Antediluvian remains – Chap. 3, Act 2, Strip 14

Well, it’s difficult to say what the second-best tracker of the Greek Forrestry Service is like – they sent him out a while ago on the trail of the missing third-best tracker, and neither one has returned. I guess that would make the former fourth-best tracker the new second-best one, but he can’t be located at the moment.

I think Mowgli is doing alright, all told – he did find a track, after all, it would just have been a bit more dignified if he had spotted it half a second earlier or so. Keep in mind that he was raised by wild bulls on Crete, so where would he have acquired great skill at tracking? The great skill he does owe to his unusual upbringing is clearly in evidence in panel three: he’s really great at bullshitting.

Aside from that, our friends proceed merely along the well-beaten path to a live dinosaur encounters. After the first, small footprint they’ve encountered the skeleton-that-looks-a-bit-too-fresh, and then the giant footprint into which the most disbelieving member of the expedition suddenly falls (with the footprint being revealed to the audience only after the fall via a pull-back). It’s like a codified ritual, you have to observe all of those little preparatory steps – everything else would show a deep lack of respect towards the medium of B-movies. Very avantgardistic B-movies might have an encounter with a heap of dinosaur dung as a further step in the sequence, but I’m just not that hip

“Antediluvian” is a great word for a B-movie scientist to use – it make it easier to distinguish them from real scientists.

Yes, dinosaur tracks look like that – depressed straight down to an even depth. Dinosaurs had…uh…angular feet like that. And they moved by jumping straight up and down. Truefax. ._.

More on Thursday.

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