Sunday, August 14, 2005

Flashback Friday: Dinosaurs Attack

I remember when I first saw them. I was in junior high and some kid had bought a pack of trading cards. I looked through them in amazement...they were called Dinosaurs Attack. They told the grisly tale of dinosaurs attacking Earth through a freak experiment. I loved the idea of dinosaurs attacking, since I was a big fan of sci-fi movies like Godzilla, but I'd never seen anything like these. The artwork was horrifying with people being eaten, torn apart, stabbed, and other nightmarish scenarios. I think at least some of my mental scars were caused by them.

Later on, I found out the cards were based on an older trading card series called Mars Attacks. It wasn't until I got on the Internet and found an archive of them that I finally understood Dinosaurs Attack. Of course, Mars Attacks is the inspiration the twisted Tim Burton movie of the same name.

Looking at the cards now, Dinosaurs Attack is pretty cheesy. The gore and violence is overdone, designed to be shocking without being really logical. I mean, not all dinoaurs are rampaging, man-eating horrors. Jurassic Park did a better job showing what would happen if dinosaurs and modern-day humans collided. And the research is sloppy. Trilobites were definitely not "flesh-eating worms."

2 comments:

Maurice Mitchell said...

Those cards always seem pretty sick to me. Just violent for the sake of being violence. The only one I really remember was the duckbilled dionsaur with the baby leg sticking out of his mouth. Sick.

Nigel G Mitchell said...

Yeah, this wasn't really a pleasant flashback. Tell you what...flashback to My Little Pony instead.