Let’s start 2025 with one more silent movie accompanied by me: The 1925 The Lost World. This film, presenting a plateau populated by dinosaurs, uses stop-motion effects created by Willis O’Brien, who did the effects for King Kong a few years later. It still looks pretty good. It’s vastly better than the 1960 version directed by Irwin Allen. I saw that one as a kid and immediately recognized that it was using poorly disguised lizards as dinosaurs.

The movie is based on a novel of the same title by Arthur Conan Doyle. It’s one of three novels that featured Professor Challenger, a man with a brilliant mind, a large body, and a terrible temper. The other two have fallen into obscurity. He has received the diary of an explorer, Maple White, containing sketches of dinosaurs and pterosaurs supposedly living on a South American plateau. He is ridiculed for claiming these creatures are alive in his time, and he responds by organizing an expedition to find the plateau and its inhabitants. He finds plenty of them, brought to the screen with stop motion. After his party struggles to survive and escape, he brings a brontosaurus back to London, where it gets loose to cause panic and wreckage.

It’s a well-plotted tale. The characters are believable, even the larger-than-life Challenger. Granted, the idea of a variety of giant saurians surviving to the present day on a small plateau is absurd. The stop-motion animation seen here became the basis for many later movies, with Ray Harryhausen carrying on O’Brien’s art for movies like Jason and the Argonauts, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, and others which I enjoyed as a boy much more than Irwin Allen’s schlock.

At 1 hour 44 minutes, this is the longest film I’ve accompanied. I still managed to record it all in one sitting, though it took two attempts. (My cat ruined the first one.)