but I didn't truly get that theatrical experience.
And while the movie definitely had a mixed reception when it was initially released with some liking it and some hating it, the love and appreciation for it has only grown since it's original release ❤️. People are finally enjoying the movie for what it is, instead of hating on it for not being what they wanted it to be which is basically a silent documentary-style movie where the dinosaurs didn't talk and there was no story or narrative and you just saw them do their natural thing as animals. While that would be cool to see, that isn't what Dinosaur is. It is animated movie with a story, with a narrative, and the dinosaurs talk. It is what it is, you can take it or leave it. At least it isn't a musical 🎵 where the dinosaurs sing 🎶, at least be happy about that, dino-purists.
Besides, the whole silent movie/documentary thing really doesn't have that wide of an appeal. Unless there's a narrator like in an actual documentary, most people would probably not watch a movie with no story or no dialogue that was just dinosaurs being animals, doing animal things. That sort of thing is definitely more esoteric and experimental. That doesn't mean that I don't want it to be done one day, but I don't mind what we got with Dinosaur. Esoteric and experimental is not what Disney was really looking for with this movie, they wanted a movie that had wider appeal, and that is what they got. It just didn't pay off like it did for them like in the Disney Renaissance era which had all but ended by the time this movie came out.
Plus, ever since the COVID-19 pandemic 🦠😷 started, we've been in this time where studios are re-releasing some of their older movies in theaters because of the lack of newer releases. If Dinosaur has any chance at getting a theatrical re-release the time is now, though it probably won't for the reasons I explained earlier. I mean, if Ice Age 🧊 could get a theatrical re-release even for just a limited time and capacity, I don't see why Dinosaur can't.
If not a theatrical release, then I would like a 4K release. No Disney+ shit, but an actual physical release. I assume that Dinosaur did have a Blu-Ray release, but it has never had a 4K restoration, and that would be cool to see since it is already a pretty gorgeous movie. I am fairly confident that the movie does have a Blu-Ray release, but if it doesn't then a 4K release would be the first time that the movie had ever been in HD, let alone Ultra HD.
I would also like to see other underrated Disney movies get theatrical re-releases or 4K releases, like Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet. I think that would be really cool, not just because they're awesome movies and huge parts of my childhood and other people's childhoods, but also because it would be an opportunity to give those movies as well as Dinosaur a new lease on life.
Allow them to make the kind of money 💵 they didn't make when they were originally released. The fan bases and cult following of all three of these movies has only grown since they were released in theaters and since they were initially released on DVD 📀. Besides, most of the reason why these movies weren't successful and didn't meet Disney's financial expectations is that they had poor marketing and were released at bad times. This would be an opportunity to rectify that. But, it's more likely that all of these movies will just get put on Disney+ if they aren't already on there. I'm pretty sure Atlantis and Treasure Planet are, but I'm not sure about Dinosaur. But, I want these movies in theaters again, not just in streaming.
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Note:
One more thing about Dinosaur that I learned recently thanks to watching an old behind-the-scenes TV documentary is that the movie actually has a significant African-American, or black cast. Like, I would say more than half of the main voice cast of that movie is black. There are only a few white actors and actresses in the cast, and I think one Latino. I think the actor who voices the wise-cracking wannabe pickup artist lemur, Zini is voiced by a Latino actor, but I'm not 100% sure, I could be wrong about that. But, the two of the main lemur characters, Pilo and Yar, they're voiced by black actors, the elderly Styracosaurus, Eema is voiced by a black actress, the antagonistic Altirhinus, Kron is voiced by voiced by a black actor. Like, I'm genuinely amazed at how diverse the voice cast actually was. This movie was ahead of its time in that way.
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Update (Saturday November 26, 2022):
It turns out that Dinosaur did have a Blu-Ray release. You can buy it on Amazon and it is still in stock...during the holiday season. I guess, this movie isn't in very demand, which is still unfortunate. It is very underrated and one of Disney's lesser known movies now. It was meant to be one of their most successful and biggest movies, and it ended up being one of their smallest and most obscure movies. So, all the movie needs is a 4K release since it has definitely never had a 4K release. I still want a theatrical re-release though, I think that would be pretty awesome.
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