A Gun for Dinosaur

My father's a fan of classic radio. His favorite of which is the old CBS radio drama Suspense, but he has a couple of other shows that he's listened to over the years. I remember quite a few long car trips from when I was a kid that involved him putting on tapes of Suspense, or some other old-time radio series.

One that particularly stood out to me was a science fiction radio show from the mid-1950s, called "X Minus One." It ran for three years on NBC, and adapted quite a few different stories, in its first year in particular, before settling exclusively on those published by Galaxy Science Fiction magazine. Not every adaptation was a winner, mind you, but the very first episode I ever heard from them has always stuck in my mind.

"A Gun for Dinosaur," based on the story by L. Sprague de Camp. A tale about time travel, hunting the big game of the prehistoric past, and of harsh lessons learned.

I'm a big fan of dinosaurs, and the story has always stuck with me. Much to my pleasure, I found it up on YouTube, as shown below.

A few stray observations about the story itself, as adapted here.

- As adaptations go, this one is very close to the original prose by de Camp. Very little is left out, which I find quite impressive given the time frame of a typical half-hour radio slot.
- Speaking thereof... in comparison to other episodes of X Minus One that I've heard, this one here has a surprising amount of edge to it. Particularly in regards to some of the violence, or discussion of violence... the state of Courtney James' body is pretty ugly to contemplate, oof!
- I both laugh and wince whenever Rivers recalls the story of how that museum in New York got a whole sauropod dinosaur to put on display.
- Sadly, there is a paleontological goof at one point that I find both amusing and a little irksome. At one point the words "theropod" and "sauropod" get mixed up, which to a dino-nerd is something of an immersion-breaker. (Oh well. Then again, Rivers admits that he's not a scientist, so there you go too.)
- Still, I quite like the sound effects used for the dinosaurs here. The "boneheads" sound rather eerie when you hear them, and the tyrannosaur's rumbling growls and grunts sound appropriately menacing.
- The species of Tyrannosaur named here is entirely fictitious. This is not merely an invention of the radio drama, but a holdover from the original story as well.

All in all, this is, at least in my view, one of the best stories that they ever did on the show, and just for fun, I thought I'd share it with you all.

Comments

[Impossible Numbers]

- Sadly, there is a paleontological goof at one point that I find both amusing and a little irksome. At one point the words "theropod" and "sauropod" get mixed up, which to a dino-nerd is something of an immersion-breaker. (Oh well. Then again, Rivers admits that he's not a scientist, so there you go too.)

This seems like such a weird goof to me, because the obscurity of the terms suggests he did do some research to dig them up, at least. Others would make more egregious errors, such as "pterodactyls" being treated as "dinosaurs", but then it's usually obvious no research was done.

This also reminds me of that Bradbury short story "A Sound of Thunder", which I think was my introduction to the idea of butterfly-chaotic mutable time travel (as in the smallest change can radically reconfigure the future). Although in hindsight it's a pretty modest example of one, if a Cretaceous butterfly's death mostly just changes the result of an election. After 65 million years, you'd think it'd be a bit more radical than that.

[Scholarly-Cimmerian]

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This seems like such a weird goof to me, because the obscurity of the terms suggests he did do some research to dig them up, at least. Others would make more egregious errors, such as "pterodactyls" being treated as "dinosaurs", but then it's usually obvious no research was done.

I know, it is a very weird mistake here, especially in comparison to the original story, which does keep the terms consistent. The original "Gun for Dinosaur" might still operate on many of the scientific misconceptions about dinosaurs in the era it was written, but one thing that can't be disputed is that L. Sprague de Camp did do the research in writing it. So it seems to me to be a goof on the part of one of the screenwriters.

This also reminds me of that Bradbury short story "A Sound of Thunder", which I think was my introduction to the idea of butterfly-chaotic mutable time travel (as in the smallest change can radically reconfigure the future). Although in hindsight it's a pretty modest example of one, if a Cretaceous butterfly's death mostly just changes the result of an election. After 65 million years, you'd think it'd be a bit more radical than that.

Heh, good point there. (Actually, if I recall, I think de Camp in part wrote this story in response to "A Sound of Thunder" because he was annoyed with the depiction of the dinosaurs in it.) Though in fairness to Bradbury's story, the written language when the travelers return to the present is pretty radically different too. "TYME SEFARI INC. SEFARIS TU ANY YEER EN THE PAST. YU NAIM THE ANIMALL. WEE TAEK YU THAIR. YU SHOOT ITT." Yikes. I suppose that, had the story been longer, we might have gotten a sense of just what else had changed, but Ray was probably aiming more for poetics with the image of the butterfly being the cause of the changes.