Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Captain's Library: ONE MILLION YEARS BC Part 1

Return with us to those thrilling days of yesteryear...
...when men were cavemen and women looked like Raquel Welch in a fur bikini!
Yeah, 1966 was a great year!
 The story concludes tomorrow.
Adaptation script by Steve Moore 
Art by John Bolton
Published in House of Hammer #14, 1978

While the movie is a remake of the already-classic 1940 film One Million BC, and features kool stop-motion dinosaurs animated by the legendary Ray Harryhausen, the big selling point was Raquel Welch, who also appeared, in slightly more clothes (skintight scuba gear), in another classic sci-fi flick, Fantastic Voyage, that same year.
The film's poster and a blowup of the promo photo (left) it was based on became best-selling posters adorning bedrooms, dorm rooms, and dens of genre film buffs and/or fans of beautiful women.
The outdoor scenes were filmed on the Canary Islands in the middle of winter, when the average daily temperature was 60-65 degrees...except this was a cooler-than-normal winter! Lots of goose bumps!
Roughly nine minutes were cut from the American version, including a provocative dance by co-star (and two-time James Bond girl) Martine Beswicke.  Despite several restorations done for the domestic laser disc and DVD releases, the missing footage is not available on the US DVD (but it was on the laser disc).  If you have a multi-region player, you can see it on the British DVD!
Hammer did two other prehistoric epics which featured stock footage from this film: When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth and Creatures the World Forgot. Though both pix featured scantly-clad cavewomen including a Playboy Playmate, neither was as successful.

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