Land Before Time Retrospective #6
Released: 1998
To give some context, James Horner was the music composer for the first Land Before Time film. Michael Tavera took over for all the sequels, although the first several sequels still reused a lot of James’s musical cues from the original, alongside Michael’s new compositions.
I also wanted to preface this by saying that my feelings about the film have changed since my initial review. While I had a more lukewarm response to the film at the time, it’s grown on me since then, and I even consider it to be an underrated LBT sequel nowadays. Still, these were my initial impressions about it.
Continuing along with my LBT quest, yesterday evening I watched The Secret of Saurus Rock. This is another one I had seen as a kid, which up to this point leaves the fourth film as the only one I’d never seen before. Although, as with the other films, there were only small snippets I remembered here. In fact, the only part I could (fairly) vividly recall was the scene near the end when Littlefoot says goodbye to Doc and Doc tells him, “You already have a hero.” Littlefoot turns to look at his grandfather, then turns back and is sad to see Doc leaving. The character of Doc in himself was somewhat familiar, sort of like the bullies from the third film, but that was the only other thing I could remember.
Anyway, while there were some entertaining scenes and good character moments, the central plot wasn’t as compelling as the previous films. The other films all had strong plot hooks, but this one felt a bit more average to me.
Of course, hearing James Horner’s music is always a delight, although the score by Michael Tavera is really good too. The music was a lot more epic than the film itself. 😛 (Thanks to Ducky123 for showing me this playlist of LBT sequel music.)
I’ve seen some criticism regarding the western theme, but I actually thought that was one of the film’s better aspects. It helped give this one a unique flavour in a long-running series. If anything, I wish they’d gone a little further with the western vibe. I also like that it was left ambiguous whether there actually was some sort of bad luck curse surrounding Saurus Rock, or whether it was merely a series of coincidences.
I’ll probably give this the same “5 & 1/3 out of 8 tree star” rating that I gave the second film. But where in the second film, it was because there was a strong mixture of things I liked versus things I didn’t like, and thus it was quite polarizing for me. By contrast, I was much more “eh” about this one; it didn’t evoke a strong response from me in either direction.
Also, I noticed that the production quality seemed to be lower on this film than the others. It had a slightly blurry and grainy look to it. Was it because of a poor DVD remaster, perhaps? Or was the film always like this?
Update – Explanation from Hypno: “I believe the reason why The Secret of Saurus Rock looks so bad on DVD is because it’s the VHS version but just upscaled… which is lazy. Older DVD releases of movies 2 to 5 (I believe) were just upscales of the VHS versions. But when they were properly assembled into proper DVD quality form in later DVD releases, they looked better. The Secret of Saurus Rock hasn’t been updated still, which is really annoying.”
