When I opened up internetarcade, I have to say I wasn't quite expecting games like this. I was thinking of NES classics rather than arcade, and realized real quick that I had little knowledge in the arcade genre.
I played a few games and found myself liking Two Tigers a lot. You play as the smaller purple and blue plane, dropping bombs and shooting down enemy planes in order to sink ships. I've had experience playing on emulators before, and I now remember why I stopped playing on them. No matter what, the gameplay is catered to the controller of the original counsel, or in this case the arcade machine. Some of the other games on the site were almost unplayable with how it had been remapped to a keyboard.
Two Tigers by itself though is a fun experience. Your penalty is if you don't take down enough ships rather than dying three or so times. I found this a lot less stressful. You could even use the infinite life mechanic to your advantage to crash other planes into the ship. But the time lost in respawning doesn't make this a good strategy. I found it best to stay in the middle, shooting constantly and dropping bombs as much as I could. The plane you control doesn't drop a bomb until the one you just launched hits it's mark, so the closer you are to the bottom of the screen the better. The one thing that drove me nuts though was how the left canon on the ship would almost always get a hit on your plane when you respawn.
Adjusting to the controls is a bit of a doozy, but its definitely worth looking into the archive should one want to see an important step in gaming history.
These were real fun to do. I wish I could have gotten a real close up on the figurine's jaws but the size of it just wouldn't work. That said, I'm glad I was able to make it work as close as the camera was to the figurine. Getting the head to pop out while the body went back in space was incredibly satisfying.
The perceptions we have of the unknown can change drastically over the course of time. Not too long ago in the 20s' people thought that sauropods like this diplodocus here walked around like lizards, lived an aquatic lifestyle, and used their neck as a snorkel.
We know now these assumptions are incorrect and depictions have caught up to these facts. This is the current model of what they look like.
However, some sources have either not caught up or have deliberately chosen to depict creatures like these dinosaurs in not so accurate manners. This is done in the name of creating something more cinematic and fantastical. One of the biggest franchises of dinosaur media, Jurassic Park, is a testament to the capacity to shape how people see different things. This beloved classic and the rebooted title of Jurassic World, are a big influence in how people perceive dinosaurs.
It doesn't take much proofreading to see just how off Jurassic Park's dinosaur models are from the real thing. The carnivores are depicted as blood-hungry beasts and the herbivores as hapless and peaceful creatures. This kind of narrative tends to be a trope for sci-fi. In reality predators are fairly lax as long as they're not hungry while herbivores tend to act more paranoid and hostile, sometimes territorial and competitive. Though given how starved the dinosaur models look, no on can really blame them for being so bloodthirsty. These models lack soft tissues, like fat and other body bits that you wouldn't get from the skeleton. They should look a lot chunkier.
Another detail they didn't adhere to is the use of slit pupils in the raptors. That's something you see with animals who's heads are much closer to ground level, like cats and crocodilians. Slit pupils are helpful when predators want to see horizontal movement in sharp focus from low to the ground. The raptors are much too tall to make proper use of those kinds of eyes. The t.rex however has round pupils, which holds up to current canon. Another anatomical issue is how the wrists moved. The wrists of theropods, upright meat eating dinosaurs, would have not have been able to hold their hands out straight. Their hands, skeletally, are always folded in like they're holding a ball.
In fact, the raptors in the movie aren't even velociraptors. Velociraptors are two feet tall and those would be the ones to possibly have slit pupils. The species in the movies is more closely modeled after dromaeosaurid deinonychus. But something that all the raptors, and possibly the t.rex were lacking, was feathers. Since the 90s there has been evidence in the Liaoning site in China that therapods had developing feathers. While the movie, coming out in 1993, has the excuse of the discovery being relatively new, Jurassic World did nothing to reprimand any of these scientific errors. There is a brief line where a scientist says "you didn't ask for reality" when they bred and filled in the missing genome of dinosaurs with other animals. That being said it doesn't outright address to the audience that the dinosaurs in Jurassic World are deliberately designed to look like the Jurassic Park depictions. Still to this day our scaleless, starving dinosaurs is what we're familiar with. Science is ever evolving and telling us more about these amazing creatures and it's rather surprising that people aren't aware of just how off the mark Jurassic Park's models are. In 2016 a fully preserved dinosaur tail with feathers was found in a piece of amber. There's even enough left over protein on various remains that some dinosaurs have been accurately recolored. Microraptor for instance was black like a crow. That's about the most solid evidence someone could ask for. But that being said, it’s not biased towards any side of the debate. A study published in June 2017 suggests there was evidence that t.rex was indeed featherless, according to a preserved fossil of t.rex skin. In the same way large mammals are overall hairless, its not farfetched to say large theropods like t.rex are indeed scaly kings or perhaps only feathered in infancy. But what about kings of the water? Spinosaurus, the largest theropod known with a massive signature sail on its back, was a river dwelling fish hunter. But beyond that it's possible that they walked on all fours unlike other theropods. Looking at these developments of how animals walked and moved is astounding. In the 20s it was depicted walking splaylegged like a lizard with a dragging it's tail to walking horizontally. Recently it’s anatomy has been revised to the point it's nearly quadruped again, but more because of how it's body weight is distributed rather than being lizard-like.
(images depict oldest to newest reconstructions from top to bottom)
This shows just how much things change, and things will only continue to change with time. Maybe it had a tail fin for all we know.
The unfortunate thing is that movies like Jurassic Park, as entertaining as they are, help perpetuate outdated depictions of dinosaurs. People see them as monsters, not as animals that filled their own niche with distinct and different behaviors. There is beauty in their normalcy, and people don't want to see that because it's boring. People thinking that isn’t all that bad, but what is bad is when people view these new developments in paleontology as straight up conspiracies. There are some people that do in fact think that feathered dinosaurs are a ploy. A way to push some sort of agenda instead of just updating what we previously knew about these creatures. These are usually people who don't believe in evolution at all, and believe that feathered dinosaurs can't fit in a creationist narrative. In reality its very possible to be a creationist while also acknowledging updated dinosaur appearances but people can be defensive against anything that might challenge their longstanding perceptions. The most popular piece of dinosaur culture doing nothing to update it's depictions for nearly 30 years does not help this mindset and sets the standard for other movies and media to do the same.
These movies hold a big piece of our childhoods and there's nothing wrong with some hollywood fun. That however does not stop it's effects on the public's perception on what dinosaurs were. With Fallen Kingdom coming out soon it will continue to shape how we view them. But even then, we've come a long way since the lizard diplodocus of the 20s' and perhaps bit by bit people will get to see these feathered beauties on the silver screen. Who’s to say people’s favorite dinosaurs can’t both be terrifying and a fluffy oversized chicken?
__________________________ *Blue lined sketches provided by me
1. Brief explanation of how dinosaur depiction has changed over the years
a) 1920s depictions
(1) Image of Heinrich Harder’s “Diplodocus” compared to most recent reconstruction
2. Hollywood’s exaggeration counters what science has found and continues
to be the main inspiration for people’s ideas of what a dinosaur looks like
II. Overall inaccuracies in Jurassic Park
A. Overly aggressive monster-like behavior
B. Featherless raptors
1. Evidence for feathers found in 1990s in China's Liaoning Province
C. Heavily shrink wrapped models for the dinosaurs, otherwise creating a
‘starved’ look
1. Image of jurassic park rex next to a more fleshy less starved looking accurate rex
D. Raptors in the movie called velociraptor are actual a species called dromaeosaurid deinonychus
1. Velociraptors were roughly two feet tall
2. Eyes would have not have been slitted, as those belong to smaller predators and/or predators that live close to ground level (cats/crocodilians)
3. Broken wrists
E. Briefly describe how Jurassic World maintains the same inaccuracies even after 30 more years of research
1. Describe a potentially redeeming line “You didn’t ask for reality” in the movie
a) Not enough to clearly explain to the audience that the dinosaurs in Jurassic World supposedly were modified to look like older interpretations of dinosaurs
III. Ever evolving perception
A. Feathered dinosaur tail found in amber (2016)
B. Very recent discovery of featherless t.rex a month ago
C. Spinosaurus in the past few years has been discovered to have possibly moved on 4 legs and a river dweller
1. Image of spinosaurus reconstruction
D. Some dinosaurs can be accurately recolored due to feather remains
IV. Effects of inaccurate portrayals
A. Prehistory romanticized
1. Viewed as monsters out of a fantasy rather than animals
B. Some people straight up think that feathered dinosaurs are a conspiracy
1. Overall suspicion towards updated/recent fossil discoveries and stagnant towards change
C. Most popular dinosaur media sets up standard for other dinosaur-based media to follow
D. An overall roadblock to accurate portrayal in media overall
1. Literally 30 years behind at this point
V. Conclusion
A. Discuss the hold that Jurassic Park holds on our perception of dinosaurs and how Fallen Kingdom will continue to shape it
B. Mention how there’s hope since things have come a long way since the 1920s depictions
This animation was significantly easier than the previous one. I was, with the exception of a few frames, able to control the puppet without the clumsy invisible wire. I feel I'm overall satisfied with the product, though I would have liked to have a few more inbetween frames when the creature came in to slow it down. But no matter how many photos I took it seemed I only ended up taking the same shots and left it as is. I think my favorite shot is the creature flying through the frame at the very end. It really helps sell the fact that the serpent is flying.
Crafting the environment was probably the most fun. A few blue shirts and some pillow stuffing and I had a reasonable sky environment!
The green serpent will ease into the frame from stage right to the center of the frame, rearing its head up. It will look beyond the camera towards stage right, and then slither down in the direction it was looking to lower stage right.
It’s surprising how easy people can believe stuff in fiction that wouldn’t be possible in real life, and yet all it takes is a little reworking and people will eat that all up. When woven in with how the story world and storytelling work, its rather easy to make an audience believe what the director wants them to, especially with something people aren’t too familiar with, interacting with extreme heat. And when the purpose of a movie is to entertain, who can complain?
The first scene comes from The Core, a movie that already takes several different concepts about the Earth and does implausible things with it, be it from making a drill that can go to the center of the Earth, to making the core stop and start spinning by nuking it. However the scene we’ll be analyzing is when Braz Burns goes to manually override a particular function of the drill to preserve power.
In order to do this, he goes into a part of the drill that isn’t cooled. Here, it’s 9000 degrees fahrenheit. He’s shown wearing a suit as he does his task, and then collapses after doing so, dying when the crew allows the section to be filled with magma. There’s no way he would have survived long enough to perform his task. Even with the suit he would have died the minute he stepped out. The air would have vaporized his lungs. But at this point the movie has already set a standard so absurd that we don’t question what’s going on. Most deaths from lava in movies occur when in direct contact with it, not prior due to heat. In The Core though, with scenes like the crew being stuck in a geode as big as a building, it’s easy to see why people don’t question it. Or rather, people accept that this is the movie’s standard and roll with it because the concepts of the film are cool.
In a similar fashion, Gollum’s iconic death in Lord of the Rings is accepted, but isn’t nearly as accurate. The audience feels a tension as Gollum dies watching his precious ring, but really, he wouldn’t even sink into the lava. The density of lava is 1000 kg/m3 while the density of a person’s body is relatively x1000 less dense.
Gollum would remain above the lava, burning alive, maybe even dead before he hit the lava, with the ring sinking into the lava first as gold is denser than lava. But this would dramatically take away from the climax that this scene gives, and someone sinking into lava is such a consistent move in movies and other media that people have generally accepted that when you fall into lava, you sink and die. But the ring falling in first and Gollum boiling on top, dead before he even hit the lava, would be traumatic to say the least and it’s easy to see why this movie didn’t abide by heat or lava physics here. It wouldn’t really fit the prophetic feel of the movie either, which pretty much calls for a dramatic and more fantastical ending.
Going back aways, when science fiction and fantasy weren’t all that different, we have the old work of Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth. In this 1959 classic the crew escapes Atlantis by setting off an explosion that triggers an earthquake and they ride up the volcanic shaft up to the surface on an old metal Atlantean disk of some sort.
Now, the work of Verne was written long ago, near the time when sci-fi was just becoming a genre. By itself it’s not exactly inaccurate, by Verne’s time. So in context, the audience is already aware of Verne’s outlandish stories, more fantasy than sci-fi in some ways and accepts it in the name of “it’s a classic”. That being said, there are a number of reasons, aside from the obvious fact Atlantis could not exist in the Earth’s core, for why this scene would not work and that these people would die. For one, the metal disk is incredibly old. It would have more than likely have crumbled when things started shaking. Metal also transfers heat very well. On the way up the shaft, considering the disk didn’t crumble, the crew would have boiled as if on a skillet. And last to say the least, being shot into the air from the volcano in Italy would have killed them, be it from the gases, or from the fall.
There’s a similar scene in the 2008 version, but instead of a metal disk, it’s a t-rex skull and they
ride on a plume of steaming water. Perhaps a little more plausible because the skull is presumably not as old as the Atlantean disk and not as heat conductive but more than likely it would have killed them as well.
It is funny in hindsight just how much these movies got away with physics. But be it in the name of preserving its classical feel, to appeasing a more dramatic fantasy end, or just because a movie’s already taken sci-fi by the collar and shot it dead there are many ways to cover up heat physics. At the end of the day it’s entertaining and works within the story world's own parameters, and isn’t that what makes a movie entertaining and believable in its own right?
When writing the paper, I wasn't sure if the topic I covered was complex enough to cover with just three scenes, so the outline has and added fourth movie that I didn't include here, the nuke scene from Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. But I found when writing it that these scenes were indeed more complex, especially when comparing the different iterations of Journey to The Center of The Earth. Seeing how the movie was reimagined and also inaccurate in it's own right was fun.
