The first movie was a moderate success in 1988, following the adventures of a small group of dinosaur children who are searching for their parents. The group consists of Littlefoot, a baby Brontosaurus, Cera, a female Triceratops, Spike, a dopey Stegosaurus, Ducky, a small generic dinosaur, and Petrie, a young Pterodactyl, with each of them falling into a standard stereotype for a children's movie. If you change the setting from the Jurassic era and put them as kids in a contemporary, you'll see absolutely no difference in how they interact with one another. Okay, this being a children's show, I'm not exactly expecting a deep show full of thoughtful prose and subtlety. That's good since there really wasn't a lot of it going on here.

This volume had the kids traveling with the large Brontosaurus herd, going to a large crater where legend tells of a time when the herd's ancestors saved the world by pushing the sun back into the sky. As Littlefoot joins up with the herd, his friends get lost and look for him. Each face a number of dangers from prehistoric alligators, volcanoes, and even hungry Tyrannosaurus Rex's in their attempts to find each other. Little kids may get scared by some of the happenings here and older kids (as in 8 years old and higher) will roll their eyes as much as you do.

The current status of kids movies means that the cast will have to break into song at least a few times in order to tie in some marketing gimmick and sell a CD so you can bet this happened here too. The songs weren't the worst I've heard over the years but I'm sure Weird Al Yankovic would've scribbled better songs down in about 15 minutes at a local café. The voice talents of James Garner and Kiefer Sutherland were in supporting roles with Olivia Newton-John providing a song (not her best work in the last three decades but pleasant enough for the lovely Australian singer).

The direction was sloppy and the pacing ranged from slow to moderate for an adult but what about for young children? After all, the movie isn't made for parents (at least I hope not); it's made for the kids. If kids like a movie, they'll watch it about a billion times, making anything they like worth its weight in gold. While I'm not a kid, I know they aren't as fussy about the detail in animation and intricacies of plot, nor do they fret about picture quality if they like the show. Luckily for y'all, I had a test screening in front of a group of kids this week (the ultimate test of a kids show is if kids like it). All the younger ones thought it was great, and proceeded to sing my praises for their folks, while all the older ones looked at me sadly, knowing I had to stick it out while they left. Taking one for the team really had some meaning this time.

There you have it; if the movie is going to be an electronic babysitter of sorts for younger kids, this is probably a good choice for you to get. If you're getting it to complete your animation collection, you'll probably want to leave this one on the shelves and pick up something more enjoyable though. The best advice I can give with such a dichotomy of opinions is to tell you to Rent It first and see how your children like it. The technical aspects are better than the recently released first volume in the series and it seemed to have some replay value (I slid out of the room when round two started but the younger kids stayed out of trouble and watched until I left).

Picture: The picture was presented in the original 1.33:1 ratio aspect full frame color that it was recorded in. The colors were bright and accurate and I didn't see any major amounts of grain or video noise. There were no compression artifacts and I think it looked great.

Sound: The audio was presented with a choice of 5.1 Dolby Digital surround tracks in English, Spanish and French with optional subtitles in those languages as well. The vocals, music, and sound effects were all well mixed and the rear channels were actively used at various times in the movie. I didn't notice any problems with the audio and this was one aspect of the show that was actually extremely well done.

Extras: The extras included a short behind the scenes look at Olivia Newton-John's recording session, a lot of DVD-Rom content, such as making stencils, a read along story, sing along songs, making an eclipse viewer, trailers, a Spanish language lesson, and two games including a Bone Shop where you can build/race dinosaurs and a feature about digging bones yourself. In all, the extras were pretty good but I didn't have a computer with a DVD-Rom player to see what the kids thought of them.

Final Thoughts: If you have younger kids that can handle seeing the meat-eating dinosaurs attack their friends, they'll like the movie just fine. The themes dealt with growing up, responsibility, and all the usual moral lessons we've come to expect from a children's movie. It wasn't perfect and adults will want to open a vein before watching it more than once but the kids will appreciate it for what it was.