One Million Years B.C. - Production Notes

Production Notes

The exterior scenes were filmed on Lanzarote and Tenerife in the Canary Islands in the middle of winter. The film features the Echium wildpretii plant, as a homage to Tenerife's unique endemic flora. However, the plants are set in scenes filmed on the Lanzarote beach. In actuality, this plant only flowers from May to June, and is found in Tenerife mountain zones higher than 1600m. As there were no active volcanoes in the Canary Islands, the studio had to construct a 6–7 foot (2 metre) high volcano on the ABPC studio back lot. The eruption, lava explosions and lava flows were composed of a mixture of wallpaper paste, oatmeal, dry ice and red dye.

This was one of the later Ray Harryhausen stop motion animation films, he only created four more films after this one. Harryhausen, as usual, filmed the dinosaur visuals in his personal studio in London.

As the Shell people are attacked by a giant turtle, the women call it "Archelon" which is the real scientific name for the animal. The film uses two live creatures: a green iguana and a tarantula (a cricket can be seen at the tarantula's side). Ray Harryhausen was asked repeatedly about these two unanimated creatures, and he confesses they were his idea. At the time, he felt the use of real creatures would convince the audience that all of what they were about to see was indeed real.

Robert Brown (Akhoba) wears makeup similar to that worn by Lon Chaney, Jr. in the same role in the 1940 version, One Million B.C..

The publicity photograph of Welch from the movie became a best-selling pinup poster and something of a cultural phenomenon. Many noted photographers had been flown to Tenerife by 20th Century Fox on a publicity junket, but the iconic pose of Welch was taken by the unit still photographer (as recalled by Welch in an interview) who never made anything more than his weekly salary for his world-famous work. The poster was a story element in the film The Shawshank Redemption.

Roughly nine minutes were cut from the American print, including a provocative dance from Martine Beswick and a gruesome end to one of the ape-men in the cave. Some footage of the allosaur attack on the Shell tribe was also deleted from the initial release, but restored decades later.

Stock footage depicting the landslide was reused for Alex's dream (Beethoven's 9th Symphony) in Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film Clockwork Orange

Further films from Hammer, which traded on the attractions of scantily clad cave girls, were Slave Girls (1968), When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970) and Creatures the World Forgot (1971).