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:

1.   “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).
2. 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.)
3. This was co-produced by Rankin-Bass, the company better known for those well made classic Christmas specials.
4. 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?)