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How was it.... welll-l-l-l-l... it was eight minutes long.  It was a "private screening" at the Motion Picture Academy's secret little place in Hollywood.  There were about a dozen of us, invited by Dinosaur Don Glut, and it was like getting into CIA headquarters to get in.  Parking lot was gated; you drive up, announce yourself into the intercom. Maybe they'll hit a button and let you in-- if you say your name clearly..

Check your ID, sign here, hang this badge around your neck, follow me, no food or drink, no recording video...


I knew nearly all of the people there.   There was Sid Terror, stop-motion animators, Tim Smyth and Don Waller (he worked on King Kong and the Lord of the Rings, writer Bill Winkler, Ron Borst and his wife Margarite, and Bill and Beverly Warren.   Plus effects master Lyle Conway (Little Shoppe of Horrors--among many other things!)

Dead silent.  Small classroom about ten feet by eight.  Big screen TV and a player.  Four chairs, twelve people (Yes, I'll take a chair, thank you.  What the hell.  The only woman among us, Beverly, already has one, as does Bill.   Watching the film in this tiny little room in dead silence reminded me of the scene in Hammer's THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT.

ALONG THE MOONBEAM TRAIL, was all the work of one Major Herbert Dawley, who plays the "lead" role in the live-action, and had produced SLUMBER MOUNTAIN.  In SLUMBER, the dinosaurs had been the work of animator Willis O'Brian, who would refine the techniques over the next several years to make THE LOST WORLD (1925), KING KONG (1933) and MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (1949).  

What exists currently is about eight minutes of the film, which apparently includes most or all of the animation footage.  The head and end titles are missing, as are the first few minutes establishing the character of the explorer (played by Dawley) and his two Boy Scout charges.  Since the existing transfer is from a 35mm nitrate original, the image is surprisingly clear and sharp.

Despite the gentle fantasy title, it's a semi-sci-fi story.  A guy and his two boys (in scout uniforms) flies a biplane to the Moon (represented by the New Jersey forest).  During their flight, they're annoyed by a flying pterodactyl, which causes them to land.  Once they hike through the woods of the "Moon" and drink some water from a stream, they enter a cave and see, out the other end, a jungle with dinosaurs:  a stegosaurus, then a duck-billed dinosaur and a T-rex.  The film as it exists now ends abruptly after the end of the fight between the carnivore and the duckbill.

Interaction between the live-action actors and the stop-motion puppets is minimal-- mostly the humans are in a cave watching the dino action outside.  There was one interesting camera angle, used a couple of times, which was a neat double-exposure, with the guy & kids cowering in darkness on the left, an otherwise black frame (representing the darkness of the cave) and the "mouth" of the cave on the right, which was the miniature landscape with the animated dinosaurs.  The stop-motion is plentiful but crude by any standards, not even up to the level of GHOST OF SLUMBER MOUNTAIN two years before. 

When O'Brian hit the big time with THE LOST WORLD, Dawley sued, claiming that he had "invented" this form of trick photography... and further, that his dinosaur movies had been made with a patented method  using full-sized mechanical devices constructed of wood, metal, pulleys, gears and canvas.  He had a blueprint and everything registered at the patent office. It was utter nonsense-- stop-motion animation uses articulated miniature puppets-- but he got some publicity out of it.

Dawley left the movie business at the dawn of sound and (allegedly) joined the Pierce-Arrow auto company, ostensibly having artistic input into every one of the cars the company made until they went belly-up in the 30s (at least, that's what it says on IMDB).  He then operated a live theater in New Jersey for the next 35 years until his death in 1970. His movie ALONG THE MOONBEAM TRAIL disappeared into history, literally becoming "legendary."  Film historians theorized that the dinosaur footage was actually out takes from GHOST OF SLUMBER MOUNTAIN, or had been used in latter-day documentaries about ancient history.  Without a copy of the movie itself, there was no way to verify what was true and what wasn't.  Without the movie itself, it was also theorized that Dawley knew nothing about stop-motion even though it had been used in SLUMBER MOUNTAIN. 

Noted animators & dinosaur buffs Jim Aupperle and Steven Czerkas (who had created the stop motion effects for the 1978 film PLANET OF DINOSAURS) were co-responsible for discovering the "only" existing print of ALONG THE MOONBEAM TRAIL, which had never really been lost.  Dawley had kept a 35mm copy in his theater all these years.  Coincidentally, a second print of roughly the same material was later discovered in England.  The Motion Picture Academy transferred the nitrate film to digital tape for preservation.

The "direction" of the film is very basic, more reminiscent of a film made in 1901 than 1921.  Even the animation shots (very long by current standards, anywhere from 15 or 20 seconds to a full minute) are mostly static, with few attempts at intercutting close-ups of the dinosaurs or alternate angles.  Frequently during the animation, the puppet or puppets will simply stop moving entirely for several seconds at a time, then the animation will resume where it left off.  Since shooting in stop motion at the time would entire a deliberate single crank of a camera, these frozen tableaus may have been intentional, Dawley cranking off "leader" between stop-motion segments to later be intercut with shots of the three humans watching from the cave.  However, there ARE no shots of the adventurers, with the exception of the one split-screen (or double-exposure) trick shot noted above.  Maybe Dawley simply forgot about it.

The dinosaur footage is shot almost exclusively from one locked down camera position, with a slight shadowy suggestion of the cave "roof" at the top of the frame.  Several times, one of the dinosaurs is seen close to the opening of the cave, with the miniature "jungle" still clear in the background.  This potentially imaginative use of foreground/background screen depth is undone by Dawley, since the foreground puppet element is invariably blurred and out of focus. 

The confrontation between the T-rex and the duck-billed dinosaur does have a few close-ups of the models intercut with the "fight," at least one of which "breaks the line of 180"-- that is, the angle on the dinosaur heads is more than 180 degrees different from the wider shot, reversing the positions of the models on screen.  The tussle is often actionless and not at all dynamic, the models simply photographed without any adjustment between frames.  When they do move, Dawley tries to keep the reptilian tails flexing as well as the rest of the model's bodies.

The pterodactyl shots at the beginning of the film are intercut with a miniature biplane.  The flying monster seems to be simply an unarticulated model.  Both it and the biplane swoop back and forth against a crudely-done dark sky with painted clouds.  When the plane actually lands, it's a real biplane, so Dawley was able to inject some genuine production value into his epic.  However, the New Jersey woods do not look much like the Moon.

The overall effect is reminiscent of THE LOST CONTINENT (1951).  Done by Edward Nassour Jr. (son of the film's producer), they were the work of an enthusiastic fan of the technique, without the experienced slickness of a Willis O'Brian or a Ray Harryhausen.  Likewise, Dawley's dinosaur movements seem to show more than a passing knowledge of what the result ought to be.  The animated gaits of the Tyrannosaurus and the duck-billed trachodon are entirely different, for instance.  And at the conclusion of the dino-vs-dino fight, the trachodon "falls" to the ground with a relatively realistic heft and movement.  But as with LOST CONTINENT 30 years later, there is rarely a smoothness that convinces a viewer they are watching "reality."

I was talking to Tim Smyth about the film, and it occurred to me that the "payoff" is probably "it was all a dream." That would be consistent not only with the sort of fantasy films of the time, including GHOST OF SLUMBER MOUNTAIN, but also this film's title, which implies sleep and dreaming.

What's the possibility that "Along the Moonbeam Trail" was actually begun, or even entirely shot, before "Ghost of Slumber Mountain"?

Here's a couple of things I noticed after watching "Ghost" on youtube. First, the two kids seem about the same age in both films. I obviously do not have a reference copy of "Moonbeam" in front of me, and I can't saw them in half to count the rings, but there doesn't look like a big age difference. If anything, it's possible the kids in "Moonbeam" may be a tad younger than they are in "Ghost."

Second: in the shack of "Mad Jack," there are two model dinosaurs, a triceratops which the hero picks up and examines-- and a Trachodon. From the size, they are about as large as the animation models would be. He doesn't flex the legs, darn it, so you can't tell for sure if they're articulated. But there is no Trachodon in "Slumber Mountain." There is, however, in "Moonbeam Trail."

Third: Many of the effects in "Slumber Mountain" seem far more sophisticated than "Moonbeam." when logically it should be the other way around. For instance, there's a long-ish scene of a dodo-type bird in a forest. The set appears to be partly miniature shrubbery, but primarily a photo backdrop. Likewise, the lengthy shot of the Brontosaurus at the riverside appears to be a combination of a miniature area (where the beast is) and either a large photograph or a representational painting of the forest and mountains behind it.

Compare this to the one, single, solitary miniature set in "Moonbeam," above: an open area with a few foreground trees, and a rather crudely painted backdrop (albeit with a nice indication of a waterfall on a distant mountain.).

Fourth: Chalk it up to the usual movie hyperbole if you like, but Dawley's ad (on the previous page) says that "Moonbeam" has been "three years in the making." If that were accurate, it would pre-date "Slumber Mountain," or at least be contemporaneous with it.

Fifth: Understanding of cutaways. The editorial sophistication of "Slumber Mountain" shows a strong conceptual knowledge of cutting from one image to the other to create a cohesive overall reality. You see the hero looking through the magic binoculars-- then you see the dinosaurs that he sees. Later, when the Tyrannosaurus spots him, the hero fires off screen right, and there is a cut to a medium close-up of the dinosaur facing screen left, with an animated trickle of blood appearing on his head. It pursues him, moving off-screen right to left. The film cuts back to Dawley, fleeing-- correctly-- right to left.

Compare this to the dearth of "coverage" in "Moonbeam." There are no shots of the hero and the kids watching the dinosaurs. There is one shot and one shot only-- Dawley and two kids huddling against black with the cave mouth on screen right. I could not even say for certain that the two kids in scout uniforms in this shot really ARE the same two kids in the rest of the film.

Sixth: General sophistication. "Slumber Mountain" is a pretty intricate film for a "simple" two reeler. It's a story within a story within a story, a fantasy construct within a framing device, within ANOTHER framing device. In the core story, the hero learns of Mad Jack, then discovers the guy's "special binoculars," a device which can see backwards into the past. The transparent ghost of "Mad Jack" points out the place to look-- and our hero watches prehistoric images. This is all actually a "dream," established by bookend scenes of the hero and a pal canoeing down a river, hiking, and setting up camp -- after which the hero "dreams" the rest of the story. But all THIS is actually a yarn being read to two little kids by the hero himself from his diary. And because of the unobtrusive way the film is edited, all this complex story-within-story stuff is never unclear. The use of inter-titles is sharp, and expedites the story flow.

Then on the other hand, there's "Moonbeam"-- clunky, elementary in execution, and with no sense of editorial pacing. If it is, as I suspect, "all a dream," there is no indication this is the case within the extant clip --unlike the clever and unobtrusive way the viewer is reminded of the story-within-a-story in "Ghost" with occasional cuts back to the two boys on their uncle's lap listening to him tell his tall tale. The animation is more rudimentary, the execution far simpler (there is only one tabletop set in the entire film, compared to five or six in "Ghost.")

Either Herbert Dawley forgot the expertise and cinema understanding he had while doing "Slumber," including any and all animation tricks he may've picked up from O'Brian ...

or...

"Moonbeam Trail" was actually his first attempt, followed by the slicker and far more cinematically sophisticated "Slumber Mountain"... after which he finished the "first" film as best he could and released it, hoping to cash in on the previous film's success.

And takers on this one?