Journey to the Beginning of Time (Czechoslovakia, 1955)

I started watching this and realized I had seen it on TV when I was six or eight. I lived in San Antonio, Texas, at the time. It was around 1970 at the height of the Cold War and San Antonio was home of the Fourth Army. They showed this movie a few minutes at a time mixed in with Popeye and old Warner Brothers cartoons.

We were in a city where we were forced to pray in public school and where the Fourth Army was training troops bound for Vietnam, but they showed a movie about evolution made in a Communist country on a local children's show.

Four boys go through a tunnel in their rowboat and find themselves in the ice age. They continue down the river going further and further back in time as they go. They see older and older animals and plants.

With stop motion animation. I think the duck-billed dinosaur was a puppet and they used a different method for some shots of the brontosaurus.

There's a scene where a kid runs for his life from a giant flightless bird.

They had one of those birds in a Ray Harryhausen movie, Mysterious Island. I saw that movie as a kid and thought it was a giant baby bird. I felt sorry for it because the guys killed and ate it, but seeing it in this movie, I'm back on the side of humanity.

The movie made little attempt to explain how any of this was happening. The kid at the beginning commented that something similar happened in a Jules Verne novel and other stuff he wrote about came true, so why shouldn't this?

Available on the Criterion Channel.

That TV channel back then serialized another cartoon from another Communist country where they explore the solar system. I thought it was Soviet but I looked for it and didn't find it.

When I was fourteen or fifteen, they kept showing a movie called Voyage to to the Edge of Universe (1963) which was a Czechoslovakian film called Icarie XB1 before it was butchered by American International Pictures.

There was also The First Spaceship on Venus available on Pub-D-Hub, a Poland-East German co-production.

There were other Soviet movies that were cut up by American International Pictures with new footage added. I don't remember seeing any of them, but there were one or two made from footage from Planet of Storms (aka Planeta Bur, USSR, 1962). One was something about a planet of prehistoric women.

Americans should be ashamed. It'd be like if some other backward, degenerate country chopped up 2001: A Space Odyssey and turned it into a nudie film.