One Million Years From Now Trivia Quiz

Answer: time travellers

The film features two tribes of cavemen meeting and interacting with each other. Things don't go well. There are multiple attacks between dinosaurs and other pre-historic creatures, including creature vs. creature and creature vs. cavemen.

The ape-men appear in a cave that the characters travel through when journeying between the tribes. While the ape-men appear briefly in the 1967 US version of the film, the original 1966 UK version includes a longer scene with the ape-men.

Incredibly, the film doesn't feature any creature that was alive 1 million years ago.

Current scientific research places the last dinosaurs becoming extinct about 65 million years ago, while modern humans (Homo sapiens) only started about 250,000 years ago. Even Homo heidelbergensis, which may be a direct ancestor to both modern humans and Neanderthals, only lived from 800,000-300,000 years ago.

Curiously, the credits state that: "Characters and scenes appearing and names used are imaginary, and every reference to names, characters or facts really happened is purely fictional."

Regarding the scientific/historical inaccuracy, animator Ray Harryhausen (1920-2013) has stated that he did not make "One Million Years B.C." for "professors... [who] probably don't go to see these kinds of movies anyway."

Answer: a fur bikini

Hammer studios not only put Raquel Welch on the movie poster, but sent out over 10,000 Christmas cards featuring the actress (in her fur bikini) to movie theaters, which undoubtedly helped promote the film.

Time magazine listed Welch's B.C. bikini in their 2011 "Top Ten Bikinis in Pop Culture" feature.

In "The Shawshank Redemption" (1994), the poster for "One Million Years B.C." featuring Welch in her bikini at one time was covering the hole Andy Dufresne used to escape from prison.

Welch plays "Loana the Fair One" in the movie. Although there are no character names in the credits and she is called "Loana" (many, many times), "the Fair One" probably comes from the script or the original 1940 film "One Million B.C." that the 1966/67 film was based upon.

Answer: the Rock tribe

The narrator introduces us to the leader of the Rock tribe and his sons. Tumak, played by John Richardson, soon argues with his father Akhoba, played by Robert Brown, and is exiled. Percy Herbert played Sakana.

According to the narrator, there "is no love lost between" Sakana and Tumak.

The Rock tribe is more primitive than the Shell tribe, which they encounter later in the movie. The Rock tribe live in a dark cave and fight each other over meat. The Shell tribe have art and agriculture.

Curiously, despite having far more words than any of the other actors (who mostly grunted), the narrator is uncredited in the film. The narrator was Victor Herbert "Vic" Perrin (1916-1989). While Perrin did have some on-camera roles, he did a lot of voice-over work as an announcer and in animation.

Answer: iguana

Ray Harryhausen has stated that it was his idea to use the real creatures, in order to add to the suspension of disbelief for his other effects.

Some people have hypothesized that since the film was a remake of the 1940 film "One Million B.C.", the use of real animals was an homage to the real animals used in that film.

However, the use of "un-animated" creatures was most likely a result of the low budget of the film.

A tarantula (attacking/eating a cricket) was also used as a giant monster in the film. Other animals, such as a warthog, a goat, a snake, birds, etc., were also in the film, but at regular size. While there is a "giant turtle" in the film, it is one of Harryhausen's stop-motion animated creatures.

The tongue of the "giant" iguana was a prop. The iguana itself makes a short appearance at the end of the movie.

Answer: beach

Filming took place on the islands of Lanzarote and Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Lanzarote is the eastern most of the Canary Islands, and Tenerife is the largest and most populous one.

Many scenes around the beach feature a plant that looks like a column of red flowers. This is Echium wildpretii (commonly called the tower of jewels or red bugloss). These plants are native to the Canary Islands, specifically the mountains of Tenerife, and flower in the spring. However, the beach scenes were filmed in winter on the island of Lanzarote.

Answer: spears

The women of the Shell tribe are shown fishing at two different times in the movie.

On the beach, the fisherwomen spear an octopus looking creature.

At the pond to their cave, they spear a fish. Tumak tries to spear a fish, but it is not as easy as he imagines, and ends up falling in the water. When he gets up, he has accidentally speared a fish.

Answer: turtle

The women of the shell tribe call the giant turtle Archelon (from the Greek words for "ruler turtle"), which is a genus of extinct leathery-shelled giant turtles. How these cave-women from 1 Million B.C. knew the name Dr. G.R. Wieland would give the creature in 1896 A.D. is a mystery.

Even though the giant turtle is called Archelon, the monster is much bigger than the largest Archelon fossil found, which is 13 feet long by 16 feet wide.

Once the Archelon appears, Loana uses a shell carried around her neck to call for help. Warriors from the Shell tribe arrive and are able to use their spears to drive off the giant turtle. Tumak is then taken back to the home cave of the Shell tribe to recover from his injuries.

Answer: fire

With a name like Nupondi the Wild One, it's no surprise that there was a fight. Nupondi picks up whatever she can find to improvise weapons, including an antler or horn and a branch from the fire, but eventually loses. At the end, Loana picks up a rock and is encouraged by the rest of the Rock tribe to kill Nupondi, but doesn't.

Nupondi the Wild One was played by Martine Beswick. She was married to John Richardson, who played Tumak, from 1967-73.

Beswick was in two films in the "James Bond" franchise. She was Zora in "From Russia with Love" (1963), and Paula Caplan in "Thunderball" (1965). The title sequence of "From Russia with Love" incorrectly identifies her as "Martin Beswick".

After the movie's 1966 release in the United Kingdom, about 9 minutes were cut for the United States release in 1967, including a provocative dance by Nupondi and a deadly fight between the ape-men.

Answer: swimming in a pond

The scientific classification of dinosaurs excludes the pterosaurs and marine reptiles.

For the scene where the pteranodon picks up Raquel Welch, the filmmakers avoided animating the model picking up the actress by having Welch fall behind a rock. (The only rock near the pond.) The model pteranodon then picked up a model Welch.

A real pteranodon would not have been able to pick up and fly with a human being. One of the reasons they were able to fly was that they were light weight - the extra weight of a person would have made flight impossible.

In one more way the Shell tribe is more advanced than the Rock tribe, the members of the Rock tribe don't know how to swim. In fact, they look at Loana with amazement as she jumps in the water. This may be because the Rock tribe does not have time to play in the water because they are too busy trying to survive.

Answer: volcanic eruption

There isn't a volcano on the Canary Islands, where the movie was filmed, so a 6-7 foot tall model volcano was build at the Associated British Picture Corporation studios.

Near the end of the movie, the Shell tribe and Rock tribe are fighting each other when the volcano erupts. The cavemen then have to scramble for their lives as rockslides change the landscape. Many of them perish, falling into holes that open up. The "giant" iguana falls victim to a hole as well. After things calm down, the survivors look out upon a changed world before the movie ends.

While it may be an accepted theory today, the best evidence of an asteroid impact as the extinction event ~65 million years ago that killed the dinosaurs was discovered in 1980, well after the release of this movie. That was when the Chicxulub crater was identified by Luis and Walter Alvarez from the University of California, Berkeley.