Long before Jurassic Park, there was Brooke Bond’s Red Rose Tea, and in each box of tea, a couple of small collectable cards, on various subjects, especially Nature, including Dinosaurs!
There was no way Mom and Dad could buy enough tea for me to get them all, so for 25 cents (in 1962), they let me send away for the whole set, along with the album to glue them into. Brooke Bond also sent me a frameable certificate stating that they had enrolled me as a member of their Naturalist Cub. A pretty big deal for a five-year-old kid, and quite the first brush with the wider world.
In hindsight, you could say Dinosaurs were the first in a string of (healthy) obsessions for me. Although just beginning to learn how to read and write at the time, I could name all the more common varieties, from Ankylosaurus to Tyrannosaurus Rex.
So infatuated was I, and prone to sleep talking, one night shouted out the enthusiastic mantra contained in the title above. Needless to say, my parents were concerned, if not alarmed, and so curved my access to science fiction movies for a while.
Thanks to new discoveries in Paleontology, since then, the list of names has grown immensely, to the point I stopped trying to keep track, let alone pronounce them, a long time ago.
As for Dinosaur movies, back in the 1950s and 60s, to a kid, the screen reptiles were at least interesting if not laughable, and only with Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion animation method, and the release of One Million Years B.C. (1966) and Valley of Gwangi in 1969, did Dinosaurs begin to take on the persona we’ve come to know of them today, thanks to computers and CGI.
And in case you’re wondering, yes, in addition to reading a couple of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park novels, I’ve seen all the movies, and loved every minute of them...
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