I’m on lockdown so I watched all 14 Land Before Times

so if you're a child of the 90s and even the OS it shouldn't come as a surprise that there are a lot of Land Before Time movies this series was kind of the now that's what I call music of film franchises the big joke was just that it had a million direct-to-video sequels I was a big fan of the original Land Before Time movie as a kid it was just one of those movies that I defaulted to watching again and again a million times but for whatever reason I never saw any of the sequels there are 14 in total and for a long time I thought it would be a really fun video if I watched all 14 of them in a row and then ranked them all in some kind of numbered list for the internet but believe it or not there has never been a practical time to marathon 14 mediocre movies so right now we're in the middle of a global pandemic and we're not supposed to go outside and last month I got really sick I think with the corona virus there were no tests available and for like two weeks I was too sick to do anything all day except lay down so it was go tie and I am proud to say that I and my sister who was stuck under quarantine with me I've now seen all of the Land Before Time movies and it is time to share with you what I discovered over the course of this marathon a few patterns emerged one mini Land Before Time films feature racism as a plot point it seems to just be their fallback when they have no other ideas three-horns never play with long too many of them feature characters falling into slime or goo 3 many of them feature the characters climbing up to a high place and then pushing a large rock onto the villains head to defeat it also of note is that the original film is not a musical and every single one of the sequels is anyway let's get into our ranking I'm going to order these films from worst to best I decided to start at rock bottom because then I can get more positive as we go on and instead of more negative I also must caution you that this video will contain major spoilers for the entire Land Before Time franchise so just be aware of that so without further ado let's jump in number 14 very worst one is Land Before Time 13 the wisdom of friends this movie is about Littlefoot his dinosaur friends meeting a new species of dinosaur that's named the yellowbellies the yellow bellies are too stupid to live and Littlefoot and gang must help this trio reunite with the rest of their yellow-bellied herd by going on a journey the yellow bellies are named loofah doofah and booby I hate them terribly these awful idiot dinosaurs they're so little to say about this movie and I guess I'll move on because there are 13 others it's bad through and through and not in a fun way that's like fun to talk about or fun to hate watch as much as you're annoyed you're more bored rest assured that a carnivorous dinosaur shows up and gets large rocks pushed onto its head but other than that there's nothing you need to know as much as it pains me to talk about this awful movie it actually kind of pains me more to move on from it because it confirms to me that I wasted my time watching and number 13 is the Land Before Time 12 the great day of the Flyers this is probably as good a time as I need to admit that I don't like Petrie me mess up everything me worst flyer in Valley I don't like the way he talks about himself in the third person in weird little sentence fragments hey me see friend I don't like his exaggerated character trait of cowardice a flaw that he can never be allowed to overcome as long as they continue making sequels I know there must be something to Petrie I do remember liking him as a kid but I just find him difficult to watch I think another strike against him is one of my least favorite cartoon traits he is a child character voiced by an adult man hanging out with children characters voiced by actual children it just kind of creeps me out more importantly I think it makes me less forgiving of his flaws because my brain is going like get it together Petrie you're 45 anyway this is a somewhat unique Land Before Time film in that it is a Petrie centric film there's some meaningless holiday coming up where all of the pterodactyls have to fly in some kind of formation together as like a coming-of-age ritual so those are not super high stakes and you're probably like that's a really flimsy thing to base the whole film around and that is most of the problem but here's the rest of the problem early on in the movie a new dinosaur awry at the Great Valley his name is Guido and he's just hideous I am I guess you're all wondering why I asked you here huh anyway he doesn't know what kind of species he is or what he's good at what his place is even though it's visually pretty obvious that he's some kind of flying dinosaur so I don't like Petrie I don't like Guido I'm out of luck that's probably the reason I hate this movie right but no it's not we haven't even gotten to the reason that this ranked 13th in a list of 14 films so here we go there is a scene in the movie where the kids wake up in the middle of the night and discovery that Guido is sleepwalking away we have to follow him he's walking around but he's still asleep they follow him but according to an old wives tale you're not supposed to wake up a sleepwalker they wonder aloud where Guido could be going what he's doing they have gags where maybe he almost walks off a cliff he almost walks into something and they go oh no Guido where is Guido going so that sounds like a pretty boring little scene right well no actually it went on for 12 minutes [Music] [Music] we know hidden to fast water number 12 is the land before time 7 the stone of cold fire this film has incredibly low stakes the setup is that little footsies a meteorite land on a nearby mountaintop and he and some of the other dinosaurs believe that this stone will grant whoever owns it some kind of magical powers which obviously it won't and that's it worse yet this is another Petrie heavy movie but it's mostly about his uncle pterano local Terrano is basically the Loki of the Land Before Time universe that's basically as well as I can sum it up I should be Bonita Toronto is Petrie's con-artist uncle he is generally distrusted by all of the dinosaurs in the Great Valley and he just generally schemes and lies a lot but he has a soft spot for his family and obviously he is redeemed by the end of the film I hope the children were able to find common I wonder what the vibe is Fillion beforetime fandom like does this guy have a cult following is it like a Loki once-ler situation the with this ugly pterodactyl if he doesn't it's up to you guys it's never too late to make an account on gang of five dotnet the web's biggest LBT fan forum and start posting about your thirst anyway this movie is pretty bad and you know I like your Redemption arc it just didn't help there's one thing here that I really do have to talk about these mysterious dinos show up at the beginning and seem to be guiding Littlefoot along on his journey I don't want any Reading Rainbow phases filling our Young Ones heads with rubbish and that's that at the end of the film they are revealed to be godlike benevolent aliens and then beam back up to their mothership I'm saying all that and you're probably thinking that sounds incredible this has got to be the best one but no it's still not people definitely talk about this online whenever the sequels come up and I'm not talking about this movie specifically but they're always like did you know there's one where there are space aliens well I'm here to tell you that despite having space aliens this movie is really boring and it's one of the worst ones like it's not fun to watch at all as we watched through these I discovered that a lot of these movies feel like they should have just been 22 minute TV episodes but this one like really does and honestly if you removed the aliens from the story it wouldn't change which is a very weird quality for a story about aliens to have at one point in my notes I just wrote this is pretty boring so normally I'd give bonus points for the sheer audacity and weirdness of adding aliens but when you squander your aliens you lose points so it's just yet another reason this is low on the list the only good thing I can say is that the dinosaur aliens at the beginning of the movie sing this big song called beyond the mysterious beyond beyond the mysterious beyond out where the darkness is the scariest outweigh the wonders are the various pass the edge of dawn and it's laps you hear it early on and it's immediately stuck in your head for the whole rest of the movie and when it comes back around for the end credits you're like yeah number 11 is land before time for journey through the mists I almost rank this one lower out of sheer spite allow me to explain the distinguishing feature of this film the selling point is that a bunch of new brontosauruses show up in the Great Valley look [Music] including a girl child brontosaurus Littlefoot gets a female counterpart named Ali a new addition perhaps to the group wanna play with me Littlefoot they're all cousins Littlefoot I feel like if you were just hearing that you would be like yes that is a no-brainer premise for a Land Before Time film like oh okay you get all the typical scenes of a child character making a new friend maybe a question of should Littlefoot go off with the bronto's at the end and be with his own kind or stay here with what he knows but no that's not what happens I wouldn't like that I like living in the great family the bronto's come to town and the very hour they arrive littlefoot's grandfather collapses from a mysterious illness let's go welcome our customs kids I'm sure they do oh the Bronto matriarch understands what's going on and she tells littlefoot's family that the only way to cure him is to go into their home country the land of the mists and bring back a healing flower but their homeland is dangerous that's why they left I guess on their migration so they refused to go back cousins who will take me to the night flower so Littlefoot goes off on his own while in the land of the mists he quickly gets trapped in a cave and initially you're like oh this will be an interesting one scene conflict where he's trapped in a cave but no a cave the cave is most of the movie I have no sense of time in these films but like it felt like it was at least thirty percent of the film this movie isn't really about visiting brontosauruses ordered the land of the mists which sounded cool it's primarily just about being trapped in a cave Ali and the whole herd of traveling longnecks we're so useless to the plot like you could just think about it for 30 seconds and write them out easily like hey why not have Grandpa get sick that's how the movie starts not with the the Bronto is arriving he gets sick and then grandma maybe remembers from her home country this flower you could even then have Littlefoot run into the other bronto's when he goes to their home country to get the flower and it would feel less weird and contrived but I don't know why you'd bother doing that when the bronto's don't do anything anyway we can help I'm sorry dear we can do nothing I feel like if you're doing the sequel movie where you introduce a new character to the established canon you have an opportunity to make that sequel movie the exciting one but no I was so put off by the laziness of this one it edged a little higher on the list by not being as actively boring or annoying as some other ones but it was still kind of an insult so also I have to mention grandma's song is a song it's like a circle of life song and it sounds real rough each new generation one more circle is calm it honestly just sounds like they took a veteran actress and threw her in a booth and had her improvise both the lyrics and the melody on and on and on it goes repeat repeat repeat repeat number ten is land before time eleven the invasion of the tiny soros is the premise of this movie is so bad and weird that I almost have to respect it though the Great Valley apparently has this tree which blooms seasonally with these delicious flowers which the dinosaurs call tree sweets so they all stare longingly at this tree as the blooms come in and then once a year they have a holiday that they call nibbling day everybody has to win until nibbling day then we all come here together and we take turns and we all get a tree sweet that's the way we always do it but before nibbling day can arrive Littlefoot is by the tree thinking about cheating then eating a tree sweet when suddenly tiny dinosaurs show up and eat every flower off the tree only Littlefoot sees them they're like little little fairy folk and they've eaten all the tree-sweets Littlefoot tells the adults initially they don't believe him and then very quickly they do believe him and they want to find and murder these tiny dinosaurs in revenge for the tree-sweets we have to hunt them down and exterminate and Littlefoot talks to the little dinosaurs and doesn't want them to get murdered and starts trying to help them so that all sounds like it tiresome set up for a movie right well yeah it is it's not fun to see it play out despite the weird nibbling day set up which I like the plot itself is pretty simple and is spread pretty thin we're still low enough on this list that this movie is emphatically one of the bad ones but it's definitely not the worst one thing that spares this movie is they introduced a new character named tria and she is a stepmom character for Sara I guess she's an old flame of the dads and she rolls back into town I initially thought we'd get some kind of mystery of what happened to the tree-sweets because she's very interest in the tree-sweets and you're like oh they're gonna go missing and maybe she took them but no the main point of tria is that sara is jealous about the attention that she gets from Sarah's dad and then tria and she have a heart-to-heart and then they get along this is all pretty basic and the main trait of Sarah's dad is that he's racist so can't say I was enthusiastically cheering on Sarah's racist dad as he found a bride but the thing I like about tria is firstly tria seems like a nice lady Triceratops I like her I would hang out with her are you okay honey you look beat oh honey no but secondly Trias sticks around after this movie and I think that's exciting for all subsequent films she remains a character she even later has a baby with Sarah's dad in a long series like this any change to the status quo is exciting for me the other point in this movie's favor which bumped it up the list is the songs which go pretty hard there's a ballad from Littlefoot a doo-wop song from Sarah [Music] and a mob song called creepy-crawlies from the great valley dinos creepy crawlies creepy crawlies everybody those help set this one apart from the other boring low ranking movies number nine in the ranking is Land Before Time 6 the secret of Saurus rock this movie has a cowboy dinosaur there is a legend about a cowboy brontosaurus named the lone dinosaur it kind of makes you question why they don't have the word brontosaurus but they do have the word dinosaur and they sing a western ballad about him [Music] long ago when a mountaintop a mighty egg was made burned by the light of the circle bribed and cooled by the forest shade then one stormy evening when I swing before out of the egg appears the leg of the lone dinosaur and then an elderly Dino who seems to be him arrives I say send him on his way you sure you feel up to it friend this story is so simple and it mostly outranks the other week movies just by virtue of being about a cowboy dinosaur and he uses his tail as a weapon and it makes a whip crack sound effect I was also pretty tickled that this movie features a tornado they already have earthquakes all the time and other movies have blizzards famine plagues of locusts it's just funny to see what new misfortunes they throw at these dinos [Applause] unfortunately this movie gives Sarah a visiting niece and nephew they are that horrible genre of children's character of kid who's younger than the main character kids it's like a dill pickles thing you know they speak in broken baby-talk and they only exist to wander off and put themselves in danger to create conflict I always hated this genre of character I don't know if it's just because I didn't have any younger siblings if you guys like this stuff I feel like adults just assumed kids liked it and nobody did it's just very annoying if any kids out there do like it can you please stop liking it because you're ruining it for everybody else oh well Sarah is babysitting she falls into goo anyway there's a pretty awesome brawl between the brontosauruses and a t-rex at the end so that was nice [Music] but yeah this movies pretty forgettable but it had enough good stuff to bump it up to like the middle of the list number eight is the Land Before Time three the time of great giving this film is primarily about sarah's father who's canonical name is daddy top daddy tops is racist three-horns never use water unwisely but your hurts do you judge us wrongly three hard this is an aspect of his character which comes up in the majority of the movies it's just they're lazy source of conflict he's always the first to distrust an outsider or start pointing fingers when things go wrong it's just such a tiresome character element and honestly I think he undermines the exact moral he's supposed to teach because the moral is supposed to be the Great Valley is for everyone can't cast someone out just because they're doing things that make life harder for others but I'm looking at daddy tops like well let's through this guy out of the Great Valley are we keeping him around anytime there's a conflict it certainly seems like daddy tops is at the heart of it anyway this film is Danny chops eccentric enough to give him a rock and roll number so that was kind of fun there is no fair when it comes to survival he's mad in this movie because there's a drought so there's not enough food to go around later in the film there's a wildfire which makes things even worse it's like I said they have all these natural disasters happening into these dinos this film also features teen bully dinosaurs this is awful but awful in a way that I guess is my jam I think it's fun to see any media try to earnestly use cartoon bullies and it's definitely even funnier when they are dinosaurs the teen bully dinosaurs get their comeuppance at the end by falling into goo eventually kids resolved the drought by pushing rocks out of the way that we're creating a dam and blocking up all the water and they also push rocks onto the heads of carnivores which are pursuing them I also like that these kids know the word for a dam and also understand the concept of a dam but not a leaf I'm making this movie sound pretty weak which honestly it is a part of why it's ranked so high is that it had a very grand opening sequence [Music] the mightiest of which was called the dinosaur [Music] it felt like they were really trying to capture the mood of the original movie just for that part they definitely weren't trying for the rest of it but you know no one little part is nice I also liked the ending when the dinosaurs returned to the Great Valley after putting out the fire the fire has already destroyed everything and all the dinosaurs just have to get through it together and ration food until the plants can grow back the Great Valley as the location is so significant in these movies that it was kind of cool to see it destroyed this movie did what frozen to was too cowardly to do number seven is the Land Before Time eight the big freeze this is a movie where it snows I want to pretend that didn't influence its ranking on the list but honestly this was movie eight in my marathon you would not believe how refreshing it is to look at different terrain and a new color palette after so many land before times in a row the animation itself is markedly better than the previous film in the series and I'm not an animator so don't quote me on this but I think what I was noticing was the jump to flash anyway other than it's snowing the plot of this movie is that a herd of Stegosaurus has come through the Great Valley on migration littlefoot's friend spike is a baby stay go but he was adopted by Ducky's family who I think are Parasaurolophus in any way Spike befriends one of the stegos and the family invites him along on a migration so ducky has to grapple with the idea that she might lose spike as a brother and is he better off with his own kind what does it mean to be a family etc I'm not going to pretend this was a crazy original storyline but as far as Land Before Time movies go this was a much more emotional conflict than we tend to see so many of these movies are about purely physical quests and obstacles so at least they're giving us something they also added this weird plot element where I guess the dinosaurs go to school not in like a school house although that would be amazing they just stand around outside in a circle and a old dinosaur named mr. thicknose teaches them it was extremely weird I can't imagine part of the child dinosaur fantasy involves having to go to school and I think I'm right about that because this whole element didn't reappear but I like mr. thicknose I found him endearing that is why such a hard time with a little foot you're so curious so bright you ask such good questions I was afraid you would catch me in a lie discover my secret robbed you of your dignity oh this applies to all of the movies but I have to point out one of my favorite things in the whole series whenever the adult dinosaurs walk around they have these booming Godzilla footsteps sound effects that they play I guess because they're big and heavy it's just so funny to be to have a sentient character thundering around and every scene like a monster especially if they're having any kind of emotional moment Littlefoot is that you number 6 is the Land Before Time 14 the journey of the brave so many of these have journey in the title beginning of this movie is very strange and I have to remark upon it Littlefoot comes out and he's singing about how today is a special day because this is the day his father is going to come visit that's the setup he just directly tells us he has a whole song that's just about that and about how special it is today's the day my dad's coming today coming home then the song concludes and littlefoot's grandfather walks up like mun Littlefoot your dad is supposed to arrive today today I forgot today's the day my dad comes back when did you forget anyway his dad doesn't show and we find out that it's because he's trapped in a volcano this bad news comes from a horrible new character named Wild Arms what happened to Wild Arms I mean what didn't happen the earth shook and spit liquid fire and the heat like you've never seen before I initially had this movie higher on the list to be honest and then I was like going through my notes and I realized that I had forgotten everything but the main plot which is pretty solid but no buried in my notes I realized that there was a lot of stupid time wasting stuff too I knew from the promo material that this film was going to contain a dinosaur voiced by Reba McEntire the country singer and that she would perform a song featuring a new song Reba McEntire cheer up little for the land before time journey of the break coming to DVD rated G and honestly I was pretty stoked for that some kind of high-energy dinosaur country song sounds like exactly what I would want from one of these films but it's just this bad forgettable gospel songs and listen to my sister and they waste so much time introducing her character and it's so boring it was giving me flashbacks to that cave movie where they're just stuck in the cave the whole time we're gonna get out of this cave just on its own it was a bad song but it was made that much worse by having gotten my hopes up oh here's my last big issue with this movie it has this character named Ruby in it she's bright pink she doesn't go with the designs of the other dinosaurs at all it's okay I dig it so there's a Land Before Time TV series I didn't watch it as part of my marathon but I am aware that ruby is one of the main characters in the series so when I saw her on the cover art I kind of expected this film to serve as either an introduction to Ruby or to kind of retro actively quickly explain what her deal is instead it's much weirder Ruby is just here like she's always been here no explanation given well hello there Ruby and chopper but then the kids go on their adventure and Ruby does not go with them she just stays home she's absent for the bulk of the film I still don't know what her personality is I was kind of excited to find out at first I thought maybe they wrote the whole script and then had to add in Ruby because that's when the show came out and that's why she felt kind of hastily added but then I looked it up and the TV series aired a full seven years before this movie's release so they knew about Ruby I guess they just didn't care you are higher on the list now and as such there are things I liked in this movie I couldn't help but notice how similar this one was to the first Land Before Time like not an atmosphere for the ways that matter you have the kids going on a grand journey on foot they have a list of landmarks that guide them onto the bright circle has a great role cross the earth break through the land of the feather-head sharpteeth and along the moving water to the fire mat if they had tried to pull this in like the second or third movie I would honestly think it was a little too much of a return to form just because the plots are such clear echoes of each other but as of right now this is the final movie that they released and with that in mind it was kind of nice to see it all come full circle so this movie ranked highly mainly on the strength of that littlefoot's dad is actually in some pretty intense mortal peril like he has his leg crushed and he's inside a volcano he would have actually died if they didn't save him so at least it doesn't just feel like a TV episode I was also astounded to see the kids defeat a Sharptooth by pulling a vine across its path and tripping it pretty amazing that they made it 14 movies before thinking of this but at least they're not just endlessly pushing rocks out of their heads oh and then immediately afterward they take out a second Sharptooth by pushing a rock onto his head also the kids keep the Sharptooth off their scent by covering themselves in smelly goo number 5 is The Land Before Time 9 journey to big water a lot of these have journey in the name this movie has what's probably the most boring intro it could possibly have the main characters sing a song about how nothing is happening and they're very bored its boring boring really truly boring even the dinosaurs can't pretend they care at this point anyway this movie is about Littlefoot and friends befriending some kind of dolphin dinosaur named Moe he's stranded in a river in the Great Valley and they have to help him get back to the ocean where he's from there's not a ton to say about this one it's extremely simple the main reason it's ranked so high is just that I find moe [Applause] which I hope demonstrates how low my standards are even at this high point on the list anyway yeah I like the Moe's design it's insane like he doesn't look like he belongs in the universe he's like bright purple he looks like he came off the fish carousel they used to have a California Adventure I was kind of hoping Moe wouldn't talk which initially it seems like he's not going to but then he does start talking and his voice is extremely annoying Marnell back and forth like little forty but he didn't act annoying enough to really ruin the character for me and he didn't talk that much and that's about it they get mo home it's another one of those TV episode plots what a notable thing about this movie is right off the bat you can tell that little foot sounds weird that must be because we're getting close to big water I thought it was just a new bad voice actor but then I watched a video from my favorite Land Before Time fan channel the LBT squad the reason I don't play some higher on the list is because I think he stayed on for one movie too many he was 15 years old at the time he did sure need a big water and it kind of shows most of the time in that movie it sounds like a teenager trying to imitate a prepubescent so the reason a little foot sounds bad it's not that it's a new actor but actually that it's an old actor who at this point has hit puberty and should not be voicing a little foot anymore number four the Land Before Time - the Great Valley adventure I know I'm not ranking these based on titles but if I was this would be dead last what a horrible title it's so generic I had to look at my notes to remember which one this was because they're all great valley adventures aren't they the film introduces the character of chopper hoof jumpers a nice Sharptooth thanks chopper [Music] me like you jumper as I've already said whenever a kids property introduces a new child character who is a baby or younger than the other child characters I think it can go south fast you always have to worry that they're gonna be super annoying but Chomper totally avoids this and in fact is like the best character in this series firstly he doesn't speak which really helps he just emotes with his face often very adorably secondly in case you couldn't already tell I like his design I think he's very cute cuter I would say than the other characters that we already have yeah I went there with his greyish purple color his chubby body his big nose and eyeballs and he's a t-rex which every child likes he also made it out with a lot fewer of those wrinkles that the other kids have finally unlike other baby characters he doesn't create contrived drama by putting himself in danger out of stupidity when he does eventually run away it's because the other kids told him to leave out of prejudice i Chomper why would you attack me I already said that when I was a kid I didn't see the sequels but I do remember seeing ads for them on TV and this one in particular I saw ads for all the time so I was at least aware that there was a sequel in which the kids befriended a baby t-rex and I remember being very intrigued by this idea I already said when I was talking about the alley movie that when you have a franchise centered around a group of child friends adding another member to the group is a very natural next step and their group had like every iconic dinosaur already except the t-rex so conceptually this feels like a no brainer for a sequel which you know that alone puts it a lot higher on the list that a lot of these other stupid ideas they had another point in favor of this movie is the duo of villains most of the movies just had a generic carnivore dinosaur and a lot of them didn't even talk you would have velociraptors t-rex is a crocodile a shark this one's a bit of a twist because you have these bipedal dinosaurs and they just want to eat eggs the leader has this bizarrely dignified voice it's like a Kelsey Grammer vibe and then he has this instantly iconic horrible song it's just about how badly he wants to eat eggs when I love an egg for breakfast and now whenever I want an egg I can't help but say it in the salacious way that he does eggs the villain plotline is definitely the foggiest part of this movie like for all these guys really want to eat eggs they sure seem to not eat eggs when they have them do you spend a lot of time taking them to a second location talking about eating them just ample opportunities for those eggs to get away then in kind of an intense turn at the end of the movie they just want to straight-up murder two kids not because they have any eggs to steal any longer the eggs have hatched that ship has sailed it's just out of pure spite and revenge little foot and friends have warded them in their hunt for eggs too many times and now they must die by lava I guess it's like that scene in the rise of Skywalker when kylo Ren destroys the map and Rey runs out him to fight him it's not like fighting him is gonna get her the map it's just a pure expression of her range actually this movie is a lot like the right of Skywalker in a lot of ways did you lease and 400 also at one point the characters fall into quicksand which meets our GU quota for the film and the egg dinosaurs do get rocks dropped on their heads number three is Land Before Time 1 The Land Before Time that's right this film does not take first place on the list that's my hot tape rewashing it I was surprised by a few things firstly by how short it is at 69 minutes it's shorter than any of the direct-to-video sequels and I was also surprised by how basic it is I wanted to call it simple but I know that simple can sometimes be a compliment so yeah I'm going with basic it operates on an extremely literal level with no themes or lessons and is just an adventure story about dinosaurs going to a new place I mentioned that a lot of the sequels have racism as a plot element you can kind of see murmurings of that here three-horns never play with the real one never play with longnecks sera is racist and doesn't want to hang out with the dinosaurs of other species and then over the course of the film she I guess changes her mind because they're friends but it's not really something that was directly addressed and in my opinion it's not like you could say the movie was about that apparently the original cut of the film was a full 13 minutes longer and there were several fully animated sequences which were cut and subsequently lost forever there was a deleted scene which was more about racism in a very obvious way I believe the way it plays out is the gang happens upon a location with two different species of local dinosaurs one group has plentiful water the other group has plentiful food and due to racism they won't share their resources so everybody suffers so I guess the gang notice is that this is stupid and it teaches Sarah of racism not to be a Dino hating grouch but this seemed if real actually makes me think less of the film and that's just because it suggests two things firstly it suggests that the producers cut the resolution to a major plot thread in post-production and then didn't replace it with anything secondly it suggests that the film was in fact about racism that's not inherently bad obviously but in this case it's bad because this movie did a bad job being about racism well we all keep to our own kind the three hordes the spike tails the swimmers the fliers we never do anything together why well because what do you think it's always been that way Littlefoot himself the protagonist seems not to struggle with racism at all so I don't understand how his journey could be improved by him second handedly watching someone else grapple with their racism sarah's journey would have also been pretty lame she apparently would have learned to be unrighteous not by acknowledging the humanity or dinah set dinosaur anity of her friends instead she would learn that racism is bad because you can benefit from the resources of people you might otherwise be racist against besides I'm not really convinced she's not racist by the end it kind of just seems like she has some friends of another race it's like you know and then whenever she says something racist she can be like hey I have some friends who are pterodactyls anyway there were other deleted scenes too one of them is just another Sharptooth chase sequence and I find it really funny that the fans of LBT are trying desperately to find this lost footage like oh man we didn't have enough of that in the finished product and intriguingly the entire original ending was apparently very different with entire scenes rearranged there's something to do with that sequence you see in the finished movie where Littlefoot is arriving at the Great Valley alone with his friends out of frame and then he calls them back into frame like come on guys and then it cuts to another shot where they are there I guess in the original cut he arrives at the Great Valley without them anyway I'd be curious to see how the Bluth cut alters the story hashtag released the Bluth cut but going purely off the information available to me it just kind of sounds like it would have been a lateral move on the whole rewatching it as an adult this movie kind of reminds me of Bambi which is to say the story itself is not really about anything I guess it's about growing up but it doesn't really have anything to say about growing up it's just showing you it happening by contrast Bambi is extremely beautiful that's kind of the point of it it's just the visual artistry it's like a character study of a forest the main point of that movie was just to show the forest that Bambi lives in and to be beautiful the Land Before Time isn't ugly but man its characters are I mean I'm not going to knock the artistry inherent in any hand-drawn animation but man these are some ugly dinosaurs they're just so gummy and wrinkly I promise I didn't set out to roast the Land Before Time like I said it was one of my most watched movies as a kid and I'm still extremely sentimental about it that Diana Ross song gets me every time but I think a lot of the positive associations people have of it are based on nostalgia the knowledge that it was made by John Bluth and age not the age of the people I mean that too I guess but the age of the movie it's old and it came from the era of hand-drawn animation which gets an instant clout imagine if this movie was CGI and they released it now an extremely literal coming of age dinosaur movie with dark atmosphere and beautiful backgrounds but frankly ugly dinosaurs with a very basic story which skews to a very young audience despite the dark tone and despite the fact that it comes from a studio which historically has made deeper stuff oh wait all of that stuff I just said did happen it was called the good dinosaur and it got mediocre reviews and lost a lot of money anyway it's not like I'm putting this at the bottom of my list leave me alone it's it's at number three number three is respectable there's still plenty I like about it I think this story does a good job of catering direct to kids but curiously imagining themselves in this dinosaur adventure the best thing about it is probably its earnestness even though the story is very basic you get the feeling that it's being told because whoever wrote it felt that it wasn't basic they felt that it was a beautiful story that needed to be told it definitely doesn't feel like a cash grab in the way that every single one of the sequels very obviously is because if it was wouldn't it be less sad and terrifying why didn't it have bouncy musical numbers why weren't the dinosaurs cuter the answer is either genuine ineptitude or earnestness I I'm hoping its earnestness so we'll go with that okay let's see which of its own sequels defeated it in the ranking number two is the Land Before Time 10 the great long neck migration this film brought the big status quo change I was hoping for for much of this marathon this is the movie which introduces the character of littlefoot's estranged father for the first time that's exciting enough after a lot of stupid nonsense stories but that's not all the premise of the film is that the Bronto is all start having these weird prophetic dreams urging them to go to a crater this is I guess the way the film expresses migration instincts and animals which i think is kind of cool it turns out that their big migration coincides with an eclipse and the bronto's believe the reason they are being summoned to this crater is that it is their job to hold up the Sun with their long necks and push it back into the sky and even the Eclipse and saving the world so when the bronto's are all at this crater Littlefoot runs into his dad who turns out to be the leader of this big herd of bronto's king of the bronto's I guess he was gone because before Littlefoot was born he set out to try to find someplace safe to live and then the earthquake happened and Littlefoot was missing presumed dead Littlefoot stat is played by Kiefer Sutherland and I really liked the gentle energy he brought to it Shirley come on it's me now give me the truth there's even a little detail which resolves something that has kind of been bothering me Littlefoot needs his dad and neither of them knows initially who the other one is names bran what's yours Littlefoot no kidding that's funny they called me Littlefoot I was young so in this moment I think we basically learned that Littlefoot is effectively the same as if he was called Junior as a kid it did always kind of bother me that his name was so child specific like you can't call him Littlefoot forever now we know and I also kind of wonder if Littlefoot has another name that's already waiting in the wings for when he's big or if he's just going to pick something when he's older I did find it a little bit of a cop-out that littlefoot's dad had this super convenient excuse for why he was never around for all of littlefoot's life I was trying to articulate to my sister the kind of drama-filled reunion I would have wanted out of this and she pointed out that it sounded like I basically wanted the episode of The Fresh Prince of bel-air where will is disappointed by his father and yeah I mean I guess I guess she's right that is kind of what I wanted just I guess weird to want from a Land Before Time film but they still have a little emotional drama there Littlefoot ultimately has to choose between going with the Bronto herd and staying with his dad or going back to the Great Valley where his grandparents and his friends are and he handles this in a pretty mature way like he gives it a lot of thought it's it feels realistic it rings true I don't want to leave Grandma and Grandpa or you guys but I can't give my dad up I just met him I don't know what to do well we can't tell you what best for you but we always your friends no matter where you go and this whole emotional conflict is basically exactly what I wanted the Ali movie to deliver so kudos for that but the thing that really puts this movie so high on the list is the visuals they're so bizarre they really play with colors to convey mood and atmosphere in a way none of the others have even attempted to do you especially see this in the dream sequences where everything is extremely vibrant and trippy I guess this goes without saying but it's kind of nice to watch a movie and not feel like the animators were just doing the barest minimum and they use CGI ins and wide shots probably because it's easier than drawing it but they use that to do some more dynamic camera movement which is cool my favorite scene is probably Sarah's nightmare when Littlefoot has his dream calling him away she has a nightmare that after going on this adventure Littlefoot is going to be a big hero and be revered as some kind of God this whole sequence and littlefoot's expression in it is just so amazing and the weirdest part of the movie is definitely the ending the bronto's think that they have to hold up the Sun and believe that they succeed in doing so so from their perspective the stakes are impossibly high just like in my sleep story the great circles going dark [Music] but like we understand what's going on they're not affecting the Eclipse so I guess we have to choose how we are going to engage with this story are we bored because we know that the stakes are non-existent or do we appreciate that their sense of accomplishment is very real for them [Music] Littlefoot saved the world that is his truth so also a Sharptooth shows up and they have to push rocks onto a ted and finally our top land before time film number one the land before time five the mysterious island this movie initially seemed like it was going to be kind of lame but it turned out to have a lot to love the first thing i have to commend this movie for is the fact that it is a multi concept Land Before Time movie most of these movies feel like a TV episode where they take one very general idea and stretch it to 90 ish minutes but this one really leads you on a marry adventure in a way I look at Land Before Time movies not as movies which Entertain You but as tutorials for children of how to play Lynne before time with your friends as in the first film they are a very physical surface level experiences so there's not a ton of depth to the characters and you don't particularly like any one of them but the idea is it's a group of child friends who live in this lush outdoor playground they don't have to go to school and the whole world is full of snacks because leaves taste yummy to them in a way it's the fantasy of you and your child friends getting to hang out all day long and have summer vacation all year and be totally self-sufficient [Music] also you're not humans you're dinosaurs which are cool and you get to crawl around on the ground pretending to be dinosaurs so it doesn't matter that Littlefoot is boring a kid watches Land Before Time and sees an action set piece where Littlefoot and his friends must walk across a log over lava now they have an exciting moment to reenact by crawling across the top of the sofa or the monkey bars of the park a character is climbing a mountain there's something to do the next time you're crawling backwards up a twisty slide so when I look at these sequels strip to their most basic elements I just see little nuggets of plate concepts for dinosaur loving children but many of these movies are very stingy about that you might watch a whole movie and just get there's snow they're migrating they're trapped in a cave in my video about the Star Wars doll line forces of destiny I was in favor of this I basically said that when they do tie-in webisodes for doll lines this is exactly what they should deliver but something that's nice coming from a five-minute free webisode is not super appreciated when it's stretched to the length of a 90-minute movie and many of them do the barest minimum with their concept and are otherwise painfully boring but in Land Before Time five the best one I've seen many different concepts for your mind to feast upon I read the title and I thought okay the one set piece is there on an island and that's all we get but no at the start of the movie the dinosaurs have to flee as the Great Valley is overtaken by a plague of locusts the next concept is that they have to leave their home which entails a migration across a huge desert from there the kids strike out on their own and end up on a beach then finally they end up at a Jurassic Park esque Jungle Island I have to say the mechanics by which they arrive at the island are extremely strange to me see they spot this rocky bridge leading out to it and me being a grown-up I was like okay the bridge is exposed because it's low tide they're going to go over there then the tides going to come in and cover the bridge making them believe they're trapped there until the end of the movie because they don't understand the tide because they're dinosaurs makes sense right well no I was super wrong instead they crossed the bridge and as they're crossing a convenient earthquake happens and this earthquake completely destroys the bridge you'd think in a series that so heavily relies on convenient earthquakes for drama they would take advantage of any opportunity to use something that's not an earthquake but no it's earthquakes all the time here but I haven't even told you the best part [Music] sure this movie sees the return of Chomper the best character in the franchise he's older so he can talk now but he's still not an annoying baby character he doesn't do any of that baby talk nonsense he's just an emotionally mature fully formed character voiced by a cute sounding kid Matt chompers the best better yet we get to see more of chompers parents and this time when he talks to them they have captions which I found extremely funny to watch he and conflict comes from an unrelated Sharptooth and both Chomper and his parents worked to defend the gang in an epic t-rex vs t-rex fight with actual on-screen blood and the lazy resolution - all of this is probably the funniest part the characters are threatened with being stranded on this island and more immediately drowning so a big benevolent swimming dinosaur just shows up and offers them a ride even the initial plot where they need a new home is just resolved off screens so what if we've found enough food to last us for years who cares if we don't have our kids what's the point this movie also has two notable songs which um they're not good but they're intense ear worms there's one Chomper things about having his friends over for dinner [Music] and another way they're singing about how the ocean is scary but they call the ocean this song is so iconic it even got a call back in the 9th movie which I was very excited to see we're looking for big this movie is so original that it contains no goo and not only did they not push a rock onto a villains head there's actually a clever inversion where the kids are hiding from the villain under a rock and it uses its head to push the rock off of them in order to pursue them how the tables have turned and I love seeing the adult t-rex is emoting their character models they're so mean looking that it was really funny anytime they had to make a face of dismay or happiness this was definitely a weirder one and I give it major points for going way beyond the bare minimum of what it needed to give us that's more than I can say for most of these Land Before Time movies to an extent it's more than I can say for the original Land Before Time so Land Before Time 5 takes home the crown and in putting the crown right on chompers big purple head so that's my list it's insane to see how totally different these sequels are from the original film by watching this series all in order back to back I felt like I was not consuming it the way it was meant to be seen it's odd because you look at that era of direct-to-video Disney sequel films and they're all cashing in on the success of the original film and that's not at all the case here this whole franchise just seems to cash in on the concept of dinosaurs and trusting that kids love dinosaurs and they do so it's a success a big aspect I was charmed by is that this is a kids series and it feels like it skews very young in almost every possible way but then every movie features at least one scene where a big terrifying predator arrives and tries to murder and eat the kids it's the most common problem they face so you have this preschool show where they're singing songs and learning about sharing and suddenly the beady-eyed t-rex from Jurassic Park busts through a wall and everybody starts screaming and running apparently among the LBT fandom there is a belief that the first three or four films are the good ones and then after that it's a sharp decline in quality and I think that's not true at all and in fact I think it speaks to how much of a factor nostalgia plays in their esteem of these movies looking at my ranking it's all across the board and I'm sorry but some of the early ones were like pretty bad I thought the difference in quality might be a case of different visions but looking at the credits I was surprised to find that nearly every film was written by the same guy and among all 14 films there were only five different directors so really I guess I can just chalk the successes and failures of the different films up to the amount of effort put in or I guess dumb luck one thing I have to respect though is there is a sense of expanding the Canon as the series progresses it's small stuff but it's there like Sarah gets a stepmom and then they keep the stepmom around they introduce littlefoot's dad and he comes back Moe even makes a cameo in a later film and I mentioned the racism plotline they always fall back on and have Sarah's dad daddy tops is the racist dinosaur of them all well even he retains his lesson after a few movies he stays grumpy but he stops being overtly racist and marriage really seems to mellow him out so that's nice to see I still wouldn't keep him in my Great Valley but you know I was really hoping through the whole marathon to see some kind of big status quo shake-up though and I never really delivered on that it would have been crazy to see a movie where suddenly their preteens and you have new conflicts from that and their designs are aged up like you know they're still young but maybe their legs are longer or something but I don't we'll ever see that because this doesn't seem like a series that's especially interested in moving forward if you move forward you can't keep making sequels indefinitely and that does seem to be the plan it's been six years since LBT number 14 and that is a pretty big gap but they've had that long of a gap before a gap between movies 1 & 2 is actually six years and the gap between movies 13 and 14 was 9 years so I'm sure eventually we will get a Land Before Time 15 and those ago little dinosaurs will be rendered in hideous cgi I mentioned that there's a Land Before Time TV series and I'm not going to watch that but honestly if your kid is into dinosaurs I think you'd be better off just showing than that I'm sure the plots feel a lot less than when they only last 22 minutes and besides chompers a series regular he's living in the Great Valley don't ask me how that works anyway I don't think I was missing much as a kid but I liked the series well enough like the long neck's at the Eclipse I just have to engage with it on its own level I was going to end this video by saying that know if you're an adult who is curious about these movies like I was no you should not watch them I don't recommend it you know just in case you were here for that but we're all in lockdown for the foreseeable future so you know what yes yeah you should watch all of them watch the TV series and tell me which EPS you recommend make the forum account on gang of five dotnet right fanfics about you redeeming uncle pterano or the Sharptooth if you're feeling spicy get mo tattooed on your body I know I'll be doing all of the above so I'll see you in the Land Before Time roleplay discussion board [Music] I can't wait to see you what's up today yeah we call it's time to play every cloud in the sky green leaf on a tree is reminding me faraway dreams really do come true let's go run around [Music] it's a beautiful feeling we finally found a peaceful valley and everyone's having a good time everyone's having a good time you [Music] so that's it you're leaving you don't have to go

Channel: Jenny Nicholson

Views: 1,666,599

Rating: 4.9288616 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: B-8zmGr0geQ

Length: 58min 46sec (3526 seconds)

Published: Thu May 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/badpeaches]

Someone had to watch them. Glad it wasn't me.

[u/coltonamort]

If you liked this, I’d recommend her review of the worst TV show ever. She’s pretty hilarious and does a lot of intense research into it.

https://youtu.be/JKFgn6tNU6w

[u/anonymous_coward69]

The first movie is ranked at number three? Blasphemy!

[u/Ryanestrasz]

...theres 14?

[u/Spaceman_Jalego]

As a kid, the 5th and 10th movies were my favorites. I did not expect an adult to agree on rewatch, so props to kid me.

[u/Ash-Playz-396]

She bought them so we don’t have to. True quarantine hero

[u/Fr3ckld]

Wait... there’s a 14th one?!?!?!

[u/68Wishicould]

Get it together petree your 45 lol

[u/AlexxxanderShunnarah]

Love Jenny Nicholson. Her channel is perfect if you are the type of person who likes to dissect movies and books.