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Rhedosaurus
First appearance	The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
Last appearance	Godzilla Singular Point (2021)
Created by	Ray Harryhausen Eugène Lourié Ray Bradbury Hal Chester
Based on	Dinosaur in "The Fog Horn" (1951) by Ray Bradbury
Adapted by	Eugène Lourié Fred Freiberger Robert Smith Louis Morheim Ray Harryhausen Hal Chester
Designed by	Ray Harryhausen Eugène Lourié
In-universe information
Alias	The Beast Sea Serpent Herman Atomic Monster
Species	Sea monster (Original short story) Giant dinosaur (1953 film) Extraterrestrial reptile (1977 film)
Origin	Baffin Bay (1953)

The Rhedosaurus is a fictional dinosaur that debuted in the 1953 monster movie The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, directed and co-written by Eugène Lourié. The Rhedosaurus is depicted as a giant, destructive, prehistoric reptile that is immune to most modern artillery in its major on-screen appearance, and would later appear in the 1977 science fiction film Planet of Dinosaurs.

The prehistoric sea monster that became the Rhedosaurus was initially conceived by the writer Ray Bradbury for his short story "The Fog Horn", which appeared in the June 23, 1951 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Prior to deciding to adapt Bradbury's creature from the story and the artwork by James R. Bingham, Ray Harryhausen, and Eugène Lourié went through many draft designs for producers Hal E. Chester and Jack Dietz, who desired to make a monster film due to the successful 1952 re-release of King Kong (1933). After considering using existing dinosaurs such as an Allosaurus, Harryhausen and Lourié eventually decided to invent a new fictional creature; its appearance later infuriated scientists and students alike upon its release. The former ultimately made two models based on his concept art before concluding on a fearsome-looking design with the producers' approval and portraying the creature in the film via stop motion animation.

The Rhedosaurus is one of the most influential and iconic fictional monsters in the history of cinema. It inspired film monsters such as Godzilla and Gamera and set the template for giant monsters and kaiju in films. Homages to the creature appear in media such as a 1956 issue of the comic book series Batman, the 1970 film When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, and the comic book miniseries Dinosaurs Attack!.

Appearances

The Rhedosaurus first appeared in the 1951 short story The Fog Horn, written by Ray Bradbury. In the story, the creature, remaining unnamed and mostly referred to as a "sea monster", regularly visits a nearby lighthouse, drawn to the sounds of the fog horn emanating from it. When the keepers of the lighthouse turn off the fog horn one day, the creature becomes enraged and completely destroys the lighthouse, returning back into the sea, never to be seen again.

The monster would later make his silver screen debut in the 1953 film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. In the film, the creature, now referred to as a Rhedosaurus, awakens from suspended animation under the Arctic by an atomic bomb detonation. Traveling south towards its native breeding grounds in New York City, it causes many human casualties as it attacks ships and even a lighthouse in its journey. Eventually, it makes landfall in New York City and goes on a devastating rampage, killing and injuring many people before it is temporarily repelled and injured by artillery fire. The Rhedosaurus is ultimately killed on Coney Island by a radionuclide that is directly shot into an open wound on its neck caused by the artillery fire.

The Rhedosaurus next screen appearance was in the 1977 film Planet of Dinosaurs. In the film, it is one of many species resembling Earth's dinosaurs which inhabit a Mesozoic era earth-like planet. When a spaceship containing a human crew becomes stranded on the planet, the crew encounters a Rhedosaurus while attempting to flee an attacking Tyrannosaurus, causing a battle between the two. Ultimately, the Rhedosaurus is defeated when the Tyranosaurus bites into its head, crushing its skull and seemingly killing it.

Rhedosaurus later made an appearance in the 2013 comic book series Dinosaurs Attack! by IDW Publishing. The comic depicted Rhedosaurus, alongside various giant monsters attacking humanity.

Concept and creation

Development and design

The monster that would later be known as the Rhedosaurus was originally conceived by the writer Ray Bradbury for his short story "The Fog Horn", which appeared in the June 23, 1951 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. At the start of the scripting of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), first-time science fiction film producer Hal Chester, who wanted to make a monster film in collaboration with Jack Dietz due to the successful 1952 re-release of King Kong (1933), brought Bradbury into his office to read the outline for a proposed monster film. Bradbury later recalled that upon reading the draft, he mention that it strongly resembled his 1951 short story and told Chester that their monsters were evidently the same one. Bradbury's friend Ray Harryhausen was also assigned to work on Chester and Dietz's film by this point and was given a copy of James R. Bingham's artwork of the creature published alongside the story in The Saturday Evening Post.

Before adapting Bradbury's sea monster, Harryhausen and director Eugène Lourié had gone through many draft designs for producers Chester and Dietz. They made sketches of an octopus (foreshadowing Harryhausen's work on the 1955 film It Came from Beneath the Sea), a leviathan, and a giant shark but Harryhausen expressed his dislike of these, leading him to "experiment" with other concepts such as an octopus-like alien and a beast akin to a dragon. When the pair decided to make the creature a dinosaur based on the sea beast, Harryhausen said he did not want a "normal" dinosaur such as the Allosaurus, Tyrannosaurus or Brontosaurus, with the latter because he did not want his creation to seem similar to his mentor Willis H. O'Brien's dinosaurs featured in The Lost World (1925). Therefore, Harryhausen and Lourié eventually invented a new fictional giant four-legged creature, with a menacing appearance.

Sometime during designing, the creature was dubbed the "Rhedosaurus" by a crew member who Harryhausen suggested may have been Chester, though this remains unconfirmed. He also considered the fact that the first two letters in the dinosaur's name are the same as his initials are coincidental, despite some people saying the beast's name was partly derived from his. Warner Bros. later gave it the nickname "Herman".

Modelling and portrayal

Following a few rough sketches of the beast's structure on paper and discussing storyboards for the film, Ray Harryhausen constructed a clay prototype of the Rhedosaurus and then used it to make a model out of latex, which he revealed to the two producers. However, everyone, including himself, who saw this model voiced their disappointment with its "babyish" and "kind" appearance. Harryhausen took the model back to his workroom and broke the model apart, recreating it with a stronger, more reptilian head and thicker legs. In his book The Art of Ray Harryhausen, he stated that it gave the beast what he desired was a more scarify look, however, after making some test footage he "realized that it still wasn't right" and remade it a third and final time before using it for the film. The model was later reused by Harryhausen to portray the dragon in the critically-acclaimed 1958 film The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.

To portray his stop motion animated model of the giant beast tumulting in a particular setting in the 1953 film, Harryhausen invented a method for screen projection that divided the plates into foreground and backdrop imagery one frame at a time. He later described how he undertook this projection process: "I split the screen in front of the 16mm camera by using a glass with blacked-out portions where the model was standing. After photographing one portion, I would rewind the exposed film, black out the already exposed half, and then photograph the blacked-out portion of the projection plate. Theoretically, the whole thing would look like the model was part of the picture." The process, later dubbed "Dynamation" by producer Charles Schneer, was an inexpensive and successful technique for Harryhausen and consequently would refine throughout his career, becoming a milestone of his work.

Additionally, Harryhausen designed and supervised the creation of all the large models that the Rhedosaurus destroys in the picture, which Willis Cook assembled. Harryhausen said that his experience utilizing the Rhedosaurus in the production later partially inspired his monster Ymir in 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957).

Characteristics

Physical appearance

In the original short story The Fog Horn, the creature is described as a massive aquatic reptile which the main protagonist estimates as totaling fifty to one hundred feet in length. Its large head sits at the top of a long serpentine neck roughly forty feet long, and its entire body appears to be covered in various sea life. The story also mentions the creature having a tail and four legs that are barely mentioned during its initial encounter. A later illustration by James Bingham depicted the creature as resembling a bipedal therapod with a long neck and a single row of dorsal spines running down its head to the end of its tail. The 1993 comic book adaption of the short story depicts it as a plesiosaur-like creature, specifically that of an Elasmosaurus, with a sleeker head, large black eyes, and a mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth. While the rest of the creature's body adheres to the short story, this incarnation of the creature had two pairs of powerful flippers that it uses to swim rapidly through the water.

For the creature's silver screen adaption, the creature, now referred to as a Rhedosaurus, is depicted as a dinosaur of incredible size, belonging to the fictional species of the same name. Standing at forty feet in height, and weighing five hundred tons, Rhedosaurus is mostly quadrupedal in nature, with the occasional bipedalism. The head, which is relatively small in proportion to his body, has a single row of spines on the back of his head and continuing down to the end of his long, prehensile tail. In addition to a much smaller head, the neck is also noticeably shorter and thicker than what is described in the original short story. His long, muscular body is held up by four short, powerful legs that each end in three clawed toes. His physical appearance in 1977 film Planet of Dinosaurs remained almost identical to the 1953 film incarnation with some notable differences, significantly, his size is much smaller than his original counterpart, now being roughly the size of a car.

Powers and abilities

In his first appearance in The Fog Horn, and in subsequent adaptions, the creature is depicted as highly adaptable to various environments, capable of living submerged underwater and walking around on land. The short story would make the distinction of having it being connected with the various ocean life in its underwater home, with various creatures living on its massive frame. Both its literary and cinematic incarnations are shown to be exceptionally powerful, capable of destroying man-made structures such as a lighthouse with relative ease.

In The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the Rhedosaurus is shown to use its extraordinary strength and bulk during combat, also utilizing its long tail and powerful jaws as offensive weapons. Its body is covered in armored scales that are very durable, being hard enough to withstand gunfire, and artillery fire to a degree, its skull is further described as being eight inches thick. One of its more notable "abilities" is its blood, which is host to a prehistoric virus. While this virus has seemingly no effect on it, humans are uniquely susceptible to it, as the human immune system has no basis to defend against it. This virus is shown to be extremely fatal to humans once they are infected with it, within a matter of minutes after their initial exposure the infected's body will shut down completely, causing the human host to expire.

In Planet of Dinosaurs, the Rhedosaurus is a smaller and more defenseless creature, although it is still quite powerful, it is easily killed when it battles a T-Rex.

Legacy

Cultural impact

Upon the release of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), the Rhedosaurus initially received widespread pan from dinosaur enthusiasts, especially scientists and students of paleontology. They considered the creature's design and portrayal in the film to be unrealistic and complained that the filmmakers should have used an actual dinosaur instead of creating a new fictional one. In an attempt to ease them expressing their infuriation, director Eugène Lourié told reporters they invented the creature because the crew felt an unoriginal creation would not meet their intention of striking fear into twentieth-century theatergoers: "We wanted a brand new monster who looks more frightening enough to throw a large city into a panic. So we concocted a forty-foot Rhedosaurus. A more evil-looking, blood-thirsty, powerful creature than [the] thing the museum people have uncovered." In contrast, critics have mostly praised the Rhedosaurus, especially acclaiming its animation by Ray Harryhausen.

Influence

Many retrospective commentators have praised this iconic and influential film monster due to it possibly being the foundation of the Atomic Age giant monster genre, the first entirely fictional dinosaur to appear on-screen, and even the first monster in a film to be associated with an atomic weapon.

The monster and its 1953 film, inspired film monsters such as Godzilla and Gamera and set the template for giant monsters and kaiju in films, including: Them! (1954), Godzilla (1954), The Deadly Mantis (1957), 20 Million Miles to Earth, The Giant Claw (both 1957), The Giant Behemoth (1959), Gorgo (1961), and Gamera, the Giant Monster (1965). Homages to the creature appear in media such as a 1956 issue of the comic book series Batman, the 1970 film When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, and the comic book miniseries Dinosaurs Attack!.

See also

• Cultural depictions of dinosaurs

Sources

Books

• Berry, Mark (August 31, 2015). The Dinosaur Filmography. McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-1-4766-0674-3.
• Bogue, Mike (September 14, 2017). Apocalypse Then: American and Japanese Atomic Cinema, 1951-1967. McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-1-4766-6841-3.
• Booker, Keith (2001). Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946-1964. Greenwood Publishing Group Group. ISBN 978-0-3133-1873-3.
• Debus, Allen (June 9, 2022). Kong, Godzilla and the Living Earth: Gaian Environmentalism in Daikaiju Cinema. McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-1-4766-4653-4.
• Debus, Allen (November 21, 2014). Prehistoric Monsters: The Real and Imagined Creatures of the Past That We Love to Fear. McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-0-7864-5815-8.
• Noble, Brian (January 1, 2016). Articulating Dinosaurs: A Political Anthropology. University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-1-4426-2705-5.
• Evans, Joyce (March 5, 2018). Celluloid Mushroom Clouds: Hollywood And Atomic Bomb. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-4299-8142-5.
• Glut, Donald (January 30, 2001). Jurassic Classics: A Collection of Saurian Essays and Mesozoic Musings. McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-0-7864-6246-9.
• Hankin, Mike (September 14, 2008). Ray Harryhausen - Master of the Majicks Vol. 2: The American Films. Archive Editions. ISBN 978-0-9817-8290-4.
• Harryhausen, Ray; Dalton, Tony (2006). The Art of Ray Harryhausen. Billboard Books. ISBN 978-0-8230-8400-5.
• Harryhausen, Ray; Dalton, Tony (November 22, 2003). Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life. Aurum Press. ISBN 978-1-8541-0940-8.
• Harryhausen, Ray; Dalton, Tony (September 30, 2008). A Century of Stop Motion Animation: From Méliès to Aardman. Watson-Guptill Publications. ISBN 978-0-8230-9980-1.
• Hendershot, Cynthia (1999). Paranoia, the Bomb, and 1950s Science Fiction Films. The Popular Press. ISBN 978-0-8797-2799-4.
• Leeder, Murray (January 25, 2018). Horror Film: A Critical Introduction. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-5013-1443-8.
• Lennard, Dominic (November 1, 2019). Brute Force: Animal Horror Movies. SUNY Press. ISBN 978-1-4384-7661-2.
• Lev, Peter (2003). Transforming the Screen, 1950-1959. Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 978-0-6848-0495-8.
• Matthews, Melvin (2007). 1950s Science Fiction Films and 9/11: Hostile Aliens, Hollywood, and Today's News. Algora Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8758-6499-0.
• Pettigrew, Neil (April 30, 1999). The Stop-motion Filmography: A Critical Guide to 297 Features Using Puppet Animation. McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-0-7864-0446-9.
• Richards, Rashna (December 1, 2012). Cinematic Flashes: Cinephilia and Classical Hollywood. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-2530-0688-2.
• Rovin, Jeff (January 1, 1989). The Encyclopiedia of Monsters. Facts On File Inc. ISBN 978-0-8160-2303-5.
• Sanz, José (November 14, 2002). Starring T. Rex!: Dinosaur Mythology and Popular Culture. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-2532-1550-5.
• Schoell, William (September 30, 2016). Creature Features: Nature Turned Nasty in the Movies. McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-1-4766-1072-6.
• Senn, Brian (March 26, 2015). A Year of Fear: A Day-by-Day Guide to 366 Horror Films. McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-1-4766-1090-0.
• Tamura, Hiroshi (April 1, 2021). Showa Japan Sensationalist Dinosaur Compendium (in Japanese). Tatsumi Publishing. ISBN 978-4-7778-2752-7.
• Warren, Bill (January 12, 2017). Keep Watching the Skies!: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties, The 21st Century Edition. McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-1-4766-2505-8.
• Webber, Ray (2004). The Dinosaur Films of Ray Harryhausen: Features, Early 16mm Experiments and Unrealized Projects. McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-0-7864-1666-0.

Periodicals

• "Herman". The Charlotte News. Charlotte, North Carolina. May 7, 1953 – via Newspapers.com (subscription required).
• "Monster, Mystery and Action Films Showing at Local Theaters". Lansing State Journal. Lansing, Michigan. June 21, 1953 – via Newspapers.com (subscription required).
• "Issues 4-6". Literature. Vol. 8. Iwanami Shoten. 1990 – via Google Books.

Media

• Eugène Lourié (director) (1953). The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (motion picture). United States: Warner Bros.
• James Shea (director) (1977). Planet of Dinosaurs (motion picture). United States: Cineworld Pictures.
• Atsushi Takahashi (director) (2021). Godzilla Singular Point (television series). Japan: Netflix.

External links

• The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms at Warner Bros.