When I was a kid, I had a VHS copy of Planet of Dinosaurs that I bought from a flea market. According to Wikipedia, “The film’s director, James K. Shea, instructed most of the budget to be spent on the special effects for the film, which included an array of award-winning stop motion dinosaurs, leaving little money for props or even to pay the main actors.” Certainly, the stop-motion dinosaurs are what I watched it for.

Years later, while watching It Follows, I was struck by the footage of some old sci-fi movie that the characters were watching in the film. Eventually, with the help of Nick Gucker, I was able to identify it as the 1962 Russian film Planeta Bur or, more likely, one of the two Roger Corman-released recuts of it, Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet from 1965 or Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women from 1968.

Neither (none?) of those movies is particularly good but, like Planet of Dinosaurs, the original Planeta Bur (and therefore also the other films made using its footage) has some really striking special effects that deserve to be seen.

What do these movies have in common? They all belong to one of the smallest subgenres that is still robust enough to justify the name: films about astronauts who crash land on planets that are populated by dinosaurs.

As movies editor at Exploits, my job, primarily, is to source a 350-word essay each month about some movie. During my tenure there, we’ve covered everything from Mad Love to Mermaid in a Manhole and many more besides.

When David Busboom pitched me an essay about the subgenre of spacemen vs. dinosaurs, I wanted badly to take it. There were just a couple of problems. One, we generally reserve Exploits essays for covering a single movie, rather than a subgenre. Two, and more importantly, there was no way he could bring it in under 350 words.

Normally, I don’t have anything to do with the editorial side of things over at Unwinnable but, since Unwinnable and Exploits are sibling publications, I figured it would be a good idea to reach out to them and ask if they would be interested in taking David’s essay on. Luckily for me (and for you, I think), they were.

Stu Horvath, publisher at both mags, asked if I had any suggestions for a cover artist. Besides a few vintage comic book covers with old-timey spacemen pointing rayguns at dinosaurs, I blueskyed one of my favorite artists, Alan Cortes. Even more luckily for me (and for you, I think), he was game for the assignment, and turned in a cover frankly even more perfect than I had imagined.

All of this is a (very) long way of saying that I had nothing to do with writing the essay in the latest issue of Unwinnable, nor with drawing the cover. But I am proud of my small contributions toward bringing all these very talented people together under one proverbial roof, and extremely excited to share the results with all of you!

And, of course, this issue of Unwinnable is, as always, packed to the gills with great writing on a variety of subjects pop cultural and otherwise, and is well worth your time even if you are (somehow) not a fan of astronauts fighting dinosaurs.