Dinosaurs Attack!

Blog reader “JP” brought this website to my attention which has collected and posted the entire collection of a trading card series called Dinosaurs Attack! The cards were released in 1988 as a sort of follow-up to the infamous Mars Attacks! trading cards from the 60’s and shares in its predecessor’s portrayals of over-the-top violence and gore. Normally, I consider dinosaurs to be outside of the realm of giant monsters since they’re not technically “monsters”, but just really big, extinct animals- however, the content and paleontological inaccuracy of the creatures depicted in the series is much more akin to a rampaging daikaiju movie than something you’d ever come across on the Discovery Channel. How so, might you ask?

First off, the dinosaurs in quite a few of the cards are insanely over-sized:

Or appear to be made up by the artist (a.k.a. a “generi-saurus”):

All of the various species are blood-thirsty carnivores, even the plant-eating ones:

I like this one- clearly a reference to the creatures of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and The Giant Behemoth:

I’ve watched a lot of documentaries, but none of them ever mentioned how dinosaurs were guided by the will of a satanic, reptilian deity called the “Supreme Monstrosity”. Who knew?

Apparently the card series was considered for a theatrical adaptation, but it fell out of interest when Jurassic Park went into production.

Wait a minute- so I was denied a film wherein building-sized dinosaurs go berserk in modern day thanks to a scheme perpetrated by a prehistoric equivalent of Skeletor? Curse you, Spielberg!