Just a few days from now, Episode VII: The Force Awakens will crush every box office record set by this summer’s Jurassic World, let alone every imaginable record that exists for Hollywood. And so it is worth noting that, after George Lucas made Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, he followed it a few years later by making a dinosaur movie. It was released by Universal, the same studio that makes the wildly successful Jurassic movies. Steven Spielberg was involved on this dinosaur picture, too. The movie was The Land Before Time and Lucas remained far far away, preferring to stay in Northern California to provide his script notes and advisement through a proxy—or via conference calls—to the Amblin Entertainment offices on the Universal studio lot.
The Sullivan Bluth studio, continuing its partnership with Spielberg from An American Tail (1986), also animated this film, but every step of the production had to be approved at Amblin, which was already looking ahead to this next movie. For a hint at Lucas’ influence, read this memo by Deborah Jelin from May 2, 1986 (below, click to enlarge), a full six months before American Tail had even been released in theaters. She writes, “Per my conversation with George and Steven yesterday, George agreed with Steven’s attached comments and wanted to pass on the following additional thoughts:” (Be aware that a considerable conflict at the end of production was that, when The Land Before Time was shown to test audiences, it became regarded as far too scary for its intended audience of young children.)
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A strong opinion from him would not easily go unheeded, even in light of Amblin’s intended desire to make a G-rated family film about dinosaurs. His extended note about this visceral impression of the landscape, his wish to contrast the desolation with the lushness of the land, encompasses a full first page of just two pages of his notes. It ends in this manner: “George also felt whenever our band of orphan Dinosaurs come across other Dinosaurs, the others should be alone and stragglers. In other words, all the Dinosaurs need to get to the GREAT VALLEY in order to survive. . . if they don’t get there, they will die.”
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To anyone who holds the notion that Lucas went soft, let this be a reminder that he still had some Dark Side left—and in 1986, Jar Jar Binks was a full thirteen years away from dispelling your newfound respect. And Han Solo still shot first. The gravitas that the global success of Star Wars conferred on him allowed Lucas to now pursue a dream that he had held since childhood. The Walt Disney features and Bugs Bunny cartoons were arguably his entrée into an early love of cinema. He was so smitten with animation that when he was a student at USC’s film school he competed for and won a coveted Warner Bros. scholarship to effectively be a paid intern at the studio.
His inclination was to learn how Looney Tunes were made, not to see live-action films being shot on sets. However, the year was 1967. The legendary cartoon division was closed down. Chuck Jones, Bob McKimson, and Friz Freleng were all gone. When young Lucas dropped in to see the animation department—which by that point was actually DePatie-Freleng—he was shocked to find it so recently vacated. It stood like a ghost town with just a single employee remaining, an executive who sat alone at a desk waiting to answer a phone there in case it should actually ring.
“Fantasia”
In the same way that Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola once jostled for the macho bragging rights of one-upping Orson Welles to realize his failed attempt at adapting Conrad’s Heart of Darkness — with Coppola winning the dare by filming Apocalypse Now — so too Lucas and Spielberg wanted to revitalize the cinematic terrain of Walt Disney at his very darkest: a T-Rex gnashing at a Stegosaurus as their species plunge into extinction. In contrast to the violence that found a muse in Apocalypse Now’s Vietnam War, their original intention to make an impassioned dinosaur film came crashing against the market expectations of kid-vid executives.
“The Land Before Time”
These cuts removed about ten minutes of animation from the final runtime of the film, shrinking it on release to only 69 minutes, hardly even enough to really justify calling it a “feature-length” movie. There was tension with this predicament, and Sullivan and Bluth were both unhappy at the removal of the set-piece battles of which they were most proud. Nonetheless, The Land Before Time held up as a good time at the movies and was a box office hit. Its subsequent life in video has lent it a status as a generational classic for millenials who grew up repeatedly watching Littlefoot’s journey to the Great Valley.
The movie became a huge franchise success for Universal Home Entertainment, even if Lucas and Spielberg have long since parted ways with the spinoffs and direct-to-video series that it spawned. Steven Spielberg came roaring back to give dinosaurs their much-deserved PG-13 treatment with Jurassic Park. And of course George Lucas inaugurated a new era of computer graphics imagery with his prequels and by spinning off Pixar from his visual effects studio. While Star Wars will loudly reach its seventh episode as a feature film this week, you might be surprised to know that Universal has gone twice that pace and is readying Land Before Time XIV: Journey of the Brave for a February 2016 release.
Tom Klein is a Professor and the Chair of the Animation program at Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles. He has been published internationally and has been profiled in The New York Times for his work as a scholar of the Walter Lantz studio. He has worked at Vivendi-Universal Games and Universal Cartoon Studios. Follow him @VizLogic
Read about the film The Land Before Time prevented from getting made: http://www.williamstout.com/news/journal/?p=3549
I think these days an animated film is allowed to be PG, though almost never beyond unless it based off a popular TV IP. Unfortunately, this came out around the time where an animated film had to be cute and cuddly. Notably, the Bluth films up to this time were somewhat bucking this trend. Unsurprisingly, it seems
Though at the time, I still think it was a pretty terrible decision. Even as a kid, when one envisions dinosaurs, you WANT something scary and breathtaking. Imagining cute and cuddly pint-sized lizards frolicking in a meadow does not mesh with why dinosaurs have been popular with kids for generations since they gained mainstream scientific acceptance. Had the movie been given more leeway in that regard, it could have been a major hit.
The article certainly puts into perspective Lucas’ burgeoning love of CGI. As an animation fan, it must have seemed like the next best thing and a bold new frontier in realizing those dreams. So much so that he didn’t think twice before giving his old films that extra animation touch.
Also curious why there is no mention of Howard the Duck, considering the Land Before Time followed that one by a mere four months and that Howard itself was another sign of Lucas’s wish of directing an animated film. Could also be be a catalyst for Lucas’ “darker side” and less hand-on involvement with LBT given how it more or less sealed the doom of any Lucas ventures outside of the Star Wars universe.
I think these days an animated film is allowed to be PG, though almost never beyond unless it based off a popular TV IP. Unfortunately, this came out around the time where an animated film had to be cute and cuddly. Notably, the Bluth films up to this time were somewhat bucking this trend. Unsurprisingly, it seems
If you went by just Secret of NIMH or Dragon’s Lair, It wasn’t the case. Bluth could make very dark, violent works if he wanted, but studio interference and focus groups had took their toll on him as the years rolled on. The Land Before Time could be seen as the start of that decent.
I thought it was still a nice film. Plus, it helped that the screenplay was written by the same two dearly missed writers of “Sesame Street” that also wrote the screenplay of “An American Tail”.
In addition to “Indiana Jones” and “Gremlins,” the other film which I recall as causing the introduction of the PG-13 rating was “Sheena,” starring Tanya Roberts as the comic book jungle queen. The film received complaints on its original PG rating due to several nude scenes by Roberts (wowie) in a film which did not contain enough explicit violence to receive an R rating.
By the way, why is this article running as part of the Walter Lantz series, anyhow??
I’ve admittedly drifted a bit off-topic, but you might call this the second of two posts on Universal animation history, or stories that share a common place of origin with early Lantz cartoons: the fabled Universal City lot. With “A Force Awakens” arriving this week, I’ve fallen victim to the hype and couldn’t help myself but write a George Lucas story (via the archival Amblin office memos). After the pantheon of Lantz-produced cartoon characters (Oswald, Woody, Chilly, etc.), the two most potent animation franchises ever released by Universal are arguably The Land Before Time and the goggle-eyed Minions, so these have this in common. But still, I hear you. More Walter Lantz… arriving soon!
Though he too had declined by the early 60s with the widely panned Paul Smith directed ones (all due respect could anyone stand to watch Chilly Willy five or so episodes straight)? But I loved the Andy Panda and Woodies from the 1940s. Those are true classics! (It’s no wonder that R rated Universal movies like “Trainwreck” don’t have any,say, Splinter/Knothead or Chilly references due to those cartoons being more kid oriented–likewise most likely the studio new R comedy “Sisters? w/Tiny Fey & Amy Poehler.
(In the proflici distaff comedy team’s first starring hit role, and at the same studio, “Baby Mama”, Tom and Jerry (MGM/Turner/WB), not Woody, was the cartoon Amy Poehler watched. I think a lot of the overproduction of Lantz
shorts after 1959 really took a toll on the image (but in all fairness,m it happened to every studio in the USA,as well..)
Chris Sobieniak,
For Problem Child, what kind of or should I say, what ERA, Woody cartoon are you looking for?:
the classic 1940s funny one (“Woody and the Giant”:Giant:L”Fee Fi Fo Fum, I Smell”-Woody cuts him off with “You sure DO!” L:OL or the Andy Panda mini musical nightmare “Apple Andy”,with that dream scene and the song “Up Jumpoed the Devil”, from the truly classsic era), or the 1960s Chilly/.Beary Family/Uncle Woody? You’re talking, remember, about pairing them up with a more grown up movie,
These cuts removed about ten minutes of animation from the final runtime of the film, shrinking it on release to only 69 minutes, hardly even enough to really justify calling it a “feature-length” movie.
I’m surprised Universal didn’t try to stick a Woody Woodpecker cartoon in to pad it out (like they did a few years down the road with a Problem Child sequel). I don’t recall really caring much for the film when it came out (I guess I wasn’t that nutty for dinosaurs when I was 10). Yet, I can see how they could keep the series going as it has been doing so on video. I don’t suppose those Littlefoot and Co. will be reaching adolescence yet. While Land Before Time can be see as a Millenial favorite, I think a more recent contender that has shown up in recent years for today’s tots is Lionsgate’s “Alpha & Omega” movies, so far four had been released and another three are in the works.
Did Universal try to have Bluth and Spielberg do something with the Walter Lantz characters? I was just curious, as they bought the rights to those characters in the 1980’s. It would have been interesting to see Universal want the Spielberg/Bluth partnership work on a Woody Woodpecker cartoon short of some kind.
If The Land Before Time was released in the 1990s at the earliest, would that film have received a PG rating? Some scenes in that movie are too intense for a G-rated movie. The MPAA has became a lot stricter about content for films. The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) was rated PG for some scary images. Even by 1990s standards, The Lion King and The Hunchback Of Notre Dame should’ve been rated PG instead of G because of the villains.