What, no Raquel Welch? I’m out.
Hat tip to I Watch Stuff.
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About Bad Astronomy
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He's written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic and fights the abuse of science, but his true love is praising the wonders of real science.
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July 13th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
Looks like a Mammoth production.
July 13th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
Isn’t it 12, 007 years ago.
July 13th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
Shouldn’t that be 12,007 years ago?
Without having seen 10,000 BC, I still hold my bets on Quest for Fire as the best stone age movie.
July 13th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Phil, you’re off by a couple of orders of magnitude if you were looking for Raquel Welch.
July 13th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
Wait, where are the dinosaurs? How can there possibly be a caveman movie without dinosaurs?
(NOTE TO THOSE WHO NEED IT: I am just kidding. I know all the dinosaurs were killed in the Great Flood.)
July 13th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
D’oh. Bad typo. I keep doing that; this keyboard is making me nuts. Anyway, fixed, thanks.
July 13th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
According to my numbers the title should be “12,006 years ago”, if we take into account that the Gregorian calendar has no year zero.
Can someone confirm me this?
July 13th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
How will the fundies deal with this one. It’s more than 6000 years ago.
July 13th, 2007 at 2:35 pm
Weren’t people back then just 10 foot tall troglodytes with horns growing out of their foreheads?
July 13th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Brett McCoy Says: “Weren’t people back then just 10 foot tall troglodytes with horns growing out of their foreheads?”
Only in Harryhausen films (of which 1 MY BC was).
- Jack
July 13th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
A brief history of time…. oh no, that was something else!
Looks like a “big” one, if it’s good or does have a story… well, that’s another point!
July 13th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
I saw her in the late 60′s as part of a Bob Hope show in Vietnam. She was holding up very well considering her age.
July 13th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
I saw her in the late 60′s as part of a Bob Hope show in Vietnam. She was holding up very well considering her great age at the time.
July 13th, 2007 at 3:48 pm
I dunno, it looks cool to me; except I saw what really did look like a dinosaur for a second… That and I’m not a big fan of that director’s pedigree.
I just think sabretooths are less scary than modern tigers, I guess because I can see those fangs actually getting in the way instead of aiding in feeding.
OK, time index 44. It was some sort of Dromaeosaurid (looked it up). Oh well, it looks more interesting to me than The Transformers (I’ll stick with the cartoon, thank you).
July 13th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
# Adicto Says:
July 13th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
According to my numbers the title should be “12,006 years agoâ€, if we take into account that the Gregorian calendar has no year zero.
Can someone confirm me this?
__________________________________________________
Actually that would mean 12,007 is correct since the movie won’t be released until 2008
July 13th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
Saw that trailer on the big screen before the Harry Potter movie. Didn’t make it look any better…
July 13th, 2007 at 4:10 pm
Hmmmm, I don’t think we had domesticated horses by 10,000 BC. And if they were they certainly weren’t that dang big.
July 13th, 2007 at 5:10 pm
At least it looked like they got the 10000 year old alien assisted pyramides right
___________
“Oh, irony! Oh no, we don’t get that here. See, people ski topless here while smoking dope, so irony’s not really a high priority. We haven’t had any irony here since about ’83, when I was the only practitioner of it. And I stopped because I was tired of being stared at.”
— C.D. Bales
July 13th, 2007 at 6:22 pm
How about some giant ground sloths? They never get to be in a prehistoric movie. And Doedicurus might have been around, just going extinct about that time.
Oh, I forgot, there’s a plot to this movie around ancient human characters, right?
July 13th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
The “beginning of time” was about 12,000 years ago? Are we getting a whiff of YEC here?
July 13th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
Cool! 2000 years before the invention of agriculture, we had wars with metal weapons and armies, fighting over, what?,,,
As I recall, the development of agriculture was for the primary purpose of having a steady supply of beer. THAT’S why they needed a standing army(with BRONZE weapons), to protect the brewery.
Ah, well. I’d probably grouse about the environmental inaccuracies if they made a movie of John Carter of MArs,,,but I’d still go see it,,,
Gary 7
July 13th, 2007 at 6:59 pm
Nah – I think the “beginning of time” is just a vague reference to the beginning of recorded history, or the history of civilization, of some such. No need to get too paranoid! (Mind you, it won’t stop the Biblical creationists from critiquing the movie from a YEC perspective.)
July 13th, 2007 at 7:09 pm
My friend sitting next to me in the theater when I saw the trailer had to listen to me mutter “but you can’t have woolly mammoths in the desert” over and over again. (And really really big mammoths too.) I’m also wondering how the saber-tooth got out of the Americas.
I guess this is a movie about the lost pyramid builders of the northern canadian desert (in the manner of Antarctica) who kept warm through constant intense physical activity instead of, say, wearing additional clothing.
P.S. I also liked how, in the opening sequence, as we were apparently going back in time and watching light pollution disappear, that the dense concentrations of light disappeared first and are therefore much younger than the sparsely populated outlying areas.
P.P.S. Perhaps it’s time someone registered the domain “badpaleontology.com”.
July 13th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
Caucasian humans in prehistoric America? (Smilodon was exclusive to America) Enormous stone buildings? Shouldn’t there be some remains? Dinosaurs chasing humans?… It seems to me that we shouldn’t expect more than a glorified Flinstones kind of story.
July 13th, 2007 at 7:25 pm
More like, “What, the director of Independence Day? I’m out.”
July 13th, 2007 at 7:51 pm
To my mind, the best part of this trailer is that the drum solo that plays over the final clip montage is from the bridge of Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”.
Other than that… well, if I see this movie, it’ll probably be alone, to avoid annoying the people around me with my muttering.
July 13th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
…or possibly a Dromornithidae:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dromornithidae
July 13th, 2007 at 8:25 pm
Yup. I checked the frame again and it’s some kind of giant flightless bird, nor a dinosaur (well, birds are dinosaurs, but you get my meaning). But Dromornithidae were Australian birds…
July 13th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
Hmm. My first (well, second) comment that suggested this might be an Elephant Bird, Moa, or other Ratite (different from the Dromornithidae) is held up in moderation. I wonder why.
July 13th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
# Robert Says:
July 13th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
I saw her in the late 60’s as part of a Bob Hope show in Vietnam. She was holding up very well considering her great age at the time.
Here’s a link to her in 2003!
July 13th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
I’d be more inclined to see it if it were titled 10,000 BCE.
July 13th, 2007 at 9:29 pm
Eric,
Really? That seems a bit silly. I think BC is a pretty secular term these days, and I don’t see how it would make much difference in the movie itself.
July 13th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
10,000 BC – Before Christmas!
July 14th, 2007 at 3:23 am
Waitaminnit…where’s Conan?
(yeah, yeah…12:30 eastern & pacific on NBC. Yuk, yuk.)
July 14th, 2007 at 8:42 am
Chris Anthony said “To my mind, the best part of this trailer is that the drum solo that plays over the final clip montage is from the bridge of Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vidaâ€.”
Definitely! First thing I thought of, too.
As for why there are no remains of giant stone buildings, maybe in the Exciting Climax (TM) that all action films have, a meteorite slams into the building, obliterating it & creating Meteor Crater. (Hey, come on, that would be as much real science as ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ had!)
July 14th, 2007 at 6:43 pm
this does seem to be a bastardized version of history, egyptians attacked by enormous mammoths? I would think they would’ve dropped due to heat exhaustion before reaching the desert.
now please correct me if I’m wrong but wasn’t the climate of northern africa very different in those days (I.E. temperate and not a desert)
July 14th, 2007 at 11:00 pm
…and language of choice was English, with perfect Americanized diction.
July 15th, 2007 at 2:19 am
>>> if we take into account that the Gregorian calendar
>>> has no year zero.
Jesus Tap Dancing Christ, I thought we were done with that back in Y2K?
We all learned one thing from that: everyone hates math geeks.
As for the movie, well, at least they used mammoths and not dinosaurs. Maybe it’ll be Atlantis or something, and all the advanced stuff sinks into the sea at the end. I’d buy that as a fantasy film premise.
July 15th, 2007 at 6:42 am
Gary 7 said “Ah, well. I’d probably grouse about the environmental inaccuracies if they made a movie of John Carter of MArs,,,but I’d still go see it,,,”
Don’t know abot you, tovarisch, but I’d be more interested in watching a John Carter movie to see Thuvia and Dejah Thoris, but then I’ve still got that ‘infantile bias’ – and proud of it!
July 15th, 2007 at 8:53 am
I see Manny and Diego, but where’s Sid?
July 15th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Gary says…”As I recall, the development of agriculture was for the primary purpose of having a steady supply of beer. THAT’S why they needed a standing army(with BRONZE weapons), to protect the brewery.”
Jeez, you’ve got a good memory. I can barely remember the brewery I visited last night.
July 16th, 2007 at 9:20 am
Yeah, definitely a Dromornithidae of some kind. Time index 00:43 shows a pretty good shot of the head, complete with tan feathers and darker crest.
They do seem to have their historical periods and peoples mixed up. I wonder how much the spastic editing that goes into creating trailers accounts for this.
What I want to see is a movie adaptation of West of Eden. Murgu against ustuzou for control of a continent. Now that would be great!
July 16th, 2007 at 5:37 pm
And regarding mixed-up dates, Raquel Welch was born in 1940 and 1,000,000 years B.C. was filmed in 1966, so she was 26 at the time, and when she toured with Bob Hope she was younger than 30… So, the unusual thing would be that she weren’t “holding up well for her age”…
July 17th, 2007 at 4:54 am
I think the point is if she was 26 in 1,000,000 BC, then she would have been 1,001,993 in 1968, or 1,002,022 today.
July 17th, 2007 at 4:58 am
Oops! She is 1,002,032 in 2007. Can you imagine having to blow out all those candles? Shw must have enormous lung power!
July 17th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
Not being much of a movie-goer for various reasons (not the least of which is most theaters are about as comfortable as most commercial aircraft), I’ve not seen the trailer..
So, I do have a question.. was it a Mammoth or a Mastodon? One was a forest dweller, the other was a plains dweller. IIRC. At least both were native to the Americas – along with the Smileodon…
Another thing you never see in movies is the Dire Wolf..
And I wonder if they picked 10K BC for the movie as that was about the time (give or take a few thousand years) that the north american megafauna went extinct
Finally – of COURSE their buildings survived to the present day. BA and I (and many others) live right next to them. Of course, most of the world knows them as The Rocky Mountains, but we know better, don’t we, BA?
January 31st, 2008 at 12:03 am
I think we need to create a “Bad Archaeology” website too
Where do we begin… with all the inaccurracies, in the trailers alone? I can only imagine what silliness awaits in the full movie.
We’re doing an article, “The REAL 10000 BC” on our new science blog. We just couldn’t resist.
Now, as inaccurate as it is, I’d still like to see it – as a pure fantasy movie only!