The Monstrefact: The Flight of Dragons

dragon flight. In this film, noted for its superb dragon effects, we get to see Vermathra's pejorative soar terrifyingly across the sky like a fighter jet, as well as swooped down from craggy Peaks, but we don't see the creature engage

in vertical takeoff. In the special features for the excellent twenty twenty three remastered Blu Ray release, the effects team indicated that they intentionally avoided depicting the dragon taken to flight in order to avoid challenges in making the feat seem believable, because, of course, dragons, while creatures of fantasy, should feel believable on the screen, and that may often mean choosing what to depict and what to leave to

the audience's imagination. But in raising the specter of believable dragon flight, I was reminded of an older episode of Weird House Cinema in which I discussed the nineteen eighty two animated film The Flight of Dragons with Seth Nicholas Johnson. The film from Rankin in Bass was based on the nineteen seventy nine book by Peter Dickinson and illustrated by Wayne Anderson. Part coffee table fantasy art book and part

speculative natural history of dragons. The book is an absolute delight, and affordable used copies are still very much in circulation. Dickinson lays out one of the more intriguing models for dragon biology and flight, which I'll briefly summarize here. For starters, the dragons of flight of ddragons are quote flying bricks. They have thick bodies and short wings, but are very capable of flight. The wings for starters are too small to support their weight and are not proper limbs, but

rather webbed spines that evolved from their ribs. The dragons only use these wings for propulsion and maneuvering because their large bodies contain lighter than air gas, specifically hydrogen, which the dragon produces via digestion of limestone. The fiery breath then is a byproduct of their mode of flight. They must regularly vent hydrogen as a means of lowering their altitude when in flight, or as a matter of course,

when not engaged in flight. Via structure known as thors thimble and the roof of their mouth, the dragons are able to ignite the hydrogen as a great burst of flame. The film does a fine job relating all of this, and the book ruminates on the speculative evolution, life cycle, and biology of fire breathing dragons as well as dragon slayers. It's a great deal of fun, but also rather insightful and clever. I highly recommend it to anyone with an

interest in the monster sciences. While we don't have any terrestrial organisms that engage in this mode of flight, science fiction contains numerous other examples of creatures that fly via bladders of lighter than atmosphere gas. Artist and author Wayne Barlow, a legend in his field, for example, envisioned the Eosapiens

in his nineteen ninety book Expedition. Barlow envisioned them as the most advanced life form on the planet Darwin four, floating in the atmosphere via two bladders of methane in the planet's oxygen rich atmosphere. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact, The Artifact, or Anamalia Stupendium each week. As always, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.