Hollywood and Prehistory

Canwest has an article on the fascination for "caveman" films in Hollywood. They write:

As humans, we seem eternally obsessed with two things: our own origins, and furry bikinis on svelte cavebabes.

In other words, caveman movies are as old as Hollywood. D.W. Griffiths created one in 1912 called Genesis, and sparked so many imitators that Charlie Chaplin had satirized the genre by 1914 with His Prehistoric Past. Talk about prehistory.

As this summer has proved, the genre still has legs - think of Will Ferrell's Land of the Lost (a sort of caveman sub-genre film), and Year One, which opened Friday.

They they proceed to list the best characters of the last hundred years of film. My favorite is still 1 million years B.C. just for the pure, unintended humor.