the late 1960s Ray Harryhausen and producer Charles Schneer decided to reunite after several years of making films apart. Harryhausen suggested reviving two old O'Brien projects, War Eagles, which had been developed for MGM, and Gwangi which had been done for RKO. Schneer did not see how they could get a script out of War Eagles but was enthusiastic about the Gwangi script and bought the rights from O'Brien's widow. Although O'Brien was the creator of the original Gwangi story, an on-screen credit for him was not included in The Valley of Gwangi . Schneer had the script rewritten by William Bast and offered the project to Columbia, who had made all Scheer's previous collaborations with Harryhausen. The studio turned it down but Warner Bros agreed to finance. James O'Connelly signed to direct. Harryhausen said they decided to keep the story's early 20th Century time period to eliminate the "cliches about the army moving in with tanks and missiles." Gwangi was described in O'Brien's original script as an Allosaurus, although O'Brien apparently did not draw much distinction between Allosaurus and Tyrannosaurus, as he also referred to the Tyrannosaurus in the original King Kong (modeled by Marcel Delgado) as an "Allosaurus". According to Ray Harryhausen, his own version of Gwangi (and O'Brien's Gwangi too, as well as Delgado's Tyrannosaurus) was based on a Charles R. Knight painting of a Tyrannosaurus – one of the two most famous paintings by Knight, and one that is instantly recognizable by the eye being placed too far forward on the skull (this was based on concurrently incomplete skeletal remains and the eye was mistakenly placed in one of the antorbital fenestrae), as well as ultimately and incorrectly portraying Tyrannosaurus with a three-fingered hand. This famous Tyrannosaurus image is also reflected in Harryhausen's "Rhedosaurus" in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. In an interview featured on the 'Valley of Gwangi' DVD, Harryhausen said "We sometimes called it an Allosaurus... They're both meat eaters, they're both Tyrants... one was just a bit larger than the other." Gwangi was scaled to be 14 feet tall, within the size range of an average adult Tyrannosaurus (although not the largest), and at the upper limit of the largest Allosaurus specimens. Special effects The Valley of Gwangi was the last dinosaur-themed film that Harryhausen animated, and he made much use of his experience in depicting extinct animals from his earlier films. Close