Trivia / Dinosaur Island (1994)

• Creator Backlash:
  • Roger Corman (who tasked Jim Wynorski and Fred Olen Ray with making the film, and ended up getting a "Roger Corman Presents" credit) ended up hating the movie, according to Wynorski, saying that "he thought the story was too campy." Wynorski and Ray thought that it did really well, however.
  • Animator Hal Miles has gone on record that he isn't thrilled with the beach fight, due to it replacing his animation of the Tylosaurus with the crudely shot Deinonychus puppet. According to both him and the directors, it actually took a lot of strong-arming Corman to even include any of the Stop Motion shots seen in the film.
• Follow the Leader: Corman tasked Wynorski and Ray to make the film after Jurassic Park came out. However, Wynorski and Ray later rewrote the script from being a Jurassic Park ripoff to resemble more the land-of-prehistoric-animals and land-inhabited-solely-by-beautiful-women B-movies of the '50s.
• Prop Recycling:
  • Whenever The Great One isn't portrayed by a a stuntman in a costume, it's reusing the same full-sized animatronic puppet from Carnosaur. The Deinonychus hand puppet also shows up a few times as both a terrifying giant creature and as the Plucky Comic Relief character.
  • Some of the flora of the island are recycled props from The Flintstones, left behind after filming on that movie ended.
  • The cave monster that attacks the soldiers is recycled from one of Fred Olen Ray's earlier films, Deep Space.
• What Could Have Been: As noted in Dino Diego's retrospective of the Carnosaur series, this works both ways:
  • Regarding some of the props, both the T-Rex costume and the Pterodactyl puppet used in the film were both intended for Canosaur itself, but went unused until this film.
  • The film was slated to use Stop Motion animation for many more of the dinosaurs. Including an attack by a Tylosaurus that was replaced by the Deinonychus puppet in the final film.

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