How a Mosquito Operates

Until it explodes, its great skinny behind so gorged with sleeper’s blood it cannot fly, and then...

Gertie the Dinosaur

Winsor McCay and some friends are motoring along when a puncture stops their progress. While the driver makes repairs, the rest go in to the museum there and admire the dinosaurus. McCay lays a wager with George McManus that the creature can be brought to life in animated cartoons, ten thousand drawings stacked high in the arms of a young assistant, who drops them.

Six months of labor pay off at a dinner like the one in The Time Machine. Drawing paper is tacked to the wall, McCay goes to it and demonstrates his hand for the camera in clear, flowing lines. He tears the sheet off to show a prehistoric landscape and the dinosaurus peeking from a cave. The picture fills the screen, he calls the creature out.

The film now represents his drawings, photographed one by one, of a dialogue between himself and Gertie. He speaks by titles, asking her to raise one paw and then the other. She devours a tree, catches a woolly mammoth by the tail and flings it playfully over her shoulder hundreds of yards into the ocean. It swims back and sprays her with its trunk, she lies down on her side and scratches her brow with her tail. Did she see that four-winged lizard flying overhead? Is she in the habit of fibbing? By a process shot, he has her place him on her back, they go off together.

Back in the private dining room, McManus picks up the check.

The Sinking of the Lusitania

McCay achieves a full, complete representation of the event, and as that is what he intends to do, the film is a success.

The discrepancy if any between the present running time and the original is probably accounted for by an incorrect projection speed in this latter day.