Epic Win: The Land Before Time
Submitted by C Snedeker
Every kid goes through a dinosaur phase, and for me, The Land Before Time was the trigger. Although I kept calling my dinosaurs “sharp tooths” instead of carnivores.
Also, I think The Land Before Time is the only movie franchise to have spawned four thousand sequels.
Updated: Featured Comments
Fumbe made a good observation:
It bothered me a bit until I looked at the credits after one of ‘em; it was Cera as in TriCERAtops rather than Sarah.
beingwyrd made me laugh with this comment:
i still love this movie.
the sequels are the devils hell spawn in movie format.
much like the highlander sequels.
there should have been only one.
Land Before Time was lame. And as the sequels continued, they were even worse. Thumbs waaaay down.
Just kidding. The first one was pretty good. Thumbs up.
I’ll give you that. The first one was pretty enjoyable–maybe even a bit tear-jerking. But the ones that came after that got so progressively worse.
We watched the first one in art class in middle school once. She fastforwarded past the pizza hut commercial part, and i was like, nooooo…
Who do you think you’re kidding?
The avatar is different.
True on that one atleast the first 3 were decient
The first was great, but the sequel were so awful, it’s a shame
I thought Big water was pretty good though. But your right about the newest ones.
I loved the original, it was really cute.. but ever since they spawned a billion annoying sequels it seems u cant even find the original on dvd..
idk how can u do sequels when all are essentially the same? first everyone is happy, then a problem arises, the baby dinos sing and fix the problem while the apparently incompetent and dense adults turn a blind eye, they sing again after the problem is solved and the movie ends with every one happy again somehow with everyone learning an important lesson about sharing or singing in tune or whatever… then after the credits the advertise the next dvd that will come out in a few months with the same scenario.. just a different movie title
Yup Yup Yup
Nice ref.
Too true. I used to cry when Littlefoot’s mom died. Now i cry cause all the sequels suck.
My mom remembers watching the Italian translation of this. I think Littlefoot translated as ‘Pieditto’ or something like that.
Go to Walmart, they occaisonally have the original on the $7 DVD rack. It rotates every couple months so if you don’t find it initially, check back after a while.
True, but I am personally waiting for Universal to realize that there is an audience for a special edition. Letterboxing, at least, would be nice.
It’s very typical children’s programming – the adults need to be dense (to our minds) because the children watching have to see that the “children” (in the program/movie/what have you) are smart and capable.
All that positivity will get beaten out of them in high school dodgeball, so why sweat it?
my favourite line: “i smell… i smell… i smell. . . . .ducky.”
My fav part was.
I flyed? No you falled.
The original incarnation of “that wasn’t flying, that was falling with style!”
And I always heard it as,
“I flied?”
“No, you fail’d.”
Poor Petrie. First winged animal to make the Fail Blog.
Nice. We SHOULD put him there…
LoL not only did it come out with movie sequels, they even had a series going on.
I probably wore out the VHS tape we had this on.
I’ve still got mine, and the second film though after that I stopped watching.
First was the greatest.
I just checked it out of the library a billion times for free. There were a couple kids movies they let you take out no charge.
I never liked The Land Before Time. Probably because I was never all that wild about dinosaurs when I was a kid. It also annoyed me that the triceratops’ name was Sara.
It bothered me a bit until I looked at the credits after one of ‘em; it was Cera as in TriCERAtops rather than Sarah.
This VHS got a lot of play at our house – so much so that my father, years after we had stopped watching it, woke up in a sweat one night and asked my mother “The tape of the Land before Time! Where is it?!” My mother was confused at being woken up for such a thing in the middle of the night. “But what if we have grandchildren!?” my father asked. “We must find it!”
None of us has produced grandchildren so far, and I wonder if my parents will still have a VHS player when we do…
HAHAHAHA! It’s amazing my poor grandma didn’t have that problem. My little cousin had everyone of those movies, and she watched them at least 4 times a week. It’s really hard to get those songs out of your head.
“Every one” not “everyone.”
Sorry! I’m being my own spelling/grammar nazi today.
Yeah i liked the song Big Water. My little brother couldn’t say water so he would sin “big big big big waer
opps i ment to write sing
This movie is THE movie of my childhood! I still love it so much, and I still cry like a baby when Littlefoot’s mom dies D:
SPOILER ALERT.
Just kidding. That part is ridiculously sad.
Even now it makes me teary even listening to her voice as she talks to him, watching her stand up to the sharp-tooth and loving Littlefoot so, so much. I loved this movie – we had the VHS version of course, and the paper box it came in got all the corners worn off and the colors bleached because we watched it so much. Truly a “heart” movie.
The first one, I mean. The only good one.
We don’t even own the sequels. I haven’t seen most of them.
i remember when this movie came out. i begged my mom to take us to pizza hut every night so i could collect all of the hand puppets.
Oh good Lord. Those freakin’ hand puppets.
Our local Pizza Hut hung stuffed animals of the main cast from the ceiling and each time we ate there, I seethed with envy. You see, those toys were J.C. Penny exclusives and there wasn’t a J.C. Penny store for miles. Whose genius marketing idea was that?
Anyway, if I couldn’t have the stuffed animals, the puppets were a (clears throat awkwardly) decent substitute. (Decent as in off-model, awkwardly designed, and failing utterly at fitting on a human hand.) Honestly, give-away toys are like a giant conspiracy against you when you are seven and want a complete set. (See also all the trauma caused by McDonalds’ Happy Meals.) But I got my complete set. Sharptooth and everyone. Yard sales are awesome.
Funny coda: I passed by a stuffed animal Littlefoot in Ocean State Job Lot a while ago, and the irony of blithely ignoring something I would have done anything for as a little kid did not escape me. But I had an excellent reason for not buying him: he was a tie-in toy for the DTV sequels, and as a dedicated Don Bluth fangirl, I can’t justify giving those people my money.
They still play the first few on tv every few years, & they have like what 16 sequels? There are more LBT movies than Friday the 13th movies…
I have a few of the resturant toys from I think it was Burger King? Duckie wore a lei & would flip in the air!
Still remember it. The first one was epic.. The sequence fails, though.
Does anybody remember the ending theme? If not, here it is.
Yeah, I think it’s a really rare song by Diana Ross and the Supremes.
http://www.amazon.com/Land-Before-Time-Original-Soundtrack/dp/B000002O5Q
Gives me goosebumps every time I hear it. Seriously. It’s one of those nostalgia things that come up. This movie was made in, what, 1987? I was four years old. Wow.
I still drink from longgg… necks.
My daughter couldn’t get enough of the original. She complained about “why do they always have a dead parent in these films?”. She could sing the “I love eggs song” from the sequel. The original (at least) had the classic Don Bluth look, like classic Disney animation, which is no wonder considering that he worked at Disney before they canned the animation staff because “no one watches cartoon movies anymore!”. Guess who had the last laff with three award winning sequels?
Ever notice that there’s not one “family film” that has an intact family in it? Every Disney fairy-tale-based film at least one parent is mysteriously missing (to be fair that was a major plot point of some of the original fables, such as Snow White), but it’s also true for stories where they made up their own ending, like Bambi. The only exception I can think of is where the humans aren’t major characters at all, such as in Lady and the Tramp.
Aristocats didn’t have humans as major characters and the “dad” was not in the picture either… But it’s not one of the fairy tale ones.
Also, I think Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan had both parents. I haven’t seen either one in years, so I can’t remember though.
I was supposed to go see this movie for my sixth birthday; had a big party and everything. Then one of my friends shows up to the party and his grandmother informs my mother that The Land Before Time is sad and Gregory (my friend) cried when he saw it. So we went to see Oliver & Company instead.
And to this day, almost 21 years later, I have never see The Land Before Time or any of the sequels.
aww. that is sad. you should come over, i have it on dvd, i will hold your hand through the sad parts.
(it still makes me cry)
Keep this Gregory far, far away from “Graveyard of the Fireflies”.
Oh my gosh! That movie is the saddest! I cried throughout the entire film.
That bites dude. I hate it when people give there opinion to my mom about movies. I never got to see the Dark Night in theaters because my moms friends said ti was to dark. when we bought it I was soooo pissed off at my mom when i saw there was nothing wrong with the movie.
The first 3 were decent but the last 10 were retarded
so so true
This was definitely one of my top movies growing up! I know Pizza Hut had those little LBT plastic puppets of all the dinosaurs, and they had some coloring contest there that I won, and I got this big stuffed Littlefoot toy as a prize, which ended up being one of the main toys I always played with.
I really liked the sequel with the little baby t-rex, Chomper I think his name was? SO cute! Any one after that though sucked.
Gadzooks, the coloring contest. I remember getting a picture of Littlefoot to color in. Littlefoot, just to remind you, is brown. Okay. The picture came with a sealed packet of crayons: red, yellow, blue, and green.
Chain restaurants hate little kids.
i still love this movie.
the sequels are the devils hell spawn in movie format.
much like the highlander sequels.
there should have been only one.
My kids loved the first one, but after that it was “why are we watching this???”
Oh man I loved this stuff when I was little didn’t matter how bad the 55656 sequels were. Hell, I was watching Land Before Time V this past week on HBO Family.
My dad got my brother to eat broccoli by calling it “tree stars”
Funny how the dinosaurs have a word for “star” but not one for “leaf”.
I always thought that it was just the leaves of that one particular tree that were called ‘Tree stars’.
Saw this as a kid and cried. Was to sad to realy play much with the Pizza Hut puppets!
When I got netflix I watched all the sequils they had… yah, I’ll admit it.
I didn’t remember any thing from the original but a lot of crying, but on watching the sequils I realized that my “silly voice” was pretty much Ducky. o0
Epic FAIL for dumbing down dinosaurs. A four or five year-old who masters names like tyrannosaurus and pachycephalosaurus feels a certain pride and may be motivated to explore more challenging material. The kids I’ve known who’ve been raised on “sharp-tooth” and the like have all dismissed dinosaurs as being just more silly cartoon faces.
Good point, but I wonder if they were going for a bit of language realism. Sort of like present-day animal characters calling a gun a “thunderstick”, because you wouldn’t expect them to know the human term.
Now that I think about it, its weird that we only call dinos and other prehistoric creatures by their scientific names, instead of giving them common names. It’s like always calling a wolf Canis Lupus.
That’s exactly right. Tyrannosaurs Rex is the human word with it roots in Latin. I think it must mean terrible lizard king or something close, not entirely sure as I didn’t really study Latin, just picked up a few terms here and there.
I wouldn’t expect a T-Rex to know Latin. All their names for each other were descriptive. long neck, three horn, sharp tooth, etc.
Besides, many adults can’t pronounce pachycephalosaurus, the voices actors might have been among them.
Favorite quote “You’ve got a nice flat head, Flathead!”
My son was Littlefoot, my daughter was Cera, and my other daughter was Petrie, although my son said his Cera sister was Spike because she was big, slow and stupid (she is none of those things). They played Land Before Time endlessly. I remember stopping my daughter just in time as she was pawing the ground in the grocery store about to charge a stack of cans. (She was 4, so cut her some slack!)
i loved this movie! when i see it’s on hbo i still always watch it. the movies after were horrible though.
YESSSSSSSSSSS
Heh, Me and my brother used to love these. I think we still have the first three somewhere…
The first two LBT movies were actually made by Don Bluth, all 9842 DTV sequels after that had nothing to do with him (and it shows). Bluth and a large number of Disney animators left there after Robin Hood was made (Disney tried to use Hanna-Barbera style limited animation to make a feature film; Bluth and the other animators were so appalled at the move that they had their names removed from the credits.) They founded their own animation studio. The first product was ‘The Secret of NIMH’, one of my favorite movies of all time.
The Secret of NIMH is win!
I love Land Before Time, and yes, I watched all the sequels, but nothing beats the first. I loved dinosaurs, when I was still living in my old house in Detroit before my parents moved back to their hometown I had a whole dinosaur themed bedroom, I actually thought they were dragons, but that doesn’t matter, I loved dinosaurs.
I would always want to rent the latest sequel every time my mom took us to the video store. Although as a kid, each of the sequels satisfied me, like many other movies, the original started it all…
I just bought this movie from a garage sale in perfect condition on VHS for 50 cents, this movie and any other Don Bluth movie is pure WIN…
In my opinion, what made the original Land Before Time so good is they weren’t afraid to show nature (albeit prehistoric nature) in all its savage glory, as opposed to Bambi which put all nearly all the danger in the hands of hunters and their dogs.
The problem with the sequels was that they established the Great Valley as a sanctuary, where “Sharpteeth” and other dangers were the exception, rather than the rule. This meant that the writers had to really stretch to create scenarios where the kids were separated from their parents and got into life-threatening trouble. Also in that regard, the grown-ups were nearly always depicted as incompetent in order to provide the catalyst for action. The songs also didn’t help, except to fill up time.
The sequel that came the closest to the original, in terms of serious drama, was The Mysterious Island. The following movies (and TV series) should have been set in the seaside land the grownups found. That would have made for more interesting stories, (and I would have loved to see Chomper first introduced to the grownups of the herd).
I forgot, there was one other sequel that came close, and that was The Great Longneck Migration, where Littlefoot meets his father.
Remebe Ducky, also play Anne Marie in All Dogs Go To heaven?
She tragically died in a double murder suicide at the hands of her father. I can no longer watch ANY of the movies she did.
i wondered if anyone was going to bring this up…
I had these on VHS! I also remember the Land Before Time Fail on FailBlog.
Never bothered past the second movie.. but I LOVED the first one. I sang, I danced, I had a stuffed Spike doll. I don’t know which I was more obnoxious with, this or Brave Little Toaster..
I was at a DVD store the other day and there were 12 sequels!!! 12!
Why did they make all the sequels musicals? Were they TRYING to completely destroy the series?
I still have the soundtrack on cassette tape. I listened to it recently and it still works!
Oh my gosh, when I was little my mom had to buy three copies of this movie because I watched the movie so much I wore through the first two. I still have my Little Foot stuffed animal, I wish I had my Duckey hand puppet, and I still have the movie on VHS AND DVD!!!
I own the first 7 i think. This one I always avoided because it scared me and made me cry.
I just watched it last week. I cried when Littlefoot’s mom died, I’m 17
I’m 14 and i did the exact same thing. It’s weird how most teens actually get more in touch with their childhood now.
The sequals to this original classic were absolutely terrible. But this movie was one of my favorites growing up, and still is. I got a puppy for Christmas of ‘89 and I named him Little Foot (he was a litte guy too; he was a lhasa apso).
The only reason we watched this at the theater is because Oliver & Company was sold out. They only needed one. The other 15 or whatever sequels were pointless.
I still have all the videos, and then bought the whole collection on dvd, there’s a new one out now too, think we’re up to number 11 or 12…And YES I still sit down and watch when my kids put them on!!!!
I constantly reference this movie, am always shouting at my friends:
“You’re going the wrong way!!!!” in the Littlefoot voice
Nobody ever gets it
(
My babysitter brought these over for us to watch ^.^
I still have my Little Foot stuffed animal, I wish I had my Duckey hand puppet, and I still have the movie on VHS AND DVD!!!
I always loved these videos we used to have this old family video store that rented out 5 kids movies for 5 dollars for 5 nights we used to get all the ones we didn’t have and watch them
Strangly enough i didn’t see the first one until my sister got it as a christmas present one year apperently we had been avoiding it for like 5 years because my sister swore she had already seen, but already seeing never stoped us for renting any of our other favorites. i must have been 10 or 11 when i finally saw it i cried like a baby.
And hey no all the sequals were that bad at least up to like 5 or 6 our favorite used to be 4 the land of mists with littlefoots girlfriend allie