Along the Moonbeam Trail

A fairy grants the wish of two boys and their uncle for an airplane that can fly to the moon, but they end up on a strange planet inhabited by dinosaurs. The story is a simple 'kids' adventure framed as a dream and features comic elements such as Mars, God of War, acting as a giant 'traffic cop' who stops the boy's plane in mid-air to give the right-of-way to Mother Goose on her flying broomstick. After evading the traffic-God, the plane is pursued by a pterodactyl, forcing the boys to land after which they encounter a stegosaurus, a hadrosaur and a tyrannosaur. The provenance of the dinosaur effects is unclear; supposedly, after a disagreement with Willis O'Brien after completing 'The Ghost of Slumber Mountain', producer Herbert M. Dawley took some of the dinosaur effects and incorporated them into this film. Having seen both films, which scenes were recycled in 'Moonbeam' is not obvious (at least to me) but neither film exists in its complete form and Dawley may have only take unused footage. Overall, the stop-action work is inferior to that in 'Slumber Mountain' (notably the dragon-like pterodactyl) and the other special effects are primarily poorly done double exposures and animations. Of little interest to anyone outside of film historians or sci-fi/dinosaur movie completists.

According to the titles towards the end, the finale of this movie is missing. According to the IMDb, the original runtime is 10 minutes. Those two statements would seem odd, put together, because the truncated version I watched was more than 13 minutes long. Welll...

The set-up is that a man and his two nephews are out camping and after they fall asleep, they are visited by Mab of the fairies, who gives them an airplane that can travel between planets, and a magical ring to summon her. Off they fly, past the sort of images and camera trickery that Melies used a score of years earlier, to a planet where there are lots of dinosaurs, courtesy of Willis H. O'Brien.

At this point it ceases to become puerile. O'Brien wa an early mater of stop-motion animation, best known for the ape in KING KONG, although he worked on many projects until his death in 1962. There are some neat dinosaurs here, stegosaurus and tyrannosaurus and so forth. Excellent for the era, still good today.

A few years back, Willis O'Brien was doing the dino visual effects on The Ghost of Slumber Mountain for producer Herbert M. Dawley. After the success of that, however, the two had a falling out with O'Brien's name removed from the credits. Also that film was shortened from 40 minutes to 18 which is the version that exists now. Supposedly, Dawley then took some of those deleted scenes and put them in this film, a sequel of sorts which also stars Dawley with two pre-teen boys who were probably the same ones in the previous one. Anyway, what's depicted is those three in a cave with a large hole in it showing the dinos walking on the ground waiting for them to come out. And, yes, there's an awesome fight among two of those prehistoric creatures! So if those scenes were O'Brien's taken from The Ghost of Slumber Mountain and put here, it's a great place to put them! So that's a high recommendation for Along the Moonbeam Trail which I just watched on YouTube. Oh, and I was also watching another short on YouTube called The Puzzling Billboard which has live-action humans changing various letters on the billboard before a goat comes on the scene. Supposedly, O'Brien also did that goat scene.