The Lost World
1925 · adventure · fantasy
The Lost World (1925), the first feature to put stop-motion dinosaurs in the same shot as live actors. Willis O'Brien before King Kong. Watch it free.
Conan Doyle's expedition finds a plateau where the dinosaurs never stopped, and for the first time in a feature, the dinosaurs look like they are genuinely standing there with the cast.
Willis O'Brien spent roughly two years on the models with a young art student named Marcel Delgado, who built them over metal skeletons with rubber skins instead of the clay O'Brien had used before. A good day produced about five seconds of usable footage.
In 1929 the rights holder pulled the film and had prints destroyed, leaving only an abridged five-reel cut. A near-complete print surfaced in a Czech archive in 1992. O'Brien went straight from here to King Kong, which is the part everyone remembers.
Free to watch via internet-archive.