Citizen Kane's Hidden Dinosaurs Got the Perfect Tribute from Alan Moore
The dinosaurs which allegedly appear in the background of Citizen Kane are beloved by movie fans everywhere as the ultimate piece of film trivia, so it's no surprise that while welcoming Kane into the unfathomably vast shared universe of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, comic greats Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill included a genius tribute to the prehistoric party-crashers.
The story of Citizen Kane's dinosaurs is a bizarre one itself. In the Everglades picnic scene of Orson Welles' classic film — often hailed as the best of all time — what appear to be prehistoric beasts fly across the background multiple times. The apocryphal version of the story goes that — in a cost-cutting measure — Welles used existing rear projection footage filmed for the King Kong sequel Son of Kong, not realizing it included the dinosaurs (technically pterosaurs) until after the film had been distributed to theaters. What parts of this are true is a subject of heated debate, with some believing Welles chose to retain the creatures as a touch of deliberate surrealism and others arguing that they're actually meant to be large birds, looking unusual only due to now-dated animation. Whatever the truth, the hidden dinosaurs in Citizen Kane have become part of the movie's pop-culture lore.
Related: Alan Moore's V for Vendetta Inspirations Reveal the DNA of a Masterpiece
In the multi-volume comic series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill set about creating a universe in which pretty much every work of fiction is true. Mr. Hyde and Dracula exist on a timeline that also includes Sherlock Holmes, Cthulhu, multiple versions of James Bond, and an antichrist Harry Potter. In Nemo: Heart of Ice, fans meet an influential
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