The Valley of Gwangi is a 1969 American fantasy Western film produced by Charles H. Schneer and Ray Harryhausen, directed by Jim O'Connolly, written by William Bast,[1] and starring James Franciscus, Richard Carlson, and Gila Golan.

He had inherited the film project from his mentor Willis O'Brien, responsible for the effects in the original King Kong (1933).

O'Brien had planned to make The Valley of Gwangi decades earlier but died in 1962 before it could be realized.

Her former lover, Tuck Kirby, a former stuntman working for Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, wants to buy her out.

Along the way, he is followed by Lope, a Mexican boy who intends to join the rodeo on a quest for fame and fortune.

Tuck meets British paleontologist Horace Bromley, who is working in a nearby Mexican desert.

Carlos, an ex-member of the Romani tribe now working for T.J.'s circus, walks in on the theft and tries to stop it, but is knocked out.

Securing the creature with ropes, Tuck and the other men in the group take Gwangi back to town to be put on display in T.J.'s show.

Bromley is crushed by a broken piece of the cage, and Gwangi kills an Asian elephant before rampaging through the town.

Tuck then wounds him with a flag and throws a torch onto the floor near Gwangi, setting the building on fire.

The plot was inspired by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's book The Lost World (1912), with added elements from King Kong (capturing a creature and bringing it to civilization where it runs amok).

[4] In O'Brien's scenario, then called Valley of the Mists, cowboys discover an Allosaurus in the Grand Canyon.

The studio cancelled the production, reportedly because of research done that the public did not want to see a picture about dinosaurs.

[7] In 1949, Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper reported that Jesse Lasky was going to Central America to film scenes for Valley of the Mists with O'Brien, with a script by Richard Landau.

[9] In the late 1960s, Ray Harryhausen and producer Charles Schneer decided to reunite after several years of making films apart.

Harryhausen suggested reviving two old O'Brien projects, War Eagles, which had been developed for MGM, and Gwangi which had been done for RKO.

Schneer had the script rewritten by William Bast and offered the project to Columbia, who had made all Scheer's previous collaborations with Harryhausen.

[10] Harryhausen said they decided to keep the story's early 20th Century time period to eliminate the "cliches about the army moving in with tanks and missiles.

According to Ray Harryhausen, his own version of Gwangi (and O'Brien's Gwangi too, as well as Delgado's Tyrannosaurus) was based on a Charles R. Knight painting[citation needed] of a Tyrannosaurus – one of the two most famous paintings by Knight, and one that is instantly recognizable by the eye being placed too far forward on the skull (this was based on concurrently incomplete skeletal remains and the eye was mistakenly placed in one of the antorbital fenestrae),[citation needed][original research?]

Close to a year was spent on the special effects (there were more than 300 'Dynamation' cuts in the film, a record number for Harryhausen), with the roping of Gwangi being the most labor-intensive animated sequence.

For the scene when Lope is snatched from his horse by the Pteranodon, the boy was raised by wires painted out in the studio and Harryhausen animated the eight-inch-(20-centimeter) high model pterosaur to correspond with his movements.

Bromley the paleontologist correctly identifies it as a pterodactyl (the classification of pterosaurs that Pteranodon is a part of) while he is inspecting it on the ground.

Gwangi, the Ornithomimus and the Styracosaurus were all made from the Ceratosaurus, the Phorusrhacos and the Triceratops, who were stripped down and had their armatures modified for further use.

[13] Actor Laurence Naismith, who plays Professor Bromley, had earlier appeared in Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts as the shipbuilder Argos.

The bullring scenes were shot in Almería's Plaza de Toros and the finale at Cuenca's cathedral.

The central image of the cowboys roping the dinosaur was imaginative, but it didn't hold up for feature length.

"[20] The scene where Gwangi suddenly appears from behind a hill and snatches the fleeing Ornithomimus in his jaws was later copied in Steven Spielberg’s big-budget dinosaur film, Jurassic Park.

In episode 2–28 (2000) of the American version of the TV series Whose Line Is It Anyway?, the scene of Tuck fighting the pterodactyl was used for the green screen video during the Newsflash segment.

In the episode "The One Where Joey Speaks French" (2004) of the situation comedy Friends (1994), Ross Geller watches the film while in a hospital.

Playing on a double-bill with another 1960's dinosaur fantasy film using stop-motion animation (albeit not by Harryhausen), Dinosaurus!.