Review Archive – 2023
Hello hello!
It has been quite a while, but I come bearing a gift. What is this gift, you ask? Why, it is a brand new Land Before Time production script! Specifically, it’s another script of The Secret of Saurus Rock.
This is the third such script that has surfaced now, after the LBT 1 script in early 2018, and the original LBT 6 script in mid 2019. I had always wondered if another LBT script would ever turn up eventually. I never expected it would be another, different script of the sixth movie. Or that I’d be the one buying it this time, haha. And yes, it was expensive. It cost me $577.01 Canadian. At first I was reluctant to buy it for that reason. But then I was worried about the listing disappearing and then the script could potentially be lost forever. I figured I’d regret it more if I didn’t buy it. Since it was an important historical LBT artifact, I wanted to make sure to snag it so that I could do an image scan of it and then preserve and share it with the community.
Link to the full script here.
I wasn’t the one who originally found this script, however. A big thanks to Fandom.com user ‘Disneysaurus’, who discovered and shared the script’s eBay listing on the Land Before Time wiki back in September 2022. Still, it was good timing that I found out about this when I did. And by complete accident too! Come March 2023 and I was browsing on the LBT wiki, and that’s when I came across the article Disneysaurus had created which had the link to the eBay listing. The article had been marked as a candidate for deletion since it was just about the eBay listing and wasn’t really a proper article in itself. As in, if I’d shown up later, the article might have either been removed, or the script may no longer have been available for purchase and then I would have never known about it.
Anyway, so after my order came in, I sat down to read through it. Unlike the previous two scripts which have a lot of deviations from their respective films, this script resembles the final film much more closely and doesn’t appear to have any deleted scenes or such. In particular, the previous Saurus Rock script was a “first draft” script, whereas this one is a “revised draft”.
With the previous script, I remember noticing the lack of songs. Here, while the songs weren’t fully written yet, they were starting to figure that out. Three different points on the script are marked where a song is suggested and briefly described, which ended up being the three songs used in the final film (“The Legend of the Lone Dinosaur”, “Bad Luck”, “On Your Own”).
It’s been a few years now since I last saw LBT 6, but from what I remember of it, this script (aside from the incomplete song notes) seems pretty much exactly the same as the film. I do wonder if there are any differences, even if they’re just minor things such as slightly different dialogue. Sometime in the future, I may do a more thorough analysis on this.