Dinosaur Marketing Lady

I feel sorry for most people who have to spend a lot of time around children during their dinosaur phase, though there is one exception that I’ll get to in a moment.

Between the ages of 9 and 11, I was obsessed with dinosaurs. Massive reptile monster things that lived millions of years ago? Of course I’m going to be into that. This was around 1998/1999, which also happened to be when Pokémon launched in the UK, which captured the obsessive bit of children’s brains shockingly well. Pokémon offered kids 150 monsters to find, name and catalogue. Dinosaurs were basically Pokémon that were actually real.

My parents got me tonnes of books on dinosaurs, and my mum took me to the natural history museum’s dinosaur exhibits, which I insisted on spending about five hours wandering around really REALLY slowly. I still don’t know how I had the attention span for it or how my mum put up with it.

Most of what I knew about dinosaurs is forgotten now. I’m sure any palaeontologists reading this will correct me in the following bit of the story if I got any of it wrong.

A marketing lady from Disney came to our school around this time to sell kids on a new movie that would be coming out the next year called ‘Walt Disney’s Dinosaur’. If you don’t remember the film, it was a CGI-animated children’s film that was made because someone looked at the millions of dollars that The Lion King made and thought, “children like dinosaurs, combine the two and we’ve got another hit, surely?”

Anyway, there are a couple of things you might be wondering.

1. Walt Disney’s been dead since the 1960’s. Can you really call it ‘Walt Disney’s Dinosaur’.
2. Why was a woman from the marketing arm of one of the biggest corporations on the planet coming to talk to children in a school? How much educational value does a CGI-animated film about talking dinosaurs have?

Well the answer to the second one is: it was the 90’s and you could get away with anything. Not sure about the first one. Though given the rumours about them freezing Walt’s brain, I’m sure you could construct a conspiracy theory that would make sense of that title.

Anyway, so they showed us the trailer and some preview clips on our school’s battered old TV. The lady asked the class if we had any questions.

I put my hand up.

“What type of dinosaur is the main character?”

“…erm…”

“I don’t recognise it from my book of dinosaurs.”

“…erm, I’m not sure.”

(I’ve since looked it up. Apparently it was an Iguanodon.)

“Also, that clip showed T-Rexes and Stegosauruses in the same place, but my book said Stegosauruses were from the Jurassic period and T-Rexes were from the Cretaceous period which was millions of years later, so they wouldn’t have been alive at the same time, would they?”

The lady looked uncomfortable and tried to move the conversation onto how excited everyone was about the film.

I’m not the same as that kid anymore. If I talked to that lady now, I would understand all about creative licence, and of course recognise that whether its accurate or not is irrelevant because dinosaurs couldn’t talk. (Well, as far as we’re aware. It was millions of years ago. How do you know they couldn’t talk if you weren’t there? ANSWER THAT ONE, SCIENTISTS!)

Whether I was right or not doesn’t really matter though. Looking back, the main reason I think I was justified in ruining Dinosaur marketing lady’s day is that firstly: there is no way in hell a marketing executive should have been allowed in a school during a class, and secondly: its an important lesson about how you shouldn’t expect people to react positively to your work. That executive obviously wanted to come into that classroom and come away with a sea of awe-struck children’s faces who would go out and buy tickets, but you can’t EXPECT that because kids are unpredictable, You’ve got to be prepared for every eventuality. Marketing is not easy. Kids won’t like your product just because you slapped a dinosaur on a poster.

About fifteen years later, Pixar released the trailer for ‘The Good Dinosaur’, which opened with the question ‘what if the dinosaurs never got wiped out?’ The Good Dinosaur is not actually a very speculative film. Its essentially just a story about a dinosaur with a difficult relationship with his father, and he makes friends with a primitive human. The only reason its got that alternate history component is that it makes it so humans and dinosaurs could co-exist in the same time period to make it so kids like the one that I was shut up and eat their damn popcorn.

When I saw the trailer for The Good Dinosaur, I remembered that marketing executive that came to my school, and I thought to myself, “Good. Kids would care about that sort of thing. This shows progress.”

Anyway, I didn’t end up seeing ‘Walt Disney’s Dinosaur’ in the cinema. I saw it at someone’s house a year later when it came out on VHS. It was pretty crap. Two stars.