Dinosaurs didn’t need to be accurate to be terrifying. But what if they had been? Hollywood doesn’t think a flock of murderous turkeys would be scary enough.
Sketch and Coffee Live at 5:30am Texas time
Today’s sketch was all about space management. With a long, upright toy like this Velociraptor, you’ve got to block it out ahead of time or risk running out of paper. I marked the key shapes early, head, leg muscle, that signature claw, and worked from there. As Ivy Sunny Flowers pointed out in chat, it’s a tall one. Good reminder: if you keep running out of canvas, work a bit more on the composition.
The real Velociraptor was the size of a large turkey and lived in Mongolia during the Late Cretaceous, about 70 million years ago. The fossil record shows quills, a clear indication they were feathered. It became famous through Jurassic Park, which gave us a 7 foot tall version based on Deinonychus, larger, meaner, and found in Montana. The movie made them scary by scaling them up and stripping them down. The producers didn’t think audiences could be frightened by murderous turkeys. Instead of muscle and feathers, they wrapped skin tight around the bones and called it done. Early paleontologists were notorious for shrink wrapping skeletons with skin and claiming that’s what they look like.
But real animals don’t look like that. They’ve got padding, cartilage, fat, muscle, and weird bits like waddles. More like cassowaries, which are beautiful and deadly and have literally killed people, once 1926 in Australia, and again 2019 in Florida. Same with emus, geese, and other so-called “cobra chickens.” Australians went to war with Emus, and lost! If you’ve ever been chased by a goose, you know the fear. Add teeth and claws, and you’ve got a Velociraptor.
Interestingly, every dino movie sparks a jump in museum attendance. In Virginia, one museum had four times its usual visitors when Jurassic Park opened. In Houston, a dinosaur film bumped theater attendance by 31%. They may not be accurate, but those raptor movies sure get people talking, and thinking.