Reminiscing Over Dinosaurus!

“Alive! After 70 million years! Roaring! Walking! Destroying!” (Ad line for Dinosaurus!)

- Allen A. Debus

Sometime in the early 1960s (post- September 1961), our dad began a semi-regular ritual that continued through the next decade—taking my brother Rick and I to see the early Saturday afternoon prehistoric monster movie at the show. One of the earliest of these was a delightful and masterful—that is, to my then 2nd or 3rd grade psyche—movie titled, Dinosaurus! (Fairview Production/Universal-International, 1960). I departed exuberantly from the theater that day, in a daze thinking I’d just seen the most utterly fantastic special effects projection of ‘real’ dinosaurs since those witnessed in RKO’s King Kong, (which by then I’d seen televised two or three times). As was common back in the day, one had no way of knowing when you might have the opportunity to see a movie released at the cinema ever again— televised (unless you went back to the theater for the next matinee). In my case I didn’t see the film again until over half a century later when it was broadcast on horror movie host Svengoolie’s Chicagoland program one Saturday evening (e.g. during the mid-to late 2000s), with occasional repeated airings over the next decade.