Episode 2880
Gertie the Dinosaur
Mon, 2025-Mar-24 00:47 UTC
Length - 2:39
Direct Link
Welcome to Featured Wiki of the Day, your daily dose of knowledge from Wikipedia’s finest articles.
The featured article for Monday, 24 March 2025 is Gertie the Dinosaur.
Gertie the Dinosaur is a 1914 animated short film by American cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay. It is the first animated film to feature a dinosaur. McCay initially presented the film before live audiences as an interactive part of his vaudeville act; the frisky, childlike Gertie performed tricks at her master's command. McCay's employer William Randolph Hearst curtailed his vaudeville activities, prompting McCay to add a live-action introductory sequence to the film for its theatrical release, which was renamed Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist, and Gertie. McCay abandoned a sequel, Gertie on Tour (c. 1921), after producing about a minute of footage.
Although Gertie is popularly thought to be the earliest animated film, McCay had previously made Little Nemo (1911) and How a Mosquito Operates (1912). The American J. Stuart Blackton and the French Émile Cohl had experimented with animation even earlier. Gertie being a character with an appealing personality distinguished McCay's film from these earlier "trick films". Gertie was the first film to employ several animation techniques, like keyframes, registration marks, tracing paper, the Mutoscope action viewer, and animation loops. It influenced the next generation of animators, including the Fleischer brothers, Otto Messmer, Paul Terry, Walter Lantz, and Walt Disney. John Randolph Bray unsuccessfully tried to patent many of McCay's animation techniques and is said to have been behind a plagiarized version of Gertie that appeared a year or two after the original. Gertie is the best preserved of McCay's films—some of which have been lost or survive only in fragments—and has been preserved in the U. S. Library of Congress' National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" since 1991.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:47 UTC on Monday, 24 March 2025.
For the full current version of the article, see Gertie the Dinosaur on Wikipedia.
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Until next time, I'm generative Olivia.
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