Why Are Dinosaurs So Angry?
Story by @GIJoeRepairShop
Dinosaurs in most movies and television shows inevitably get very angry and take every chance they have to chase people around and to eat them. For that matter, sharks are also portrayed as incredibly angry with the human race. It usually doesn’t start out that way. Usually the dinosaurs are happily living their lives when the humans somehow crash into their world, are mysteriously transported into their hunting grounds, or somehow end up wronging the dinosaurs in some way. The dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park franchise seem to hold Jaws-level grudges against their captors. Not only do these dinosaurs want to be free of their cages, they want to be free of their island so that they can rampage through the suburbs and eat as many people as possible. Have you ever heard of a reptile holding a grudge?
In classic television shows, such as Land of the Lost, the dinosaurs seems to display a range of friendliness. Inevitably, though, there’s a Tyrannosaurus Rex that wants to eat everyone. These dinosaurs do not have to put up with captivity. However, they have to deal with humans and Sleestaks (the original ancient aliens) creeping about. Who knows what the Sleestaks are plotting against the dinosaurs using their table of glowing crystals…
Other classic films, such as “The Land that Time Forgot,” also feature humans avoiding becoming snacks for dinosaurs. No one ever really bothers to explain why these dinosaurs think that people would constitute a good meal, and why these dinosaurs are so hungry to begin with. Why don’t they just stop angrily running around and eating everything after they have already eaten a few people? Even small dinosaurs, like Velociraptors in Jurassic Park, seem very angry at humans for some reason.
There is really only one example of dinosaurs and humans living in fictional harmony. That example is The Flintstones. You could argue that in the Flintstones, humans have finally tamed the dinosaurs. They’ve tamed them to such an extent that they use Brontosauruses to quarry rocks, while smaller dinosaurs are domestic pets.
In the end, it is probably much more entertaining and dramatic to have a dinosaur in a movie running around killing everyone than it is to show what actual dinosaur behavior may have been. Since there is approximately 66.5 million years between the extinction of dinosaurs and the emergence of humans, we’ll never really know how these creatures behaved. So, they are a blank canvas for our films and television shows.
