Editor Ira is here this week to talk dinos and animation history!

One of the first indicators that I was fated to be a trivia professional came in second grade, when my teacher told us to make a list of all the dinosaurs we knew by name. By the time Mrs. Hogan called “pencils down,” my dino list was at least three times as long as anyone else’s, and still growing.

I couldn’t have been prouder, but this was also one of the first times I had to face a fundamental truth of being good at trivia: unless you’re in the company of other trivia nerds, nobody cares, not even a little bit.

Still, this exercise was a valuable illustration of the division between general and specialized knowledge, a fundamental element of writing trivia. My classmates were unimpressed that I could identify coelacanths (yes, I know they’re not technically dinosaurs) and titanosaurs because they had no earthly reason to value that knowledge. All they needed to know was the default roster of dinosaurs. In the 1980s, that included Tyrannosaurus rex, triceratops, stegosaurus, ankylosaurus, pterodactyls (yes, I know they’re also not technically dinosaurs), and, of course, brontosaurus.

While T. Rex was the flashiest and most popular of the ’80s dinosaurs, the brontosaurus was more like the default. When we heard the word “dinosaur,” these long-necked, long-tailed, quadripedal herbivores were the first things that popped into our heads. The appeal of the other top-tier dinosaurs was fairly obvious. They all had killer teeth, bad-ass horns and spikes, body armor, or wings. Compared to those dynamic beasts, brontosaurus was hopelessly basic. In the nomenclature of my rural Wisconsin upbringing, they were the Holstein cows of the dinosaur world.

So what made these large but otherwise un-flashy monsters the standard-bearer for dinosaurs? As with most things, pop culture had a lot to do with it. During the Great Dinosaur Rush of the late 1800s, bones belonging to sauropods like brontosaurus were some of the most plentiful paleontological finds. As the public’s fascination with these so-called “Bone Wars” grew, sauropods were among the most frequently assembled skeletons in museums, and thus among the most frequently depicted in the media.

(This period also spawned the first debates over what they should be called, “brontosaurus” or “apatosaurus.” Whether these are two distinct dinosaurs, two names for the same dinosaur, or one real and one nonexistent dinosaur is a complicated issue, sparked by paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh possibly contradicting or reduplicating some of his own discoveries. It was still a hotly debated topic when I was a juvenile dino enthusiast in the ’80s and it remains a point of contention to this day. Even though a 2015 study declared the independent existence of the brontosaurus, “apatosaurus” is probably the more demonstrably correct term. But “brontosaurus” is more fun to say, so that’s what I’m sticking with for the purposes of this article.)

The popularity of the brontosaurus grew along with the rise of new forms of mass media in the early 20th century. Dinosaurs were still a topic of public fascination. They made frequent appearances in early comic strips, a wildly popular genre of entertainment in the days before broadcast communication. That made them a natural subject when cartoonists and filmmakers began developing animation.

Winsor McCay was a pioneer in both fields. He broke through on the comics pages in 1904, launching both “Little Sammy Sneeze,” about a kid whose poorly timed sneezes wrought all manner of havoc, and “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend,” an anthology of nightmares brought on by eating cheesy toast. The kinetic physicality and surrealist landscapes of these strips instantly identified McCay as one of the true artistic visionaries of early comics, and his next big creation confirmed it beyond a doubt.

“Little Nemo in Slumberland” followed the nightly wonders and horrors that populated one little boy’s dreams. It’s a visually gorgeous strip that captured the public’s fancy and made Winsor McCay a star. In the 120 years since its debut, “Little Nemo” has spawned multiple reboots, a wide range of merchandise, several stage plays, an anime series, an opera, and even a Nintendo game. It was also likely the first comic ever to get adapted into an animated film, and here’s where we start veering back toward dinosaurs.

Beyond his considerable successes as a comic creator, Winsor McCay was keenly interested in the brand-new field of animation. In 1910, he assembled thousands of hand-drawn sketches on rice paper to create a 92-second-long film adaptation of “Little Nemo.” He’d been performing various feats of art as part of a vaudeville touring act for several years. McCay incorporated the new film into a stage show that saw him interacting with his own fictional characters, much to the crowds’ delight.

The show was a hit and McCay officially caught the animation bug. He painstakingly crafted 10 animated shorts over the next decade, including an exploration of mosquito motivations, a series of “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend” adaptations, and a dramatization of the sinking of the Lusitania. His biggest impact, however, came with 1914’s “Gertie the Dinosaur.”

McCay originally developed “Gertie” as another interactive stage show, but his boss William Randolph Hearst decided his cartoonist should be focused on cartooning and eventually banned him from performing. To keep the film feasible, McCay added a metatextual story about viewing a brontosaurus skeleton in a natural history museum with fellow cartooning legend George McManus. McCay bets McManus that he can bring the dinosaur back to life and sets to work drawing “10,000 cartoons.”

The result is Gertie, an extroverted brontosaurus who performs tricks for the audience in response to McCay’s onscreen commands. She dances, devours a tree, weeps when scolded, and gets in a fight with a mischievous mammoth. Despite her lack of speech and limited range of motion, she’s an immediately lovable and indelible character who embodies the wonder of early animation. The film was a hit with critics and audiences (Hearst’s performance ban ironically extended Gertie’s reach to moviegoers who wouldn’t have had access to McCay’s stage show), helping to cement dinosaurs in general and sauropods in particular as pop cultural touchstones.

Different takes on brontosaurus-like dinosaurs turned up in movie theaters as quickly as the industry came up with new ways to portray them. Thomas Edison’s production company put out a stop-motion dino comedy in 1917. Buster Keaton’s character used a clay-animation sauropod as a crow’s nest in 1923’s “The Three Ages.” A brontosaurus vs. T. Rex battle marked the climax of the 1925 sci-fi epic “The Lost World.”Felix the Cat and Betty Boop both tangled with sauropods in their early animated adventures. A crew of big-game poachers matched wits with a fog-obscured brontosaurus in the original 1933 “King Kong.”The age of dino-themed entertainment was upon us. It’s never really left since, as Hollywood’s determination to make audiences care about the “Jurassic World” franchise demonstrates.

“Gertie the Dinosaur” is now justly regarded as one of the most important works in the history of not just animation, but cinema as a whole. Walt Disney readily acknowledged McCay as a major inspiration, paying tribute to Gertie with the “Rite of Spring” section of 1940’s “Fantasia.” A 1955 episode of the TV program “Disneyland” featured McCay’s son Robert re-creating his father’s old stage show with Gertie, giving the film its first national exposure to a new audience of young viewers. And to this day, visitors to Disney’s Hollywood Studios can always cool off with a stop at Dinosaur Gertie’s Ice Cream of Extinction, a brontosaurus-shaped vending stand that pays homage to one of the true foundational figures of America’s obsessions with both animation and prehistoric life.