[img]Mechanical effects supervisor Isidoro Raponi poses at the feet of the film’s star, a baby brontosaurus, 70 feet long and 25 feet high, constructed full scale.[/img]
[img]Actress Sean Young plays a zoology post graduate who nets a live dinosaur while on safari in Africa.[/img]
Do people want to see another dinosaur movie? Disney Studios sure hopes so. The new “mature” Disney film production arm, Touchstone Films, hopes to repeat the initial genre success of SPLASH with its second modern fantasy film within a year, the $13 million production of BABY. Although it features a cute dinosaur, the filmmakers stress that they are trying to not make this a “cute” film; one honor no one at Disney ever wants to claim is to be the successor to 1979's infamous turkey, THE BLACK HOLE.
The story is actually the first sale of writing couple Clifford and Ellen Green, and concerns a quarelling young couple played by William Katt and Sean Young (she’s a paleontologist, he’s a sports writer) who discover a living family of Brontosaurs deep in the African jungle. After them is nasty Patrick McGoohan who wants the discovery credit for himself and intends to make sure that there’s nobody around who can contradict him. Lest the audience not get the point, scenes in the early part of the film show McGoohan cold-bloodedly murdering an informant. Other scenes of violence which led Disney to label BABY a Touchstone Film include an extended and graphic climactic attack upon a native village by one of the adult dinosaurs similar to scenes which got 1933's KING KONG in trouble with the censors.
As with SPLASH, many of the people working on BABY are not talents normally associated with the Disney Studios. Interestingly enough, several of the key creative people are either past or active personnel of Industrial Light & Magic, which seems to be part of a low-key but continuing Lucasfilm relationship with Disney.
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