Wednesday, August 18, 2021

On the Deleted Scenes from "The Land Before Time"

 I promised you animation and dinosaurs, didn't I?

That nearly a million dollars worth of content was deleted from the original "Land Before Time" is one of the greatest legends of that small but significant border town between paleoart and animation where I live.  Exactly what that content would have looked like was a big mystery, but this nice brief documentary from the channel Scribbles to Screens clears quite a lot up.  And while it does end on a sad note of we're probably never going to see the actual footage for ourselves, there's a lot of excellent rare animation art that has been found, and it is wonderful to see.  (A highlight is the concept art of the Oasis scene, where the Crown-Heads turn out to be victims of a Great Nomenclature Mixup.  A very long time ago, for some reason, Troodon was first described as a Pachycephalosaur.  And so the Crown-Heads are Pachycephalosaurs... with distinctive large talons.)  We also get a nice overview of the history of Don Bluth and his studio, which is always fun to see.

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