This past summer we were all reminded that moviegoers love dinosaurs. And we know that the people who make movies love to borrow their ideas from anywhere they can. We're also aware that this has been done so often that Hollywood is running out of properties to turn into movies. Combine these three facts together and you come to the latest plan to build a blockbuster franchise: A Dino-Riders movie.
Even if you were a child in the 1980’s you’d be forgiven if the Dino-Riders didn’t mean a thing to you. It was another in the long line of cartoons that were really just 30-minute animated commercials for a line of toys. However, unlike Transformers or He-Man, which were able to build their cartoons into popular properties in their own right, the Dino-Riders created all of 14 total episodes before giving up. Now, however, according to The Tracking Board, the fact that nobody remembers them isn’t stopping Mattel from trying to turn the brand into a film in an attempt to compete with Hasbro’s Transformers.
The premise of the series, inasmuch as there was one, concerned an intergalactic war between two races, the human-like Valorians and the more reptilian Rulons. The Valorians magical macguffin transports all of them back in time where they crash on prehistoric Earth. The two races then enlist dinosaurs to help them in their battle, leading to things like a Triceratops covered in armor and firing lasers from multiple body cannons. Actually, now that we say it like that, this might not be a bad idea for a movie after all. Check out the original cartoon intro below.
While the premise isn’t any more ridiculous than Michael Bay’s giant robot opus, or the mutant turtles with ninja skills thing, for whatever reason those were series, or toys, or both, that were popular. This is a property with just short of zero nostalgia. We’re fairly certain that the only way that anybody ended up with a Dino-Rider toy is when you asked your grandmother for a Dinobot and she got confused.
Still, if they’re digging this deeply into the '80’s well, this must mean that your favorite toy line is that much closer to getting its own film. Where exactly is the M.A.S.K. movie anyway? Personally, I’m still waiting for them to cast the Marshall Bravestarr film.
