Dinosaurs: The True Story
is a short CGI film by Paul-Louis Aeberhardt, produced by Bad Jokes Animation and released in 2020. It depicts a government agency of a dinosaur-ruled world preparing to stave off the infamous meteor using a highly sophisticated planetary defense system... albeit one that turns out to have some rather unfortunate technical oversights.
This work contains examples of:
- Bad Vibrations: Parodied. President T. rex's arrival is first heralded by a lab tech's glass of water shaking ominously.
- Brick Joke: The short begins with two dinosaur astronauts on the moon being the first to see the meteor pass overhead as it approaches Earth. The end has them still there, looking at each other as the fireball sweeps across the planet.
- But What About the Astronauts?: At the end of the short, the dinosaur astronauts are still up on the moon, now stuck there and left looking at the end of the world from up in the sky.
- Didn't Think This Through: Evidently, no one considered the shortness of tyrannosaur arms when designing the controls for the asteroid defenses.
- The Dinosaurs Had It Coming: In a humorous way — despite being smart enough to design a way to stop the meteor, the dinosaurs never accounted for the physiological differences of their various species, and their end ultimately comes down to their own stupidity.
- Disaster Movie: The short is largely a parody of this sort of films, featuring a cast of dinosaurs in the roles of action move scientists and a generic US president preparing to stop a looming meteor strike by blowing it up with missiles... except that President T. rex's arms are too short to reach the activation panel.
- Large and in Charge: The T. rex president is so big that the regular nondescript dinosaur techies barely come up to his hips and his footsteps are enough to make them shake up and down with every footfall.
- Object-Shaped Landmass: Seen from orbit, the world's sole continent is shaped like a theropod's head, with a small lake as an eye.
- Silence Is Golden: The short is done entirely without dialogue — there's sound in the form of the dinosaur characters chirruping, growling, squawking and roaring, but there's no intelligible speech and most of the noises aren't directed at other characters.
- Tough Armored Dinosaur: Fittingly, the commander of the dinosaur nation's military is an Ankylosaurus.
- Wilhelm Scream: One of the dinosaur techies lets out a faint scream of this sort when falling off a ledge.
- World-Wrecking Wave: The meteor impact is depicted as a tremendous shockwave, followed by a great fiery wave, that sweeps across the world in seconds.
