There are dinosaurs in Citizen Kane<\/i>.<\/p>\n
No, seriously, hear us out on this. This is one of the greatest bits of film trivia we’ve heard in a while.<\/p>\n
Before the advent of greenscreen technology, many films in the 30s and 40s used “rear projection” for complicated scenery. Pre-recorded footage of a background was projected onto a screen behind the main scene, creating the appearance of a larger and more bustling setting. Filmmakers used this extensively to put views outside car windows, but it could also simulate filming in an environment that couldn’t otherwise be practically used.<\/p>\n
RKO Pictures used rear projection for jungle scenes in 1933’s The Son of Kong<\/i>. As part of the pre-recorded jungle scenery, effects artists added silhouettes of flying pterodactyls to the background. This was a King Kong<\/i> movie after all. Perhaps in a cost-cutting measure, Orson Welles chose to re-use Son of Kong<\/i>‘s rear projection footage for a swampy picnic scene in Citizen Kane<\/i>. He did not remove the pterodactyls. If you pay very close attention during the scene (embedded above), you can see them flying around in the background.<\/p>\n
So yes: there are dinosaurs in Citizen Kane<\/i>. It’s unknown if anyone caught this during production, but we wouldn’t put it past Orson Welles to leave them in intentionally. Of course, if you want a little more context, you can always watch the full movie (available in our collection, HU DVD 434<\/a>).\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are dinosaurs in Citizen Kane. No, seriously, hear us out on this. This is one of the greatest bits of film trivia we’ve heard in a while. Before the advent of greenscreen technology, many films in the 30s and 40s used “rear projection” for complicated scenery. Pre-recorded footage of a background was projected onto […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[166,364,377],"class_list":["post-394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-hidden-dinosaurs","tag-trivia","tag-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}