Since I began writing about the Mokele-Mbembe, I’ve had multiple recommendations of Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend. It’s a Disney vehicle, forty years old this year, and apparently a minor classic. It stars William Katt (renowned at the time for his thick curly hair and all-American cuteness), Sean Young, and a family of mechanical dinosaurs created and engineered by Isidoro Raponi and Roland Tantin.
Although it predates the MonsterQuest investigation by twenty years, it touches on many of the same points. I wouldn’t be surprised if MonsterQuest knew the film and, in a way, made an homage to it. It seems to have captured the imagination of people who love feelgood monster movies.
The plot is simple and fairly generic. Dinosaurs are alive in the African jungle. Scientists are hunting them, some with good intentions and some with bad, but both varieties set out to capture a specimen and subject it to the rigors of science. There are good native people and bad native people, and a fresh-faced young American couple caught in the middle of it all. With bonus and somewhat obsessively filmed naked and near-naked locals drumming and dancing in the city and in the jungle.
We immediately know bad guy is bad as the opening credits roll past the dancing parade: he runs down and stabs a man in an alley and steals his collection of photos. The one we see depicts a dinosaur in water, with the distinctive long, curving neck and small head of a brontosaurus.
Once the scene is set, we shift to our protagonists. George Loomis is an American sportswriter in Africa for six months with his wife Susan Mathews-Loomis, who is a paleontologist. She’s been working with the eminent Dr. Eric Kiviat, whom we recognize immediately as Bad Stabby Guy. Susan has found a most interesting bone, which she has identified as the cervical vertebra of a brontosaurus. What’s unusual about it is that it’s not a fossil. It’s much more recent.
Eric and his minion Nigel gaslight her by telling her it’s not a dino bone, it came from a giraffe. She grudgingly accepts the eminent doctor’s decree, but we’ve heard him telling Nigel it’s the real deal and it’s only eighty years old. While George and Susan are on their way home to the States in time for George to start his new job at the Washington Post, Eric and Nigel are setting off for the remote jungle where the late photographer’s pictures were taken. They’re looking to capture a live specimen of a supposedly extinct species.
Just as Susan is about to leave, Eric sends her to the lab to talk to a delegate from the Red Cross. He’s in a hurry to catch his dinosaur, and he’s fobbing off this last chore on his soon to be ex-assistant.
That turns out to be a mistake on his part. Dr. Dubois has come to report a series of deaths in a remote village. His normal remit is cholera, but this is something else: food poisoning. The people of the village consume a diet that’s been unchanged for a thousand years, but something different has entered their food chain, and it’s killing them.
He’s brought a sample of the animal they ate, a bone that he’s asking the bone doctor to identify. It’s identical to the “giraffe” bone that Susan is in the process of sneaking into her luggage. It’s brand new and still stained with blood.
George and Susan have been having an argument. George wants kids. Lots of kids. Susan is like, no, forget it, have them yourself. (One wonders why they didn’t have this discussion before they got married. But I digress.) The one thing he thinks they’ve agreed on is that they’re leaving in the morning so he can be in his new office on Monday. They are not going to take a detour to investigate the situation in the village.
He wakes up to a note on his pillow. Susan has left with Dr. Dubois. After some considerable drama, he manages to charter a plane piloted by the endlessly cheerful Kenge “No Problem!” Obe.
When they reach the village, with George bitching and moaning the entire way, they find a funeral in progress, with five shrouded bodies and the Chief close to death in his house. Susan has been extracting the story of how villagers found a huge animal dead in the river and brought back its to meat to eat, and everyone who ate it has become sick and died or is about to die. With his dying breath and a nicely dramatic knife, he draws a picture of the animal in the dirt. It is, of course, a brontosaurus. (This is same thing MonsterQuest did with a book of animal pictures and a request to draw that witnesses saw. The knife and the dying man are Extra Movie Drama.)
That’s it. Susan has to find what remains of the animal. George is only along for the ride, and sulking mightily about it. She wants—needs—to do something big and spectacular with her career. This will more than do it.
They charter Kenge’s plane to the site where the animal was found, but it’s gone. Kenge leaves them there for two days with set of comms equipment (no cell phones in 1985) and a very reluctant native guide. As soon as the plane takes off, so does the guide, but he leaves them with a rubber raft and a few supplies. They blithely set off along the track of something enormous that’s leveled a swath of jungle.
This is squeaky-clean jungle. No insects, snakes, or dangerous predators apart from humans, just occasional picturesque wildlife: monkeys and lizards, mainly, and a native tribe that appears to have had no contact with the West. After a lengthy interlude with naked and near-naked hunters and dancers, during which Susan makes friends with the women and children by taking Polaroid portraits and George engages in a session of mutual “Look, I’m trying to like your food, but eeuuww” with Cephu, the chief, Susan shows them her book with the drawing of the brontosaurus—and the tribe evaporates. Vanishes. Gone, leaving the Americans alone with the fires still burning. And a weird moaning in the jungle.
We’re about to get to the point of the whole film. It’s a family, Disney style: mom and dad brontosaurus, and tiny adorable baby. The parents are small for sauropods but huge compared to the humans. Baby is about the size of a pony.
Meanwhile, we’ve been following a second expedition. Eric and Nigel have acquired a noisy and barely controllable military escort. They find the bronto family shortly after George and Susan. The escort shoots and kills the dad, and Nigel darts the mom. Baby is safe with Susan, who has lured her with fruit and more or less tamed her.
The rest of the film is all about rescuing the mom, trying to keep Baby safe, and Susan having to make a choice between turning Baby into a science experiment (and setting up her career for life) or letting her be free. Since this is Disney, we know how it will end.
Raponi and Tantin’s dinosaurs are an impressive feat of engineering. They’re Mokele-Mbembe-sized, probably thirtyish feet (10 meters), with elephant-like smooth skin, black rather than elephant grey, and big green eyes with catlike vertical pupils. They make a number of noises, including rumbling, moaning, and whining. Their feet are round, wrinkled on the bottom, and have four claws, which doesn’t quite fit either the Mokele-Mbembe or what we know of sauropods, but may have been an engineering decision. Although they appear to be mainly fruit-eaters, they will chew up an evil scientist if he threatens their baby.
They’re very expressive and seem to be intelligent. Baby is doglike in her attitude, happy to follow the humans who feed her and determined to find her mother after the bad guys take her away. They’re friendly monsters, only lethal if threatened or if eaten as roadkill.
Whether there are more of them, we don’t know. Susan notes that the family are far south of where they’ve historically been reported. We don’t know how they got there or why. Food scarcity? Habitat destruction?
Nor do we know where mom and baby go after they’re rescued from the bad guys. Off into the jungle, but whether they’re continuing to move on or if they’re going back home, we aren’t told. The focus is on the humans who make the choice. We can assume that George and Susan went back to the States, George started his new job, and Susan did—something. More paleontology? Making babies? A combination of both?
They can’t ever tell anyone what they found in the jungle. That’s going to be hard for Susan, but I’m sure she’ll find ways to adapt what she knows for sure about dinosaurs to the fossils she officially studies. After all, even the evil and patronizing Eric concedes that she’s a brilliant scientist.
