in search of Maple White, the stranded leader of an earlier expedition, and to bring back proof of his claims that dinosaurs and prehistoric men still exist there. Challenger is joined by the elder Pro­ fessor Summerlee (Arthur Hoyt), big-game hunter Lord Roxton (Lewis Stone), Challenger’s butler Austin (Finch Smiles), and newspaper reporter Edward Malone (Lloyd Hughes), whose paper, THE LONDON RECORD JOURNAL, finances the expedi­ tion. The film adds a new character, Maple White’s daughter Paula (Bessie Love), who accompanies Challenger and company in hopes of finding her father alive. Together they face a plethora of pre­ historic monsters, including a deadly subhuman Apeman (Bull Montana, supplanting a tribe of subhumans that appear in Doyle’s novel), and also a volcanic eruption, before discovering the mor­ tal remains of Maple White. Despite the dangers, they safely descend and return to London victori­ ous, with proof in hand: in the novel, this evidence is a Pterodactyl; in the film, a Brontosaurus (known today as Apatosaurus). In both cases, the creature breaks loose, briefly terrorizing the popu­ lace before escaping, presumably to return to the Lost World.
Since the moment of its release, THE LOST
WORLD has been most renowned for the remark­ able special effects of Willis H. “Obie” O’Brien (1886-1962). O’Brien had refined his own experi­ ments with stop-motion animation of clay mod­ els in a series of comedic novelty shorts for Edison (1914-17, detailed in the separate discussion of the MacQueen restoration’s extras, below) before signing with producer Herbert Dawley to write, direct, photograph, and create stop-motion ef­ fects for THE GHOST OF SLUMBER MOUNTAIN (1919). O’Brien also made a cameo appearance as the eponymous ghost, an elderly hermit named “Mad Dick” who beckons a visitor to peer through an odd telescope that allows the viewer to see into the past, showcasing O’Brien’s procession of antediluvian creatures: a Brontosaurus, the flightless carnivorous bird Phororhacos, a group of Triceratops, and a Tyrannosaurus rex which magically steps out of time to chase the protago­ nist before he awakens from the nightmare. The film was a boxoffice sensation, prompting Dawley to cobble together a sequel of sorts, ALONG THE MOONBEAM TRAIL (1920), reportedly using ani­ mation outtakes from GHOST.
The members of the Challenger Expedition, as photographed by William Runsford for the 1912 edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s THE LOST WORLD.
Left to right: E.D. Malone (Daily Gazette), Lord Summerlee, Professor George Edward Challenger, and Lord John Roxton. (Behind Challenger’s beard is none other than Conan Doyle himself!)
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