Despite the immense wealth and fame I’ve garnered in my years at Ruthless Reviews, I still moonlight as a stand-up comic, and one thing I like to do onstage is to ask the audience about their favorite movies. You learn a lot about people from their answers.
Once I asked a married couple, and the lady said The Unbearable Lightness of Being, while the fella said Spaceballs, from which I learned that opposites really do attract (I’ll admit I’m more of a Spaceballs man myself). Another time, a bearded and bespectacled gentleman in his twenties could hardly wait to tell me about his “Mount Rushmore of Cinema.” Three of the four movies were under 20 years old, and the first two were directed by Quentin Tarantino. Assuming he brings this up on first dates (and don’t ya just know he does?), what this told me was that he probably does not go on a lot of second dates.
Whatever their answers, I invariably remind the good people of the audience that Jurassic Park has more dinosaurs than all of those movies combined, and it is invariably true. Jurassic Park has the most dinosaurs, and therefore it is the best movie; I rest my case. Occasionally, some wit will remark, “What about The Land Before Time?” At this point, I am forced to remind them that that is a cartoon, and I was talking about real dinosaurs. Honestly, even at a comedy show, some things should be taken seriously.
Furthermore, much as I have always loved the movie, it occurs to me that The Land Before Time—despite its G-rating and status as a classic family film—does not impart entirely wholesome lessons to children. Sure, it has good things to teach about the dangers of prejudices handed down from parent to child, and how friends can overcome their differences and work together, but one of the things Littlefoot and his pals come together to achieve is the cold-blooded murder of an innocent Tyrannosaurus Rex (or “sharptooth,” the bigoted slur by which this noble creature is maligned throughout the movie).
Am I the only one who is on the sharptooth’s side? Surely there are other acolytes of Jurassic Park out there who remember the lessons of that masterpiece: namely, that the majestic T-Rex is our proven ally against velociraptors, and I don’t think there is anything more frightening than velociraptors. Except maybe commitment, amirite fellas? (I’m not married to that joke.)
Also, for a movie about overcoming prejudices and getting to know your fellow creature, it seems a little racist that the supposed villain of the piece, the sharptooth, is the only one who doesn’t speak English. Littlefoot and company get to know each other through words, expressing themselves and capturing the hearts and minds of an audience who can understand them, while the poor sharptooth is all snarls, roars and hissing, just a walking stereotype. All he’s trying to do is survive a famine, just the same as all the leaf-eaters; it’s not his fault his food is them.
In the opening sequence, even before the title appears, we see the necessity of predation in nature when the little aquatic dinosaur (a “swimmer,” in the parlance of the movie) hunts and eats its prey, only to be nearly snapped up itself by a much larger prehistoric fish. This is, as Rooter the “clubtail” later tells Littlefoot, “the great circle of life,” but our sympathies are manipulated to the side of the leaf-eaters right from the start when we see cute little baby dinos hatching and saying, “Mama,” and being given names like Littlefoot and Cera, rather than being identified only as “leaf-eater.”
The leaf-eaters are not without their faults, as life lessons like “three-horns never play with longnecks” are passed down to the young from their parents just as racial and class prejudices are passed down in human society. “We keep to our own kind,” Littlefoot’s mother tells him before her untimely demise. “It’s always been that way.” Littlefoot questions this philosophy, but the film itself never extends this thoughtfulness to the much maligned sharptooth.
It is easy to forget if it has been some time since you last viewed the picture, but the death of Littlefoot’s beloved mother is not actually the sharptooth’s fault, despite how thoroughly he has been coded as the villain. She dies in the same “earthshake” that nearly kills the sharptooth himself, and if he was trying to eat Littlefoot and the other smaller dinosaurs moments before, it is only because of his biological imperative to survive. My man is an apex predator, and Littlefoot and his pals are out there looking like a bunch of tasty snacks; what is he supposed to do?
“You should not eat talking trees,” Littlefoot’s friend Ducky says just before they discover their new friend Petrie, reinforcing the film’s sympathy for those able to speak English words. On the quest to reach the Great Valley, longnecks, three-horns, bigmouths, flyers, and even spiketails can find commonalities and become lifelong friends, but there will never be any love for sharptooths. Cera even revels in the apparent death of the one doomed to be the movie’s villain, disrespecting what she believes to be his corpse until he wakes up, justifiably angry. (To be fair, Cera is also shitty to her supposed friends throughout most of the movie, so this could be about her more than the filmmakers’ point-of-view.)
While Littlefoot, Cera, Ducky, Petrie, and Spike learn to cooperate for food and warmth, the poor nameless sharptooth is out there in the inhospitable landscape all alone, also hungry and cold. The smaller dinos learn skills and work together, saving each other from lava and tarpits (the latter even affording them the opportunity to work in a little prehistoric blackface, if you can believe it), but the predators of the movie (the sharptooth as well as the “domeheads” who ambush Cera in the Mountains that Burn) are consistently portrayed only as mindless eating machines.
“Let’s get rid of him once and for all,” Littlefoot says in the climactic sequence, in which he and his friends plot the sharptooth’s murder. It is a feat of cooperation: “We’ll coax him to the deep end of the pond. He can’t swim with those scrawny arms. Me and Spike will go up and push that big rock on top of his head, and then he’ll fall off into the water. Petrie, you whistle when he’s just at the right spot, where the water gets dark.” Co-producer Steven Spielberg reportedly cut over ten minutes from Don Bluth’s iconic motion picture for fear that it would frighten children and anger parents, yet this chilling monologue and the subsequent cold-blooded murder was left intact.
The sharptooth is just minding his own business, unaware of the presence of the little dinos when they spring their trap (using Ducky as bait, because it’s important that everyone plays a part) and force him off a cliff into deep water with a boulder on top of him. Because they’re the good guys. This poor, maligned T-Rex has literally never done any of them any harm, including Littlefoot’s mother. He doesn’t even manage to take Petrie with him when he falls to his unjust death. And he never gets even a single line of English dialogue to speak in his own defense.
Then again, Spike never says a word, either, so maybe I’m just crazy. Don’t forget to tip your servers, folks!