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    It's Alive!: The Science of B-Movie Monsters
    It's Alive!: The Science of B-Movie Monsters
    It's Alive!: The Science of B-Movie Monsters
    Ebook62 pages44 minutes

    It's Alive!: The Science of B-Movie Monsters

    By Michael LaBarbera

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The B-movie monster—be it gap-toothed gorilla, ripped-from-time dinosaur, overstretched arachnid, or another outrageous anthropomorphic fantasy—has thrilled moviegoers for decades, and firmly sunk its claws into popular culture. In It’s Alive!, Michael LaBarbera delves into the science behind these characters’ construction, from the biology surrounding tyrannosaurid postures in Jurassic Park and King Kong to the questionable physics employed by The Incredible Shrinking Man. Accompanied by a treasure trove of images from old movie posters and stills, and ranging from the 1930s to such recent films as The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the latest installments of the Alien franchise, It’s Alive! cleverly uses science to remind us that the best parts of moviemaking might indeed be magic–for all creatures, great and small.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateJun 18, 2013
    ISBN9780226094885
    It's Alive!: The Science of B-Movie Monsters

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      Book preview

      It's Alive! - Michael LaBarbera

      It’s Alive! The Science of B-Movie Monsters

      Michael LaBarbera

      Chicago Shorts

      It’s Alive! The Science of B-Movie Monsters was originally published as The Biology of B-Movie Monsters in The University of Chicago Magazine, 2003, © 2003, 2013 by Michael LaBarbera

      All rights reserved.

      Chicago Shorts edition, 2013

      ISBN: 978-0-226-09488-5

      DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226094885.001.0001

      CONTENTS

      The Fantastic World of Mr. Spielberg

      Biology and Geometry Collide!

      A World Distorted Beyond Your Imagination

      The Bigger They Are, The Harder They Fall

      Terrors of the Deep

      Giant Ants Attack!

      Unexpected Biology: Parallel Universes and Alien Worlds

      Notes

      The Fantastic World of Mr. Spielberg

      In the late 1990s, the Chicago Tribune published an article entitled When seeing is disbelieving. The article opened with the words Never, ever go to the movies with Michael LaBarbera. . . . Chances are that the University of Chicago anatomy professor will. . . . tell you, in excruciatingly minute detail, just how the action on the screen is unlikely, unrealistic, or downright impossible. LaBarbera is an unrepentant member of the plausibility police. . . . It’s true. When Jurassic Park (1994) was first released, I went to see the film with a paleontologist friend. As the rest of the audience cringed and shrieked, we excitedly whispered comments to each other—Classic large predator behavior patterns! Superb—they got the bipedal kinematics just right! Folks in adjacent seats were not amused. The Tyrannosaurus and Gallimimus sequences are truly breathtaking. If you want to see our best guess as to how dinosaurs moved and behaved, see this film.

      I have only two quibbles with Jurassic Park, both minor. First, the title. I suppose Spielberg was stuck with the title of Michael Crichton’s novel, but except for the Brachiosaurus (and the Dilophosaurus, which was a complete fiction) all of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park actually lived in the Cretaceous. But what’s 100 million years among friends?

      ::: The (Cinematic) Evolution of Tyrannosaurids

      My second quibble has a bit more substance, for it concerns the posture of the Tyrannosaurus. It’s possible to trace our understanding of tyrannosaurids by their representation in the movies. For most of the 20th century, celluloid Tyrannosaurus were heavily influenced by Charles Knight’s early 20th century sculptures and paintings; these reconstructed Tyrannosaurus as standing with its body vertical, crouched on its hind limbs. This is the posture of the Allosaurus in the classic silent film The Lost World (1925) and the Tyrannosaurus in Disney’s Fantasia (1940); both are good examples of this classical view, one probably unconsciously modeled after our own bipedal posture with a bit of superimposed lizard.

      [A painting by Charles Knight in Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History shows a confrontation between a Tyrannosaurus and a Triceratops—a popular subject in movies and illustrations of the days when dinosaurs walked the earth. The classical view of the T. rex posture seen here—body vertical, hind limbs bent—has since been rejected by researchers, who now believe that T. rex kept its body parallel to the ground and its hind limbs straight.]

      Even as late as 1969, The Valley of Gwangi has its Tyrannosaurus walking in this posture, although growing appreciation of dinosaurs as more bird-like and active (birds are living dinosaurs, close relatives of tyrannosaurids) yielded the more agile Gwangi, with a sinuous, lizard-like tail. (Ray Harryhausen, who did the special effects, reportedly once had a dream in which cowboys lassoed a T. rex; Valley of Gwangi was the embodiment of that image.)

      More careful consideration of the biomechanics of large tyrannosaurs—the position of the center of

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