Oil on canvas.
Throwback Thursday: “The Last Dinosaur” (1977)!
I remember being pretty excited as a tot about “The Last Dinosaur.” I was probably too young to enjoy it when it debuted on ABC on February 11, 1977 — I’m betting it picked me up as a fan a few years later, when I would have been around the age of a first- or second-grader. Here are a few quick, weird facts:
- “The Last Dinosaur” was originally intended as a theatrical release. It hit television after it failed to find a distributor (though it was later successfully marketed to theaters overseas).
- As you can tell from the clips below, the special effects are strictly man-in-a-suit, with no stop-motion photography. (Hey, if you’re feeling charitable, you could say the split-screen works pretty well.)
- This was co-produced by Rankin-Bass, the company better known for those well made classic Christmas specials.
- The character played by Richard Boone is named the unintentionally porntastic “Maston Thrust, Jr.,” because apparently the screenwriters decided they needed a heroic, masculine-sounding name, but only had a couple of seconds to think of one. (Or maybe … they were unconsciously conflating the name for the prehistoric mastodon?)
Green Lantern goes shopping.
CERTAIN PEOPLE WHO WE WILL NOT MENTION made a wealth of humorous comments about how unprecedented this was, because my friends apparently all know me as a homebody. WHATEVER.
“Still Life with Flowers,” Henri Fantin-Latour, 1881
What eye think.
Is it me, or does the logo for Vistar Eye Center bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the Sigil of The Crimson King from Stephen King’s “The Dark Tower” series?
It raises all sorts of questions for Vistar’s patients.
But you and I are on The Path of the Beam, folks.
“Elijah in the Wilderness,” Lord Frederic Leighton, circa 1878
Oil on canvas.
NOLAN TOURS.
Care to visit my gorgeous little Bible Belt city? I’ve been making these videos since 2018.
They’re not professional-grade or anything — like those Youtube walking tours of Athens or Rome. I have both a shaky hand and a shaky understanding of how to film things. Hell, in a couple of these videos I inexplicably kinda forgot how to walk. But you can still see how perfect my adopted home is.
I actually was a tour guide for a while when I was a college student. I was actually really good at it; it was back during the time before I hated people.
Cover to “New Mutants” #1, Rod Reis, 2019
Marvel Comics.
Elmwood Park, Roanoke, VA, June 2021
This is Elmwood Park and its amphitheater in Roanoke, VA. I apologize for the shaky-cam. I am also aware that “open-air amphitheater” is probably a redundancy, so I’m sorry for that too. I’m not even sure that I can spell “amphitheater” without autocorrect.
“Cynthia,” William Strang, 1917
