As a Film Studies major, my appreciation for Rite of Spring has only deepened over the years, and I’ve come to find the making-of process behind it just as fascinating as the finished product. What’s especially interesting is how Disney’s dinosaurs are a time capsule of what was considered to be the cutting edge of paleontology in the 1930s and early 1940s. With the benefit of scientific hindsight, it also demonstrates just how much paleontology has advanced in the last 80 or so years.

At the turn of the century, dinosaurs were just beginning to creep into the public imagination thanks to the efforts of Roy Chapman Andrews, Friedrich von Huene, Henry Fairfield Osborn, and the non-profit museums who were all too happy to display their findings to enthusiastic crowds. It’s hardly surprising, then, that characters like Gertie the Dinosaur (Windsor McKay, 1914) were among the first animated movie stars, albeit significantly less scary than how museums presented them.

But Walt Disney was about to subvert things entirely.

From the very start of preproduction on Fantasia in September 1938 Disney wanted to include a prehistoric sequence that would serve as “a coldly accurate reproduction of what science thinks went on during the first few billion years of this planet's existence” (Fantasia). So he brought on Julian Huxley, Barnum “Mr. Bones” Brown, and Roy Chapman Andrews as scientific consultants for the project, along with Edwin Hubble. To think that all of them worked on the same project -- an animated film, no less! -- is mind-boggling.