![]() What it looks like, then, is that Toei rushed a Nessie rip-off into production, and then persisted with the project even after its inspiration was shitcanned, perhaps out of faith that King Kong would revive interest in giant monsters, which was then flagging even in Japan. Beyond that, the Plesiosaurus here is directly equated with the Loch Ness Monster by two different characters. It therefore seems reasonable to presume that Nessie would have rendered the monster as a plesiosaur, too. ![]() That’s significant because during the 1970’s, the most popular theory to explain the Loch Ness Monster was that it was a plesiosaur that had somehow escaped extinction in the Mesozoic Era. Furthermore, one of those creatures is a Plesiosaurus. The setup for Toei’s film is suggestively similar to that of the aborted Nessie: climate anomalies and seismic activity revive prehistoric reptiles to terrorize the communities around a legendarily monster-haunted lake. That may not be quite the end of the story, though, because right around the time Nessie was supposed to come out, Toho’s competitors at Toei released Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds. Alas, this was the period when Hammer could barely secure financing for a trip to the pub, so Nessie inevitably fell apart before a single frame was shot. Details have been hard to track down, but evidently the premise was that the Loch Ness Monster would leave its home waters for some ecological reason, and go on a kaiju rampage across the British Isles. It was called Nessie, and it was to have been a joint venture by Hammer Film Productions and the Japanese Toho studio. The strangest Dino-Kong coattail-rider that I know of sadly never got made. ![]() ![]() ![]() Most of them were giant ape movies of one sort or another, but some producers had more expansive visions. Late in 1976 and early in 1977, when everybody the world over was assuming that the Dino De Laurentiis King Kong would be the biggest thing since the Empire State Building, a lot of cash-in projects got green-lit. Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds / Legend of the Dinosaurs / Kyoryu Kaicho no Densetsu (1977) -** ![]()
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