Dark Continent 2

Finally some information! 

Issue 5 of SPFX contains a wealth of information on rare stop motion films, including several prehistoric films that never got made. 

Among these are brand new info plus stills from the mysterious Sherlock Holmes in Africa movie "Dark Continent," featuring a surviving arsinotherium, about which I could find literally nothing about online. 

In an article by Jin Danforth, one of the pioneers of stop-motion animation, he discusses a number of his proposed film projects, including a film version of "Jongor of Lost Land." A series of pulp novels about the hero, Jongor, abandoned in a lost world in Australia, that was once an Atlantean colony. The movie was supposed to have included an arsinothere, which is slightly patterned on the living Indian rhinoceras, as you can see by the folds of skin: 

He then goes on to describe "West of Kashmir" a proposed script for a Sherlock Holmes film involving Holmes antagonist Col. Sebastian Moran, who discovered a giant snow-ape high in the Himalayas, and somehow disgraced himself. The story was about Holmes and Watson teaming up with a beautiful Anglo-Indian woman who was a former lover of Col. Moran, traveling to the the Himalayas and encountering the creatures while attempting to bring Moran to justice. 

"Dark Continent" was supposed to be a sequel to "West of Kashmir." It is a most intriguing tale. The story has Holmes and Watson traveling to Africa where they meet up with Ayesha, the ageless beauty from H. Rider Haggard's She. That's right, it was to be a cross over between the writings of Conan Doyle and Haggard! How does the Arsinotherium fit in? Well, in Haggard's original, there were no prehistoric fauna (if there were, I would have known about it). But there are in Danforth's version, and he doesn't just "cheat" by inserting them in. Just as Asheya herself is kept ageless by the Eternel Flame of Kor, so are certain survivors of the prehistoric ages kept alive. There are two others besides the aforementioned arsinothere. And here is where things really get really interesting. Years ago, in some documentary about dinosaur stop-motion--it seems like it was hosted by Donald F. Glut, but I might have been wrong--there was a briefly shown glimpse of an animated clip of a strange theropod dinosaur which resembled a cross between a spinosaurus and ceratosaurus. It had the fin-back of the former and the horned snout of the latter. This was back when spinosaurus was assumed to be a kind of generic theropod, like an allosaurus or megalosaurus, only with a fin. Where this clip originated, I had no idea, and never found out--until now. It was the spinosaurus already animated for its appearance in "Dark Continent." The one other prehistoric beast was a giant serpent (titanoboa?) which was to battle the spino:

Of course, it is such shame that these movies never saw the light of day, save in these stills, and that one clip of the spino, wherever it was I saw it. I leave you with one last (aforeseen) shot of the arsinothere, which may well be the same model for the Jongor film, given the rhino-like patterning.