Poor dino

After watching a fair amount of classic Doctor Who, I got to "The Invasion of the Dinosaurs." The dinosaurs (especially the t-rex and the pterodactyl) are ridiculous, basically children's toys, but the story-line is good, and the character development leading up to these episodes has some great pay-offs, and so it quickly became my favorite classic Who story. 

Because I'm into reactors, I watched someone's review of it, and the comments were populated by people saying how great the story is and what a shame it is that the dinosaurs are so bad so it gets a bad rap. Someone suggested reading the book so you can envision the dinosaurs as scary as you'd like. Shaking my head at myself, I checked it out of the library. It's surprisingly good actually, written by Malcolm Hulke, the man who wrote the episodes.

Anyway, this is now far longer than any of you are going to read, especially because it's classic Doctor who, and considering that you'll see that it gets longer.

When watching the show, even though the dinosaurs weren't great (they could maybe have gotten away with the brontosaurus, stegosaurus, and triceratops, though, if one forgives the time and the budget), when the brontosaurus popped up in modern London, I felt bad for him because he looked lost and confused and like he wanted to go home. Well, I just got to this in the book:

"The stegosaurus, thirty feet long and weighing two tons, stood bewildered in a narrow Hampstead side street. In the distance it could see the green of Hampstead Heath, and the prospect of so much lush foliage  made its salivic juices run. But immediately ahead stood a little group of mammalian midgets colored brown, and they were frightening because they carried sticks that made big bangs. Each time one of the sticks banged, the stegosaurus's nerve center set in its hip reacted to pin pricks of pain. No doubt a tyrannosaurus or a pterodactyl would have enjoyed the little mammals, as a between meal snack, but the stegosaurus longed only to much peacefully on green leaves. It wished the little mammals would all go away. In anguish at being trapped in this uninviting valley, it swished its tail. The fronts of three houses shattered and crumbled with a roar of falling bricks and masonry."

No one should have to be suddenly transported to someplace new and scary and then deal with mammalian midgets with sticks that go bang. Poor guy.