Dinosaur Squad movie version
Fast forward to March 1994, when the Dinosaur Squad is already a household name in the world, the Clan's toys have fully occupied the Christmas gift market, and parents are running in major shopping malls for their children's Clan Toys. The popular culture of the dinosaur team gradually took shape, word of mouth among children, every child who watched the team series will spontaneously integrate into this hero fan group, and the number of team fans will become more and more huge.
Symbian is very optimistic about the development momentum of the entire American version of the team, and he also knows how to use his resources to develop the peripherals that can expand the influence of the team, on the other hand, Bandai shared their successful experience in Japan with the American tycoon who loved special shooting, and the team culture was unstoppable in Western countries under the efforts of both sides. At this time, Symbian had a bigger ambition, he wanted to make the team series land on the movie screen, but the production team of the TV series was not capable of taking on this difficult task. Adapting the Japanese version of the team story and editing the Japanese version of the camera to complete the TV version of the team is the best job of the whole crew, but if the story is put on the movie screen, it is doomed to not rely on such a simple model to perfunctory fans. Symbian clearly realized that if he wanted to make a dinosaur movie, he would have to find a competent third-party film company to work with.
Poster cover for the movie version of Dinosaur Squad.
Twentieth Century Fox, a sibling of Fox Television, also set its sights on the Extraordinary Team's film program, and they were eager to adapt this successful TV series into a movie, thus opening up a new market for their children's films. The popularity of the team TV series is also witnessed by every producer, which also reminds Fox of another popular TV animation "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" before the team aired, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animation has achieved the success of the live-action adaptation of the film and has filmed a trilogy continuously. The first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film earned Warner $202 million at the global box office (the sequel two-parts were underperforming), and with the entire film costing only about $13.5 million, Fox saw the focus on the huge success of cinemating popular TV series, at a time when the team needed a film project to add to the icing on the cake.
Fortunately, the Extraordinary Team series TV is already in Fox's pocket, so the head office made a film plan to recommend Twentieth Century Fox to Symbian as a cooperative team, and the support of a serious film production team also solved Sypan's troubles, and the two sides reached an agreement to use the TV version of the actor's story framework to shoot movies, and Fox also promised to give the film a huge budget to shoot a blockbuster movie different from the TV version.
Movie version of the red carpet scene.
The time of the entire film shooting plan is very tight, on the one hand, the pursuit of a high level of film, on the other hand, the execution of film shooting as efficiently as possible. The film version of the team also completely abandoned the Japanese version of the team's footage, away from the Japanese version of the entire use of local shooting to complete, although the Japanese version of the super team also has a similar theatrical version, but for Fox and Symbian this is a completely American team movie, every detail must be originally Westernized.
The original film was set in the United States and Canada, and the director was steve wang. Steve Wang had completed another well-known comic book adaptation before taking over the team, "The Guyver", and the live-action "Jungle Armor" movie is also a kind of close-up movie, for Steve, the dinosaur team can be said to be the same as the Cape transformation he shot before. Influenced by his previous works, Steve pursued a biochemical concept, which he also adhered to when making the film version of the concept to present the team villain. Unlike "Jungle Armor", Dinosaur Squad was originally a children's TV series, which naturally could not achieve these overly heavy taste settings, so Fox found that Steve's concept and the theme of the team were divergent, and replaced Bryan Spicer as the film's general director. With Steve's lessons, Brian can change very little when he comes to the crew, and under pressure from Fox, the entire crew has to shoot the film story based on the TV version of the setting as much as possible, thus saving the cost of re-setting.
Stills from the movie version.
Another major problem faced by the film crew is the problem of actor schedule, since the film version decided to use the same actors in the TV version, it had to wait for the TV version to be completed before the filming of the film could begin. However, as we all know, the TV version of the team is filming and broadcasting almost every week, and there is no time for the actors to free up the actors to shoot the movie during the summer TV drama season, and the film plan can only be postponed again and again, postponed until the end of the season of the TV series that year. Watching the actors finally unload their work on the TV version and come to the film crew, but the seasons are not waiting for anyone, in the blink of an eye, North America ushered in winter, and it was not a way to let the young team members fight in the ice and snow, so the crew once again fell into a stalemate.
The crew suddenly made a bold decision to change the story to Oceania, far away in the southern hemisphere, and Sydney in the upright summer is undoubtedly one of the best filming locations. John Landau was the first to come up with this constructive idea to the crew, and with the strong support of producer Suzanne Todd, a new structure was born that replaced the TV version of Angel Jungle with the Sydney Stage as the story scene. The crew achieved the handover from North America to Australia in the shortest possible time, successfully bringing the team members to the Sydney shooting site to start work, while the crew also used the fastest speed to explore the local eligible environment to build a new team base, the camp of the villains Chad and Lyda, and other facilities.
Coolly dressed actors in the film version of the stills.
The entire film took nearly 6 months to shoot and a hefty budget of nearly $15 million, and Twentieth Century Fox was convinced that the Dinosaur Team would bring them explosive box office revenue without sparing any capital investment.
Filming independent of the TELEVISION version also led to a number of embarrassing adaptations, but fortunately some of the mistakes caused by the director's personal understanding fallacies were corrected in the final film, and the film version had more or less the director's excessive understanding of the team setting during the filming process. For example, one of the biggest changes was the modification of the helmets of team members, and when the film version was first filmed, the director asked the prop team to change the actor's holster helmet to a visual structure, exposing the actor's eyes and mouth. Brian simply believes that this helps the actors express their emotions in the film, so he sees a very embarrassing scene on the set where the actors wear extremely funny semi-skeletonized helmets while completing their performances under their holsters. It was not until he listened to the opinions of the entire crew and watched some shooting samples that the director finally dispelled his ridiculous idea, and compared with the effect of the TV version of the full-cover helmet, he realized the necessity of the complete leather jacket of the team, the audience did not have to rely on the face to identify the actors, and the leather holster of the team naturally represented the identity of each team member.
Discarded hollow helmet version.
The film version of the leather jacket overhaul also stems from the factor of the new production of the team leather jacket, different from the TV version of the simple tights leather jacket effect, the film version of the team leather jacket texture has been redefined closer to the effect of armor, each team member's leather case is also more weighty than the TV version. The entire holster weighs about 40 pounds, and shooting in such a heavyweight holster naturally places a physical burden on the actors, especially the two female members of the team, who are often exhausted after shooting an action shot.
The film version of McZord.
Brian's other not-too-successful idea was to use CG to complete the shots of the team robots, and he spent a lot of effort to persuade Fox and Symbian to promise him to make drastic changes to the team's robots, replacing Japanese holsters with computer animation, believing that the movies he made were more commercial and fashionable, but the audience did not end up recognizing the film version of McZord because of these expensive CGs. Viewers from the TV version of Dinosaur Squad prefer robot battles done by traditional holster actors, and the immature CG technology of the 90s is far less realistic than mcZord, played by holster actors.
Originally, the planned film shooting was to have the actors themselves to complete the shooting of the holster, that is to say, to let the main actors play their own roles after their own transformation. However, as the shooting time became more and more urgent, the director had to use holster actors to replace the shots of the members after the transformation, so as to ensure that the shots before and after the transformation could be filmed in two groups at the same time. The method of shooting in different groups to ensure time efficiency also loses the coherence of the shots, and like the TV version, the shots after the transformation are connected in the same way as the TV version, losing the advantage of the film at the beginning of the plan.
The original character Dulcea in the film version also caused a lot of trouble for the crew, in which The role of Dulcea was originally intended to be played by Gabrielle Fitzpatrick, and in the film, he took on the task of mentoring the team members in place of Sato. However, soon after the film started, Gabriel quit the crew due to injury (ovarian cyst surgery), and the crew had to temporarily find a new successor, and soon Mariska Hargitay entered the crew's field of vision and became a replacement. However, as the filming continued, the director soon realized that the new actor was not qualified for this role, after all, the successor was selected on an ad hoc basis, and could not achieve the effect that Gabriel matched the role from the appearance and temperament, just like the change of the yellow soldier in the TV pilot episode, and in the film version, the original actor was more qualified for the role of Durssy. As a result, Durssy's related filming schedule was stranded, and all the footage that had been filmed by Marie Scarlett was invalidated, and the whole team had to wait for Gabriel to return to the crew. Fortunately, Gabriel was successfully operated on and returned to the crew in January 1995 to start filming, so the whole shooting was able to get back on track.
Dulcie 3 played by Gabriel (official version)
Mariska's Role as Durssy.
Judging from the final film, Brian may not have achieved the cinematic effect that Fox and Syban originally envisioned. Some of the evaluations from the team fans are even more severe, and the film does not achieve a leap in the texture of tv to movie, but makes it look like a TV series standard film cloaked in the cloak of film, and because of various details changes, it is far less intimate than the TV version of the team. It can be said that it is because the shortness of the entire film shooting cycle limits the play of the entire crew, and the temporary change of director is even worse, and the final finished product handed over by the crazy catch-up progress shooting plan can only be useless. Despite this, the film debut in the history of the AMERICAN team won more than $60 million at the global box office, making the team a wonderful stroke on the movie screen.
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