Hal Roach produced One Million Years B.C. in 1940. The film starred Victor Mature as Tumak, Carole Landis as Loana and Lon Chaney Jr. as Akohba. The script was written by D. W. Griffith based on a French novel by Eugene Roche. (Manly Wade Wellman’s Hok the Mighty series has Oloana as the love interest, and that name is very similar.)
The film was important for several different reasons. One, it introduced the concept of using real animals as fake prehistoric fauna. Iguanas, elephants and crocodiles stand-in for their ancient ancestors. The animal cruelty in this film is infamous and it received a citation from the SPCA. This style of monster-making became known as “Slurposaurs”.
Another important idea this film experimented with was a script without English or translation. The actors had to “Ugh” their way through the film. This would be done in later films like When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth and slightly less stupid movies like Quest For Fire (1981). I say slightly-less stupid because it didn’t have dinosaurs in it. The idea of cavemen and dinosaurs began with Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) and was pretty much stock-in-trade by 1940. The film version of The Lost World appeared in 1925. King Kong in 1933 continues the lost world idea. Roach simply did away with that concept in an attempt to make the film a snapshot from the past and threw mammoths and dinosaurs in a jumble that makes no sense, even as Science Fiction.
The film received an eight-page adaptation in Crackajack Funnies, a comic that mostly reprinted comic strips from the newspaper. As far as I can tell, it went largely unnoticed. The writer and artists are unknown.
Crackajack Funnies #25 (July 1940)
Crackajack Funnies #26 (August 1940)
The fact that the film could be summarized in eight pages either meant the comic creators were very good at their job or the film has no plot. You decide. I think of all the boring cowboy films that got adaptations by Dell. Most of these are thirty pages long. Without dialogue, the writer could only focus on action. Imagine twenty pages of talking heads with variations of “Ugh!” Perhaps we should be glad it is only eight pages long.
1966 brought color and animation to the remake from Hammer Studios. Ray Harryhausen hurt no models in the making of this visual masterpiece. This time the producer is Michael Carreras and the production is British. Our cast has Rachel Welsh as Loana and John Richardson as Tumak. Akhoba was played by Robert Brown. But let’s be honest, Rachel was front and center in that fur bikini.
Eleven years later, Steve Moore wrote and John Bolton drew a fifteen page adaptation (I guess that plot got longer, eh?) for House of Hammer #14. (For the complete comic, go here.) Black and white but so much better!
House of Hammer #14 (November 1977)
Conclusion
Both films were wonderfully parodied in Caveman with Ringo Starr in 1981.What makes the film work so well is that it embraced so many of the ideas from the two versions of One Million Years B. C. such as the non-English script. There were great lines like “Atouk alunda Lana!” You will never forget what zug zug means. The animation was done by Jim Danforth who had provided dinos for When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. The monsters are played for laughs but still work as dinosaurs.
Unfortunately there wasn’t a comic book version. (Imagine how good that would have been if it was written and drawn by Wally Wood?)