Or: 1925’s other dinosaur movie. As you’re probably aware, 1925 marked the release of THE LOST WORLD, an enormously popular adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic novel that can be viewed as the JURASSIC PARK of its time. FIFTY MILLION YEARS AGO is often dismissed as a LOST WORLD imitation, but it originated as a (now lost) German animated feature entitled VOR 50 MILLIONEN JAHREN (1924) that was acquired by the US based Service Film Company. As with other Service releases like DICKENS’ LONDON (1925) and THE MAGIC RAG (1926), it was cut down to a one reel short and given a documentary wraparound, focused here on the theories of Charles Darwin.
This was a relevant topic in 1925 due to the widely publicized trial of John Thomas Scopes, a Tennessee schoolteacher charged with violating the state’s Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution. FIFTY MILLION YEARS AGO opened at New York City’s Piccadilly Theater in July of ‘25, a few weeks after THE LOST WORLD’s June 22 release and in the midst of the Scopes trial (which lasted from July 10 to July 21), two events that significantly boosted its finances.
The film was believed lost until the 2010s. It was then that a restoration was undertaken by the Academy Film Archive, who released it to the public in 2015. A pivotal scene is missing (as indicated by an intertitle), but the eight-minute film is otherwise complete, with newly tinted visuals and an ominous synthesizer score by Michael D. Mortilla.
According to the opening intertitle, “Leading scientists agree that the Earth must be at least 50 million years old.” Crude cut-out animation details how the planet’s first lifeforms, the jellyfish and trilobites, learned to walk on land, leading us to the dinosaur-laden “Chalk Age” (the 1920s term, apparently, for the Mesozoic Era).
Primitive stop motion animated models display the Brontosaurus, Iguanodon—which, as a cheeky intertitle informs us, “would hardly do as a household pet, since it measured sixty feet from end to end” (cheeky intertitles were a Service Film trademark)—a chubby T-Rex, a “Masosaurus” (actually a Dimetrodon), a Triceratops, a Stegosaurus and, for some reason, a Dinosaur skeleton with roving eyes.
From there the film jumps forward several million years to the Ice Age. We’re shown some gnarly looking ice bergs and two critters from the Whoolly family: a rhino and a mammoth. A final intertitle warns us that the Earth is set to enter a second Ice Age in ten thousand years, for which “We shiver in anticipation.”
As with most Service Film releases, no credits are provided. The creators of FIFTY MILLION YEARS AGO (and those of its German language antecedent) remain unknown, so I’ve no idea to whom I should assign credit or blame. Whoever was responsible, they created a charming film showcasing some (very) old school special effects. It’s ultimately more interesting as a historical artifact than a brainy entertainment, and too short to cause much offense.
Vital Statistics
FIFTY MILLION YEARS AGO (Vor 50 Millionen Jahren)
Service Films/Academy Film Archive