Theme: Prehistoric Revival

This refers to remnants from Prehistory such as Dinosaurs or Cavemen being revived in the present day. There have been a number of works that depict the day-to-day lives of cavepeople, which are listed under Prehistory. What we concern ourselves with here are denizens of prehistory that are brought into the modern day.

The Prehistoric Revival genre began with The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), which had a dinosaur unfrozen in the Arctic by an atomic blast (in so doing becoming the first Atomic Monster film). Although atomic energy was not always the explanation, other dinosaurs were resurrected or unfrozen to rampage amok again throughout this era. Most of these are Monster Movies.

Amidst these, there were also works with cavepeople being unthawed or else transported through time. Unlike revived dinosaur films, these were often about the caveperson’s confusion with the modern world or in more recent years the attempts to anthropologically study them. There are also a number of revived caveman works that play everything for comic silliness.

The revived dinosaur genre did not much exist beyond the 1960s, although it gained a new lease of life with Jurassic Park (1993), which revived dinosaurs with the genetic engineering of their leftover DNA.