The Lost World
Arthur Conan Doyle · first published 1912
The 1925 film taught cinema how to put a dinosaur on screen, and the animator went straight on to King Kong.
8 versions · 1925–2001 · screen, drawn
Willis O’Brien’s stop-motion creatures for the silent Lost World were the first convincing dinosaurs in a feature, and eight years later the same technique gave the world King Kong. Everything since — every model, puppet and rendered lizard — descends from that job of work.
Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger has never been as famous as Holmes, which is unfair: he is louder, ruder and much funnier. The book has also been drawn as a manga and as a comic, and adapted for television more than once.
1912, at the end of the blank spaces
The interior of South America was one of the last places on the map that could plausibly hide something. Percy Fawcett was surveying the Bolivian frontier in those years and knew Conan Doyle; the South American plateau in the book stands on ground that was still genuinely unmapped.
Dinosaur bones had been coming out of the American West for forty years and the great museum skeletons had just gone on display, so the creatures were newly familiar and still astonishing. Within a generation, aerial survey had closed the blank spaces for good.
On screen
6Film and television, earliest first.
- 1925 The Lost World Harry O. Hoyt
- 1960 The Lost World Irwin Allen
- 1992 The Lost World Timothy Bond
- 1998 The Lost World Bob Keen
- 2001 The Lost World Stuart Orme
- — The Lost World
Drawn
2Comics and manga.
- — Lost World
- — Challenger
Versions are listed where they are documented. A century of stage productions and most broadcasts were never catalogued at all, so this is what can be shown rather than everything that was ever made.